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to my fellow CS students, new grads, and job seekers. I know you're confused and disappointed. I'm here to tell you, you must be excited. Let me explain.
The job market isn’t impossible to get into, it’s just very new. What worked in the last generations may not work anymore. And it's not just you who's confused, most other people are, even the seniors. And that leaves you an advantage over others.
People are actually getting offers and making it work in this new job market by realizing one simple trick: they’re proving their value by building.
First of all, before doing anything, you must realize that you shouldn't just compete with your peers, you must also fight with the mainstream noise, that's the most primary skill you must develop as a modern post-AI man. You must filter out the lies you hear about AI replacing people and that you shouldn't learn coding.
AI isn’t replacing anyone yet. It’s not good enough at this point. Countless business studies and reports indicate that the adaptation is not yet significant. You hear about AI because companies are "AI-washing" their layoffs that would happen anyway without AI.
Next, you must be consistent. Getting into the market has been tough for generally all the time. At some points, it was crazy easy to get in, but that's not the general rule.
The uni has never been good at preparing students for the job market, the curriculum has always been about fundamentals, not practical skills. So you must step up and self-learn a lot of topics. You must especially practice self-learning as you will rely on it A LOT, years down the line even.
Don't linger in the generalist path too long. It only works short-term, and just to figure out what field of programming you like most, AI, web dev, software, etc. Once you figure out what you want, go deep, and I mean really deep.
Tutorial hell will be your biggest enemy as a student. You will spend days, weeks, watching tutorials and courses, THINKING you're learning stuff while in fact, you're in a delusion. Instead of relying too much on tutorials, build stuff. Practice project-based learning.
The biggest impact of AI in the new job market is a drastic reduction in junior roles. Companies aren't hiring many juniors because AI can do a lot of the job for them. So companies won't invest in educating and training fresh-out-of-college-juniors, you must do that yourself.
You must do that by proving your value by building, skipping the first step of the ladder that used to be internships/junior roles. Build apps that prove your skills, contribute to open source projects that are relevant to your fields, write blog posts, get active. And with the AI, doing all of those things is now 10x easier than it used to be.
That's why you must be EXCITED instead of DISAPPOINTED.
Additionally, I highly suggest watching this video from @AndrewYNg where he and @lmoroney share practical career advice in the new age of AI. It's packed with actionable tips on what you must do.
youtube.com/watch?v=AuZoDs…
Just to wrap things up:
•don't be disheartened, and stay consistent in your path regarless of what you hear in social media.
•be really good, and I mean really good at a particular, employable field.
•learn how to work WITH AI, but also avoid being controlled by it. learn how it works, how context works, how agents work, how to code with it, what it's good at, and bad at.
•build things and prove your value.
As a final tip, if you haven't got an active X account where you share your learnings, progress, and what you do, you're already behind than most. Take X seriously, more than LinkedIn.
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