Technology

In case anyone is not aware:

Are you currently employed?

Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?

If the answer to both of those questions is 'no', then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!

You just aren't in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.

So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them...

( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )

... and you just give up?

You are not 'unemployed'.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed

You are likely a 'discouraged worker', who is also 'not in the labor force'.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged

.........

Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and... you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?

Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely 'underemployed'.

But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs... you may also be 'overemployed'.

.........

But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.

In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers... did not make a living wage.

https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf

(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn't.)

You've also got measures like LISEP...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2025/05/27/stunning-unemployment-survey-says-millions-functionally-unemployed/

Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are 'functionally unemployed', by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.

Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.

So basically this is a way to try to measure 'doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job'.

https://www.lisep.org/tru

.........

A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of 'did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?' would be 'are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?'

Something like that.

It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.

• sincerely, a not unemployed but technically 'out of the the labor force' econometrician.

I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Washington in 2020, during the height of Covid.

After over 3000 handcrafted applications (and many more AI-written ones), I have never been offered a job in the field.

I know of multiple CS graduates who have killed themselves, and so many who are living with their parents and working service/retail.

I think the software engineering rush of the early 2000s will be looked back upon like the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.

0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.

This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.

I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.

The fairness meter at the bottom of the article is absurd. “Unfair left leaning” like yes, how dare the libtards use statistics to show how broken our economy is

In the 1970s companies started "Stack Ranking" all their employees and firing the bottom 10% in order to replace them or simply using their wages to pay CEOs more.

Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.

Now the media will jump past all this to blame anything but the CEOs and failure of Government to reign in the wage gap via the force of law.

Give it a minute. Pretty soon, they're going to need a lot of people to fix all the vibe-code that's currently being spewed out by AI. That'll be a monumental task.

Shades of dotcom days. Everyone hopped on the bandwagon. Most lured by the high salaries and gold-rush mentality. Nowadays, just having a CS degree isn't enough. You want portfolio pieces to set you apart. Start by having a damn portfolio. You can set one up for free on GH Pages or CloudFlare. Or pay a few bucks and set one up on Wordpress. If you can't figure out how, that CS degree was wasted.

You want stories that show you bring value. Show that you can build things beyond school projects. Even if you do school projects, document them and push them out. Show why they're cool and what you can do. Throw up screenshots, diagrams, or animations. No walls of text.

Also, learn to sell yourself. Not in the oily LinkedIn way. Just be out there. Contribute back. Educate others and have a voice. Blog, newsletter, social media, book, or video channel. They're dead-easy to set up and free so there's no gatekeepers to go through, other than your ideas.

If in a big city, go to Meetups or demo days. Meet people and ASK WHAT THEY DO. Help connect them to others. Anyone just sitting there cranking out resumes is going to get filtered by the LLM screener. Might as well pin up your resume above the urinal at the pub.

Finally: everyone can low-code or vibecode. Those are table stakes now. You want to do better.

An unfortunate but completely predictable result of the debt manufacturing industry. Widespread and getting worse.

If businesses continue believing they can vibe code some intern into success while drop kicking talent to the curb to save a buck, those CS unemployment numbers will fall off like a lemming!

To the quote in the summary - might be because debugging dozens of layers of bullshit is hard. Anyway, debugging is about sitting for hours and reading logs and looking for weirdness, and looking at dumps, and what not. It's a very different skill from "being the next Zuckerberg". Also Zuckerberg is a psychologist most of all, his computing knowledge is not that unique. Network effect is more important than skill and knowledge here.

It's finally happening, tech jobs are suffering the same unemployment that the trades had been suffering for years if not decades, only this time around it's probably self-inflicted by the AI bubble.

That's what happens when everyone rushes to do the same qualification - you get too many people for that area of work. More graduates doesn't magically make more jobs - it just makes more people applying for the same amount of jobs.

I set my mind on comp sci like 6 years ago because it was said to be one of the most in demand fields (maybe still is) and pays well (I was looking at SWE). Nowadays I have set my mind on a job that involves me working away in a server room. Hopefully that pans out.

Industry vulnerable to lack of investor money does badly when there is no investor money

Yep. Been saying it for years because I was laid off over and over. Do not enter computer science.

Become an welder, electrician, etc. ANYTHING but a computer scientist

It's called an oversaturated market. And capitalist fucks replacing people with AI

Where I am and due to its greater practicality, nursing is more popular as a college course than compsci.

I once started as compsci, but instead got a job fixing PCs. Also self-learned basic carpentry and plumbing. Looking at raising livestock in the near future.