Posted by MITthrow123 4/7/2025
Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends
It's honestly demoralizing. I came to MIT hoping to build a better life—not just for myself, but for my family. Now I’m facing the very real possibility of moving back home to an unstable and abusive environment while continuing to job hunt. The thought alone is crushing. I’ve even considered staying for an MEng just to avoid going home, but I’m completely burnt out and have no thesis direction. MIT gave me freedom, food security, friends, a bed of my own for the first time. It changed everything. But now that graduation’s here, it feels like it’s all slipping away.
If you've been through something similar—late job search success, unexpected turns that worked out, or just any advice—I’d really appreciate it. What helped you push through when it felt like the system failed you?
Thanks for reading.
I've interviewed some PhD students that we deep in their field, but they had zero work experience. That, combined with the fact that they were applying to a non-entry level position, meant that I'd be taking a large-ish risk in my position if I were to hire them.
In 2008, amid the downturn cited in this thread as a similar inflection point to the one we see today, I landed my first SE job, after a few months of active searching. They hired me without a degree and without any formal experience. I had a small portfolio of example work, the technical knowledge that I'd developed, and my personal philosophy. The portfolio did little to help me. The technical knowledge served to barely avoid outright disqualification. It was my outlook that earned me a chance to show mettle.
This was local startup that was a half-dozen years old. There I learned what technical collaboration was like in practice, what it meant to build as part of a team. I learned the stuff that school and individual hacking doesn't teach. In a couple of years I moved on to a Fortune 100 company on a merger mission, and from there on to greener pastures in the industry. Now I earn comfortably, somewhere north of 90th percentile by geography. Each of those steps, along with a healthy dose of reading, taught me something that I needed to learn/understand about the craft and it's challenges. I was oblivious to the need to know most of them until after I wrestled with them.
One of the most important lessons, and one very relevant today: character traits, not merely technical learning, lend power to carving a successful path.
You are not nearly as likely to differentiate yourself by degree alone as was the case in the past. Even less so if people sense entitlement. That's not a judgement, but a caution.
Hiring right now looks like an absolute swarm of posers, far noisier than I've ever seen before, fighting to convince managers to hire them into senior salaries. They are empowered by magical answer generators that whisper secret sauces into their ears just in time to be vomited back and the interviewer. Even though some of them vomit better than others, the kind of manager that you want to work for (imo) is going to see right through those people - and is getting very tired of it.
So tired in fact that I'm ready to hire low/no-experience, high-character people into my senior slots if they show that they have passion for the craft and ethics to match it. I won't pay them a fortune out the gate, but I will match salary growth to competency growth once they are in the saddle.
Time is the fabled commodity, and there's a lot of time-waste going on at the moment.
My advice, if you're having trouble on initial approach: be humble, be curious, and show an honest + direct character - be comfortable in the knowledge that the new skill is not what you already know, but how well your outlook positions you to "leaRn into" the next curve. And then, don't stop carving.
To get employed:
1. Deck out your resume with a bunch of keyword nonsense. If it doesn't look like word salad when you are done its not competitive. Find a laundry list of tools, frameworks, run time engines, and other third party tools that you never wrote.
2. If you want to get hired and aren't already a senior principle don't be an expert. Experts are intimidating. Refer back to point 1.
3. Don't use AI during a job interview. People hate that. Instead just have a static script of key points as hints. The goal is to be at the center of a bell curve and know just enough to fit in.
4. Get really good at throw away leet code insanity. Go fast and memorize programming patterns by name. You will never use any of this at the job, but it looks impressive during interviews.
5. Answer all interview questions with confidence in 3 words or less. Be quick and ensure it does not look like you are reading or waiting for answers to materialize. Always remember the only thing most programmers fear more than writing original code is unoriginal job candidates.
Once you are hired:
1. Do all that is asked of you with as little as possible. Make it a game to see just how efficiently you can accomplish what is asked of you. The people that get promoted are the ones that shine at this and do as little work as possible. That screams to management that you don't produce regression, are not burdened with stressed, and have potential to do twice as much.
2. Automate the shit out of your job, but keep this a secret to yourself. Most of your peers cannot program. If they see that you are doing more than the copy/paste what is required they will be intimidated.
3. Save video calls with your peers for educational moments only. Video calls suck up a lot of time and your peers will want to do them only because they cannot write emails. When in doubt do as little work as possible, which includes being efficient and thorough with your communication. See point 1.
4. If you are in a toxic environment learn from the best and become a complete narcissistic asshole. Fair warning, though. This will randomly blow up in your face because you are likely surrounded by narcissists looking out for themselves. If you are in a healthy environment then be a complete team player and save all your disposable time for helping your teammates with testing and documentation. In a healthy environment take as little credit for accomplishments as possible and openly praise teammates who are worthy of praise.
Link please?
1) Why did you decide to become an engineer? Did you have some hobby or other background that you had a passion for, or was it because you thought you could do this degree and make good dollars?
2) If you became an engineer for the right reasons, can you maybe leverage that interest and start an enterprise of some kind? And I don't mean a start-up, I mean a business offering services and/or products to a market that needs them.
I don't see a single reply here at this stage that does not seem to take for granted that upon graduating you must work for someone else.
The idea that "I went to MIT/Stanford/Berkley/whatever, I deserve a job, and a good one that pays fuckloads" seems to permeate the whole thread.
Well I will tell you that College/University for engineering is just a very elaborate hazing ritual, it doesn't get you shit in reality, apart from a possible entry ticket into somewhere where the real learning and work start.
There is potentially fuckloads to learn that you would have never been taught, big differences between academia and industry.
I am in another country, but not that different, and 30 years out the engineers that I studied with that really made bank all basically went straight into starting their own business upon graduating.
As one example, the guy started a business designing mineral processing plant electrical and control systems, started out delivering very small parts of projects, just kept grinding and building capabilities, and now he owns breweries and wineries for fun and is delivering projects all over the world worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There are other examples from my cohort.
If you can't find employment otherwise, what have you to lose? And tbh, if you don't do something like this now, next thing you will look up and you will want to buy a house, or will have a pregnant wife and you just can't risk your job with the man, because the baby, etc etc etc.
So your situation isn't the engineers equivalent of Pretty Lady, or whatever fantasy script society peddles, maybe that could turn out to be a good thing, you never know.
Footnote: I have a four year degree in Electrical and Control Systems Engineering from a University in another country, in the top 100 of the world for Electrical but virtually no one would have ever heard of it outside my state. I graduated in early 90's and only 2 engineers had good "company" jobs to go to, they were both trades who had left their trade to study engineering and were preferred.
I had been working part time my last year and then went full time, after graduating, with the small local electronics design and manufacture company for crap cash. But significant parts of what I learned there in the 2.5 years, I still use today. But, in retrospect I regret not taking my own advice I gave you above, and I am not prone to regrets.
You might think working for nothing is a bad deal and that it would be exploitative but you need to remember it's temporary and a little bit of experience will make it 10x easier when it comes to applying for jobs a year or two down the road. Almost any employer is going to pick someone with a bit of experience over someone with none.
I don't know how much you're paying for your education right now, but even assuming you can only find unpaid work this is literally infinitely better than the negative income you're receiving in return for improved career prospects right now. I find it quite crazy that people will so happily drop tens of thousands of dollars on an education for a chance at a good career, but are also completely unwilling to work for free for a few months to get the experience they need. Experience is extremely cheap to acquire relative to the cost of education.
The market sucks at the moment and I've argued for some time it's probably only going to worsen due to structural shifts in the global economy, and tech specifically. Keep this in mind and try not to blame yourself because it's easy to give up. I had a lot of friends who studied comp sci with me who ended up getting regular jobs because they struggled to find work after graduating.
If I were you I would look for a niche which isn't fully technical because that will give you more security from automation and outsourcing standpoint. If I were in your shoes I'd probably look for local startups and offer to work every day for free and do literally any job they asked of me. Startups are good place to start your career because they always have lots of random jobs that need doing without anyone to do them. Because of this they can be great places to find out what you enjoy and where you can add the most value. If you're concerned about where you'll live sleep literally anywhere someone is willing to offer you a bed or a sofa, but if you have to move back with your parents temporarily that isn't the end of the world.
I wish I could start my career again. I have a well paid job today, but I'd still love to be in your position. The problem when you get to my level is that life is good but expensive. It's very hard to learn new skills or shift your career when you have dependents and a mortgage to pay. Unless you want to up end your life for little to no return you just have to follow the money. But for you the whole world is at your feet. I guarantee there's hundreds of interesting companies in your area who would love to bring in new talent but they can't justify it because money is too tight. Find them and let them know how much you'd appreciate the opportunity to get some experience with them. Pick up skills, form connections, and see where it takes you. In my experience most opportunity in life comes from meeting the right people, being loyal to them and providing them value. That is what you should be focused on doing.
In my opinion there's not a simple path to a good life these days. "The system" will almost always fail you. I know it shouldn't be this way, but you have to accept the cards you a dealt and play your best hand.
Hope this helps.