<p>Unfortunately, your example shows that graduating during an industry cyclical downturn can be a career killer. Employers tend to avoid the long term unemployed, so those unlucky to graduate during an industry cyclical downturn and not get jobs then are likely to find it very difficult to find work later (compared to new graduates in the later years or employed people seeking jobs then, whose skills are perceived as “fresh” compared to the long term unemployed whose skills are perceived as “stale”). Never having gotten into the industry also means not having many contacts with others who may need at least a contractor or consultant which would add experience to your resume.</p>
<p>Was the business you referred to at all in CS or EE?</p>
<p>This is why many look at graduate school if they can’t find a job at the end of undergraduate school. This may push you out a year or more into a possibly better hiring environment and give you additional skills to make you more competitive.</p>
<p>sympathize with Mark77.
Our son had problems in finding a job 2008-09 and just came off of, 3 postgrad MS, internships with microsoft. He also has a BS Meche. In 2006 he could’ve had any position but chose a master’s program instead. Then came the credit bubble bust during his internship where no one in his extensive network could help. He was saved after internship #1 when a msft researcher forgot to request an intern at the proscribed time and msft knew DS was looking and available. (Msft had a very tight hiring freeze for all contract and FT positions) He was then saved after internship #2 when the researcher ask him to continue on with the project at researcher’s university. He was saved after internship #3 when DS asked his undergrad prof/advisor/employer for a reference, where upon a job was offered to continue undergrad RA work which digressed into halftime work.</p>
<p>In the meantime, DS indulged in personal software/hardware work, got a iPhone and started to learn the specialize languages. </p>
<p>So when DS was ready to leave his PT position, he had the skills and the evidence of those skills to walk into his current job. </p>
<p>I will admit he happened to be at the right places at the right time and route was a bit crooked.</p>
<p>I have some sympathies too as our son graduated last spring with internships from a third-tier and despite about 15 interviews, didn’t get any offers. He got an RA for last summer and started grad school and starts a contract to hire position tomorrow.</p>
<p>The thing is that Mark77 said that he didn’t get any interviews despite sending out hundreds (if not more) resumes. My son has sent out about 70 resumes and has had about 20 interviews (BTW, he’s awful at interviews despite many hours of prep).</p>
<p>Your son used two known approaches - networking and making his own experience which is something that you can’t do in most fields. He didn’t give up despite a lot of disappointment. Mark77 seems to have a bit of an attitude in that the field stinks and that it should work this way or that way. I’ve seen other posters come and go saying that profession X stinks because you can’t get a job in it and then discourage others from going into the major or field.</p>
<p>I have close relatives that lost their jobs and joined the ranks of the long-term unemployed, even when things weren’t so bad. One of them had a fantastic job at a fantastic company but had anger management issues. It’s a good thing that he has family wealth. The other blamed others for every perceived slight to the point where nobody wanted to work with him. Both had degrees from great schools and smarts but they had problems getting along with others and I think that that came through in interviews. I don’t know if that is the case with Mark77 - it’s very hard to tell on an internet forum. But most of the posters in this forum seem to feel that there are a lot of opportunities out there. I agree with them as I look through the job postings from time to time.</p>
<p>2002 was probably the worst time to graduate in CS – probably a worse job market than 2009 civil engineering and architecture graduates found. While the overall economic downturn then was not as severe as the more recent one, it was a very sharp downturn after a very big bubble in the particular industry. That the offshore outsourcing business fad hit its peak at around the same time only made things worse (yes, offshore outsourcing still happens, but no longer to the point that your offshore outsourcing plan is more important than your business plan).</p>
<p>Yes. But the option to do a year in grad school is still there. Mark77 said that he graduated with no debt so he wouldn’t have had that burden while going to grad school. Things did improve quite a bit for CS majors in 2003 concurrent with the 30% gain in the NASDAQ that year.</p>
<p>That was the middle of when everybody and their mama wanted a data warehouse built. Also heathcare-related systems needed to be built. I was making a KILLING…meaning that I was working 50-60 hours a week AND BILLING 50-60 hours a week.</p>
<p>Yes, grad school would have been an option (and often funded, so it could have been free) back then, if he had known to get the grad school applications in during fall 2001 (many students are not as aware of economic and industry conditions as more experienced people are). Career surveys of civil engineering graduates at Berkeley indicate that 2009 graduates seemed to be unaware of the poor job outlook until it was too late (18% employed, 23% grad school, 48% unemployed), but 2010 graduates seemed to be more likely to be hiding out in grad school (18% employed, 48% grad school, 20% unemployed).</p>
<p>Yes, it was very bad. The $COMPQ opened around 1950 and dropped to 1,100 which was the bottom from the bubble starting in 2000.</p>
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<p>Yup. I was working on a data warehouse project back then and we were in growth mode even though the company overall was cutting back. But you typically need some decent database experience, preferably working with large systems, along with skills that are usually taught in graduate school. Mark77’s expertise was in networks and communications which was getting decimated back then. The spouse of one of my coworkers got laid off at Lucent - not a happy time for them. He went back to school and completed a certificate program in another area and had a number of contract jobs for several years and now has a full-time permanent position.</p>
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<p>I’d agree with you here but one would be able to tell that fewer companies were coming to campus to recruit. Presumably, you start looking for jobs the fall before graduation. There are grad schools where you can apply on relatively short notice. Our son finished his undergrad requirements in last December and didn’t have a job and applied and was accepted into a grad program to start the Spring semester. The process took about four weeks. It wasn’t easy to do because many people that he needed to contact were on vacation. He could have had an RA position too for funding.</p>
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<p>That’s surprising. I was aware of the housing bubble in 2003 and the housing market peaked in 2005 and the crash was
in 2008 and it would have been pretty hard to ignore what was happening in the stock market and the home builders
and mortgage companies. I guess that seniors have a lot on their minds.</p>
<p>Mark77, part of your struggles finding a job could relate to this issue. I think I’m a victim of this myself, at least in part. However, my situation is probably unlike many people’s here because I’m 50, which is considered well overage for software engineers.</p>
<p>Yes, but the response rate to the graduate survey was only around 30%, give or take (you can look the numbers up yourself). Now, no response != unemployed, but there’s a pretty good possibility that people who don’t respond to such surveys are those who are not happy.</p>
<p>The salaries on the UCB (and Cornell) surveys don’t exactly indicate heavy demand by firms either.</p>
<p>And of course, stock market != employment market. And over a million people have been brought in on the foreign worker visas, but employment hasn’t meaningfully expanded in the industry, so guess who those million foreigners ended up displacing :(.</p>
<p>On the topic of networking, the few friends I have who are in the industry, are just struggling to hang onto their jobs, and don’t seem to be in any sort of position to hire or even refer anyone else in. Which is quite a contrast to the guys who graduated a few years before me who would return to the university and be wanting to hire their friends and the upper-years people. The big crash was devastating. Of course, I do acknowledge that a few niche areas, like social networking and mobile app development are doing well, but still huge numbers of people chasing those fields.</p>
<p>Maybe, maybe not. There are lots of students that do undergrad in their home countries and come to the US for graduate studies. There are students that go to graduate school because they want a broader education. And there are many that do it because they couldn’t find a job. Along the way, they will pick up additional skills.</p>
<p>^ That’s sort of a bleak take on things. My impression is that while your situation is regrettable, there’s no real evidence that any of it applies to current or future engineering or CS grads. I believe there is a recent thread - about CS unemployment - where I link somewhere with unemployment figures for engineering and CS. Those numbers did not seem remarkable.</p>
<p>Also, many CS students plan on graduate school, and some go because they couldn’t find a job. That’s probably true of all engineering fields.</p>
<p>No real evidence? You’re sticking your head in the sand if you really believe that, because my situation is a lot more common than you think. Even the numbers out of UCB and Cornell can’t even support a verified employment rate in excess of 40%, of CS grads, in some of the hottest markets in the United States.</p>
<p>Employment numbers for engineers and CS grads have not grown in a decade. Hundreds of thousands of practictioners have been imported from overseas. What does that do to the overall employment numbers for domestic EE and CS grads? </p>
<p>The problem with looking at ‘unemployment’ number per se is that an unemployed CS/EE/STEM grad is likely to do something like deliver pizzas, if they can’t find a job. Or, as is the case with many grads in the past decade, they never are able to find even their first job in the field, so they never get to be counted as ‘unemployed’. </p>
<p>Especially with EE, while official “unemployment” apparently is low, the absolute number of people working in the profession has plummetted. Where did they all go? Certainly there hasn’t been a mass number of EE deaths, has there?</p>
<p>Mark77- out of curiosity, what is your current plan? Are you still trying to get a job in CS? Have you tried to get any volunteer jobs to get some experience then try again? Or have you decided to go in a different direction all together?</p>
<p>The stock market should be a leading indicator of employment by six to twelve months.</p>
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<p>My company has grown quite a bit in the 2000s but we also hire foreigners that go to school in the US. I happen to work in an area that is doing well besides social media. There are many such areas in CS but it helps to keep your ear to the ground and have a good network of contacts to see where there are jobs well below that of Google and Facebook.</p>
<p>I made a boatload of money in the late 1990s in the tech stocks and in a computer hardware importation business, and somewhat repeated the same in the resource stocks after I survived the tech crash with my portfolio intact (before the 2008 crash, I had almost a 7-figure net worth). So its not entirely a sad ending for me (although there have been some rough times). But its certainly not my love, nor my passion. I’ve also had to move to what might be described as a more rural area, although I make clear in my job applications that I can relocate on a weekends’ notice and can attend interviews at no cost to the hiring firm.</p>
<p>As for experience, I have internships, and I work with Linux, with software, etc., literally every day. Even develop stuff (mainly patches) and contribute them to various open source projects. </p>
<p>Of course, all this really doesn’t matter when my resume is sitting on a pile with 1000 others, which is what is happening these days. </p>
<p>I’ve thought of starting a startup, making use of some of the vast pools of talent out there, but just don’t have any ideas that have a realistic prospect of earning revenue in excess of expenses.</p>
<p>Well, that sounded like fun. I do a fair amount of trading too and
have done quite well for the last twenty years.</p>
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<p>Ever think of working on Mozilla? They’re getting $300 million from
Google per year so they are one of those OS projects that can actually
hire people to work remotely, have a really cool headquarters with a
lot of servers and host annual conferences (or parties if you will)
in exotic locations.</p>
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<p>Have you tried alumni contacts?</p>
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<p>It helps to be plugged into someone that has a business that has a
problem that will pay another company for a solution. Having lots of
contacts helps there.</p>