Broaden your search. Apply to startups, for less money / more equity - there are plenty of them in the Boston area. Basically just do a sober assessment of how much you need to live on (perhaps with a roommate), add 30% to that and that's your minimal acceptable cash-side compensation. Do that for some time (a year or more), learn, move on. While you work, set aside some money for the rainy day. This is not optional, you have to do it even if you don't set aside a ton. Fundamentally, you have to stand out and you have to start building a track record. How much money you make in your first job is not very important. I'd say what you _do_ in your first job is more important. That's what people see in the resume. Good luck, and remember - you've got the very best education available. Do not sell yourself short in job 2 and so on.

I came from a background that sounds a lot like yours. I didn’t get to go to MIT; I just taught myself, also during hard economic times. My way of getting jobs was learning skills that were difficult for most programmers so that having a degree wouldn’t be as important. I also applied only to places that interested me and where I thought I could contribute. Therefore, I applied to very few places. I have always thought that it is my job to be irresistible to a hiring manager. No one owes us a job.

The advice I give to students is to leverage connections, especially family connections, as much as possible. Take any job you that have a family connection to, even if it isn't in tech.

Learn the business as well as you can and then apply your technical knowledge to it.

For what it’s worth, I’ll soon be looking for new PhD students to join our lab in Belgium (Europe). It’s a great, dynamic environment, and we work on exciting problems in 3D and computer vision. Feel free to reach out if you think it could be a good fit!

To OP, sorry you're experiencing this. If you want 1:1 help debugging your job search, feel welcome to email me directly (contact in HN bio). I probably won't be able to get to it until this weekend, but I will try to help if I can.

If you can get support, staying for a graduate degree is a time honored way of riding things out when you graduate into a recession. And if the stock charts are an indication, industry is bracing for the mother of all recessions.

I’ll echo a couple of other people who have said to network. This was many years ago, but when I was in college and applying for jobs I was getting no interest at all. No interviews… not even an email response acknowledging receiving a resume. Then a person that I knew who had graduated the previous year was at a campus event, I started talking to her, and she told me the company she worked at was hiring. I emailed the hiring manager the next day, attached a resume, mentioned the woman I was talking to. Got a call 2 days later, an interview the following week, then an offer after later.

If you're interesting in automated manufacturing, contact me at paul@neofactory.ai

Most hardtech startups dont have the same constraints as big tech in hiring. More than anything we need smart dedicated people to create the future.

Your future isn’t slipping away, but you’re updating your intuition. The path forward has always been there.

The system failing is the default. Allies tip the scales. You can see the board more clearly now; play accordingly

These days, applying through job portals is a losing strategy. People are overwhelmed with perfect-on-paper AI-generated applications.

Email people directly. DM them on Twitter/LinkedIn. Meet people in person.