I find myself really disliking articles like this one, because it seems they don't present any information that can challenge people's perceptions. The image they want to paint is that this individual is extremely talented and still can't get a job, so what are the chances for those who are not? Yet this is one data point, and many of us have seen people with much less impressive resumes get jobs. There's no reason for this one data point to carry any more weight than your personal anecdotes, and we're not even seeing his resume. We only hear what he (and his parents) say. Not exactly independent observers.
So it seems to me that the article only serves to confirm your biases. After reading the article, you might feel that the job market is impossible, or you might feel that there's something important left out about the subject of the article. Or even both. Either way, I don't see anyone reading this article with their view of the world challenged.
I couldn't access the whole story but came to a conclusion anyway.
> He first pursued corporate science jobs and prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories. Then he cast a wider net, applying to software engineering and other roles. Eventually, he was getting ghosted for food-preparation jobs, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes.
> For a time, Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics. That work dried up too.
I surmised that they expected a certain kind of job. Couldn't get it, then applied to general 'software engineering' jobs and was out-qualified by other applicants. Did some basic jobs and decided that wasn't their cup of tea. Note you can also be overqualified for basic jobs. I worked part of a summer in retail at a sports/clothing store training with high school kids. I was directly asked why I was applying and I answered that I was bored and had a lot of spare time. Ended up outlasting many other hires through the summer and quit in the winter. Best position ended up being in womenswear--I gave frank looks great/better/worse answers which seemed to be highly appreciated.
I completely agree. Back in the early 2000s, I was graduating out of college and desperately wanted a job to pay off some financial obligations. I wasn't the top scorer in class and didn't even make the cut off for the good jobs. However, I was pretty confident in my skills almost to the point of arrogance and showed that unapologetically to the lady from HR in charge of hiring. She gave me a chance and I got the job (which I later found really boring but that's a different story).
It was a mix of opportunity, the willingness to seize it, how well you talked and finally, in a large amount, luck.
Why would the author not ask how many interviews they got and what stage to give some picture of the pipeline? Impressions on where they think they goofed in the process? It's frustratingly opaquely written
Perhaps for data points in similar extremes, but there are definitely a good many theorems that show there is reason to weight extreme outliers more heavily. And practical experience using them as a signal to test for measurement errors etc.
Don't know about boomers, but I knew a guy with MS from Stanford who worked at a Bay Area Fry's in late 1990s. That was when the dotcom was spinning up in full force and anyone who could tell Perl from HTML could aim for a CTO at some lavishly funded startup. So nothing much changed in the past 30 years: a prestigious degree is not a golden ticket, you need to make connections while getting that degree and then use them productively. It also severely hinders your ability to get most of the jobs (like the article's protagonist applying for a food prep had any chance) - that guy only got Fry's job because all of the people who normally would be selling Gateways and eMachines to soccer moms had been already writing CGI for dotcoms at the time.
Maybe people have wised up to the fact the prestigious degrees are not a 100% signal of competence? I dislike the framing of this article because the situation of one person like this only means something if you think such a degree implies you are utterly guaranteed a job.
That puts the cart before the horse, in the past these prestigious degrees signaled elite status, they are the people who decide where capital flows, if they couldn't get a job they'd just make one. More likely people haven't wised up, they just stopped making hiring decisions, leaving it to AI.
The point is precisely that with a sample size of one, this doesn't tell us anything about whether Ivy League PhDs in general don't get jobs.
Maybe this person's applications include things that are big red flags. Maybe when they get to the interview stage they give off the impression they are a fraud?
Maybe they're even lying about the 2000 applications.
>Did Ivy League phds boomers not get jobs after 2000 applications?
>What has changed the opportunities in the job market?
Good questions, I don't have many answers since I'm only one of the above, certainly not an Ivy League PhD :)
So I'll respond with a short response to your prompt, using only the natural intelligence this senior citizen has remaining .
>graduated summa cum laude from Rice University and enrolled at Princeton for his Ph.D. in 2018. His research on ice formation was cited by the Nobel committee when it awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2024.
>he aimed to work in science roles at pharmaceutical companies.
This shows a certain kind of kind of ambition and brilliant capabilities. I would think if he had stayed in Houston in 2018 and went straight to work at an oil company or chemical company he would done a lot better by now. Then with a company helping pay for the advanced degree, they will already be more invested in your progress after that.
I almost took this route myself when I was right out of school, my first employer was fairly ideal as a research company that had some money-making chemicals (including a pharmaceutical I didn't know about until I got the job), however it was the only chemical place at all in the college town, founded by one of my professors 20 years earlier. That's just about the opposite of how it is in a truly industrial location.
>The response to numerous applications was mostly silence, with a few rejections.
For me it was from applying at non-chemical outfits so I could potentially survive the Nixon recession and remain in the college town to regroup and see about further degree pursuit.
I'm not up-to-date but I would think that staying in Salt Lake would also limit the job possibilities for pharmaceuticals compared to places like New Jersey. All things being equal a local candidate can often be preferred precisely because the screening process takes so long, by the time they get close to selecting the winner, the need to get to work immediately rules out any further delays. Job goes to the one that can start the next Monday without involving any personal "logistics", and who can put the nose to the grindstone uninterrupted immediately without distractions, making up for time lost when the position was unfilled.
>Weis studied chemical principles and molecular interactions,
I did that, it was a very worthwhile stepping stone, no doubt about it, I also accepted a destiny to thrive or not based on my own technology. I'm a chemist, not an engineer though.
When an opening came up at my local target chemical employer, the competition was so overwhelming in number I didn't stand a chance. This felt about the same point in the recession as it is now. I began to realize I needed to start looking in another state, so that was going to be after my fiancee graduated if we could survive that long.
No such thing as on-line screening yet, and phone screening had become out-of-the-question, with hundreds of applicants, employers never had any more time for that, especially for jobs where the application form is what you need, not so much a resume. Fax machines were not even out yet.
So you applied in person and it was personal screening from that point forward. During normal times an open position would draw a few applicants a week, and it could always take a long time for a candidate to get hired whether the employer was seeking some uncommon previous experience or not.
The problem was, there were now hundreds of applicants per day for jobs of any kind, and it was getting worse.
The real break came when I was applying for miscellaneous local jobs (hope was still declining across the country), one time at a lumber company. I didn't think my chances were too good after I talked to some of the other applicants, a number who had at least a few years somewhat related experience when I had not much.
But I was already wearing a tie so I stopped by the old chemical plant when there wasn't an opening and the Personnel lady[0] liked me and pulled my original application to review. I toured the plant and labs with the actual hiring PhD, and within a week they made me a part-time job 4 days a week Tue-Fri. I tried my hardest to kick butt in a visible way and within 6 months some of the other workers started to say "to themselves", "why doesn't he have to work on Monday?". So that's how I got the first full-time job in my field :)
Things were still not ideal concerning pay and (chemical) toxicity, and after I became a more experienced candidate I went for "greener" pastures, some of which were uniquely toxic in their own ways :\
There was a real big difference once I got to an actual major industrial environment. There are more diverse opportunities, but more normal in the sense that the majors have money-making chemicals first & foremost usually based on natural resources more so than technology, then their research is also massive in scale afterward, when they simply need it more and can afford it better. Realistically, though the number of opportunities are far more abundant, I would still say the biggies fund far less experimentation than the amount they could actually afford. Which turned out to be where I found my niche and eventually started my own research company, with somewhat deeper theoretical background for the most part after more than a decade of more intense experimentation, and leaning much more on ambition to make up for the lack of advanced degree. By now it's been a few more decades of further advances.
>Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics.
I know a little but sure don't think I could pull my weight doing that compared to a decent engineer. However I still feel confident I could turn him into a money-making lab worker right quick, no engineering required. Just like I did the last time the employer I had hired a ChemE PhD for me to train.
For this person in particular having circuit boards on the bench without being under an employer's direction, that is one thing most ChemE's don't do. I think a good one-word piece of advice might be "electrochemistry", and would consider focusing on networking with as many of those in every level and position in the battery technology landscape. I would play the odds that there's more employers who don't have "any" open positions (compared to those that do where odds are in your favor) and focus on the former (after already experiencing so much of the latter) so that when something does come up you might have a better chance.
[0] The "HR" designation for the established Personnel Office at corporations was still in the coining process. With the unprecedented amount of meat they now had to draw from, it could then be recognized as more of a "resource" to be exploited, and huge compared to the personnel they still had working after the widespread cutbacks. A great deal of rebalancing took place between the effect these external untapped resources have versus the internal human resources, especially with regard to pay & benefits. Once it got underway it did kind of snowball in a lot of areas. For instance you could start a salt mine based on a natural resource, but eventually once you had thousands of employees and for some reason growth has stalled, quarterly figures can still be goosed toward increase by extracting more from human resources along with the same old salt. It's all just salt of the Earth to some people when you think about it ;)
This feeds off a misconception people have of the idea of a PhD. A PhD is not something you get by studying more, taking a few years more in advanced courses.
It is something you get by specializing on a topic so much that you are pretty much THE expert on that specific topic. (The inside joke is that at the end of your PhD you must know everything about nothing)
This fundamentally makes the usual job search strategy of casting a wide net completely useless. A PhD is typically a worse employee than a normal malleable undergrad you can train unless you really need an expert on the topic the person has a PhD on.
It’s not uncommon for top tier Phds to land good jobs regardless of, but that’s more because of willingness to do different things, give up on solving problems you have invested half a decade into, and the general availability of researchy jobs.
While this is somewhat true, people also overstate how narrow a Phd student’s general understanding of the field really become as they specialize. For pretty much any serious field, specialization is inescapable without spending decades minimally studying the field via many branches, but a Phd isn’t just preparing you to have a specialized understanding of a specific branch within the field, because very often contributing something mostly new and worthy to that branch requires a mix of depth and breadth, the proportions of which depend on the exact field, branch and specialized topic. Most Phd curriculums I’ve seen still require students to take several advanced courses outside of their main topic area and take exams in multiple areas within the field. Somebody working in only one area would need to have at least graduate level understanding of multiple branches to get through these. I have also seen Phd students who are not broadly interested or comfortable in certain core branches of their field so there are all types and different requirements for different programs.
The graduate level understanding of multiple branches can be pretty hollowed out.
In practice you read the relevant papers, and have mentors and collaborators explain the insights useful for a particular purpose until you get the zeitgeist but not an in depth understanding of a neighboring field.
This is a very simplistic view of a PhD and basically a prejudice.
During conducting a PhD, you learn a lot about organizing yourself, about how to work together with others in a professional context, about teaching and guiding others, about presenting you and your results orally and in a written way, about using certain tools (whatever applies in your field) and so on.
Some people like to view it the way that a PhD makes you a expert in one field and rendering yourself useless for any other task. But this is in general far from reality. As a PhD (at least where I live in Germany and in the field of engineering) you are indeed expected to have a broad view such that you are able to know where you are located with your PhD topic and such that you are indeed not a narrow expert.
I know that many American lectures are given by "TAs" that are PhD students, but do most American PhD students (or in Germany in your case) teach and guide others? That is certainly not the case for my European country: even if one wanted to teach as a PhD student for the experience on one's CV, the answer is usually that the department's budget wouldn't allow creating another teaching position for you.
Here, you may give seminars. These are often about solving some tasks (e.g., "compute the Fourier transform of a triangle"). Sometimes it is just consultation where students can ask stuff about the lecture. You may als be asked to conduct lab experiments with students.
Sometimes your only teaching consists of supervising student research projects, Bachelor's theses or Master's theses.
The lectures are usually given by the professor (head of the research group). Sometimes a PhD gives a lecture when the professor is away. But yes, it depends on your employment contract. If your contract involves a lot of teaching you might even give a whole lecture - though this is rarely the case for employees without PhD.
Yes, so this could be the case for countries where PhDs are employees of the university. However, in other countries PhDs might be entirely externally funded and not department staff, so they would not do any teaching or guiding during the PhD (or possibly even during their postdocs).
There are a lot of PhDs in my company and basically none of them was hired because of the specific topic* of research they were pursuing during their thesis. Yet having the PhD was a huge plus during hiring and in most cases even an (informal) requirement.
I think it happens quite rarely that a company is looking for a PhD based on the specifc topic of their thesis. If that ever happens, you can consider yourself lucky though, because they will probably pay you a fortnue if they really think that they couldn't put any other PhDs on that topic.
*that is not to say field of research like "Machine Learning", but rather something like "loss functions for graph neural networks".
The article does not talk about numbers. It is hard to understand competition in the field he is applying to. Then having the opinions of his parents does not help, it’s odd I need his mom telling me the CV looks good. It would have been better to question Princeton here as it is in their interest to make sure alumni get the jobs. It would be useful to ask some recruiters about the possible red flags for this guy, just to be sure. In any case sure I understand and sympathise, anyone would be mentally broken after that many job applications.
The job market is tough, and the entry-level hiring process is pretty broken for general applicants.
But still, it feels like there is some missing information here. Surely, with a summa cum laude from Rice and a Ph.D. from Princeton in ChemE, he has impressed someone along the way. He needs to concentrate on places where he has a connection, however tenuous. Especially at the relatively rarefied Ivy STEM Ph.D. level...
If he is having trouble getting people to make connections for him, well, that would definitely be an important piece of the puzzle...
Your credential is only one factor that determines your employability. Others include things like: competence, experience, personality, culture fit, and qualifications. Having a 10/10 credential is nice, but having a 0/10 in any other area is often still disqualifying.
In the future, just know that typing archive.is/{paste article link} in your URL bar almost always removes paywalls. There’s also an extension that does this automatically for most news sites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294166
He entered the STEM job market in the US at the worst possible time, between BigTech layoffs and the current US exec branch attacks on domestic STEM employment in general. And having a PhD can be a turnoff to many potential employers and hiring managers.
I've seen people like this before. The problem is not the job market, which merely happens to be fucked as well right now. But with a summa cum laude degree from Rice and a PhD from Princeton you usually knock at any big firm remotely interested in STEM and you will at least land an interview with someone important. There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept. A double PhD from Oxford will not save you if you can't hold a conversation. This stuff doesn't matter that much in school, but it is absolute paramount in the real world. To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,
1. Your ability to speak.
2. Your ability to write.
3. Your ability to think.
- in that order! If you suck at social communication, you basically have to be an era-defining genius like Newton in the thinking department if you want to make it. And even he almost didn't get his most famous work published if Halley (yes, the guy from the comet) hadn't seen beyond his social quirks and realized his genius.
I read this as basically an expanded form of "just know someone who's hiring" or "know someone who knows someone who's hiring". That's all you really need.
Be careful also of the environment you plan to enter, because there exist ones in which people (or some people) cannot read past the "John eats an apple" level of complexity. You need to be able to calibrate.
You could say being good at 1 and 2 with people who are worse than you at 3 is basically a guarantee to success in almost any field. That's the kind of person who diffuses to the top, even if they are just slightly above average at 3.
I am afraid we need to mention the dark side, as a warning:
convincing people will "climb".
That, in bad environments of people of little judgement, includes the worst: high convincing skills but low or rotten substance. Some people are just pure climbers: it takes an environment of clean eyed people to prevent their damage.
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept. A double PhD from Oxford will not save you if you can't hold a conversation.
I imagine for a lot of positions this is true, but surely not every position is like this? Like say, at an HFT firm/hedge fund/etc. -- if you can make people ridiculous amounts of money, they'd be insane to turn you away just because you're socially inept. They would just give you a room to do your thing solo and make everyone rich, no?
This kind of job is one in a million. In all other jobs you are expected to work in a team and if the interviewer thinks that you're lacking the basic interface for that - i.e. being able to articulate your thoughts in a concise way and not being annoying to work with - they just cannot hire you.
Very few jobs work like that, though. I've worked with brilliant engineers who are bad at collaboration and communication: this can be bad enough their contribution becomes negative.
A shared social history, which over many years cements in place a set of common habits and bonds, is what determines a good collaborative fit within the mainstream of a given field.
That isn't an inherent skill to be 'naturally' good or bad at, as it's the holistic result of an entire social existence to that point.
Those engineers may (or not!) have been especially brilliant at collab&comms, when interacting with people very like themselves - had there been any present.
This might be the case in some examples, but I've found that for certain personalities/collaboration approaches putting like with like is potentially the worst outcome (and I've heard of researchers studying personalities and teamwork deliberately doing this during studies in part just to watch the fireworks, though this is just apocryphal anecdotes).
There are some jobs where you can still be paid a pretty penny even while you are completely socially inept.
In the vast majority of jobs however, being technically competent only matters to give you a chance of getting the job. Being more technically competent increases your odds.
But what will be the defining factor is the evaluation if "Can I like (or at least tolerate) communicating with this person on a daily basis?"
Even at companies where you have multiple rounds of leet code, there will be a couple of behavioural interviews in the mix. Those are definitely not fluff.
It is a valid assumption but I would have expected the article to provide such details. And why would you not want to hire a socially awkward person, if I do that for my business I just want results and awkwardness doesn’t matter much in technical positions.
Have you ever tried to hire such a person? I can guarantee you it is not as easy as you might think to get something useful out of them. Normal smart people simply can't deal with others who have severe Asperger's (or any Autism spectrum disorder for that matter). The only place I could see for those people is in a back room in some university where they get to research whatever they want with no teaching duty. But these positions are ultra-rare and you basically have to be super accomplished before you are even considered.
There are other cases, and it can be very valuable to be able to get something out of someone with a lot of technical ability but poor collaboration, but I do agree it's something that will reduce their value to most employers substantially.
HR ladies are basically undefeated against socially awkward chuds. He would have to be at least 6'4" to stand a chance of still getting hired and avoiding a sexual harrassment saga.
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point
Really? You make a rather harsh, specific point. Where's the evidence? I'd wager competition and suitability for the job would also weigh in, especially after such a superficial introduction.
> To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,
Yeah, that's meritocratic wishful thinking. Criteria obviously missing are: good looks, and a good network, which includes rich or otherwise influential parents.
I only have a second-hand experience with PhDs looking for jobs. It seems very similar to programming jobs market: it's saturated with worthless applications and the filtering on the receiving end is completely broken. I don't have numbers and wouldn't know how to measure it, but it feels like most applications never get assessed by relevant experts at all. Basically, no matter what you put in your resume it goes straight into the garbage bin.
So, your professor's rules are no longer relevant. There's nobody to speak to, no matter what you write it's not going to change anything. Thinking isn't a priority either.
You need to know people. That is all.
Anecdotally, I had this happen to me. For the context, I'm moving back from the Netherlands to Israel. I've been looking for a job in the Netherlands before giving up and leaving. Despite maybe a hundred or so applications that I've sent, I've never heard from anyone. I think, Dutch law requires a timely response to the application and so I would get template rejections most of the time. Sometimes seconds after applying.
Back in Israel, I also applied through LinkedIn and Indeed. But I also happen to be on the file in some HR agencies which supply candidates to the programming jobs. I've received an invitation from such an agency to interview for a job with a company I've already applied to through LinkedIn (and was promptly rejected). I've landed an interview, and when asked about my job hunting efforts in the Netherlands, I jokingly described the application through LinkedIn and the likes as futile, as nobody reads those applications.
The interviewer start beating his chest assuring me that they would never... I decided to withhold from them the fact that they actually would. I'm still at the... third interview with them now. So, we'll see how it goes.
Anyways. My larger point is: the automation brought to job hunting is very disadvantageous to the junior workforce. Connections always played a role, but now their role is exaggerated. The article describes it as decreased job mobility (nobody quits, so there are fewer jobs to hire people into). And while it keeps the appearance of low unemployment, the problem with it is that it's the same people who are unemployed all the time. Our unemployment model isn't prepared for this. The idea behind social security unemployment compensation is that you find a job relatively quickly and only need a few months to get by before you do. This doesn't work anymore, as unemployment lasts years.
This is bad on many levels: it lowers the number of professionals entering the field, it leads to the loss of expertise as older workers retire w/o having trained a replacement, the effort spent on acquiring expertise is wasted by the young workforce as they are forced to change direction.
It's not only about juniors and not only about Netherlands. There are no jobs and there is(are) war(s). If you lose your current job there will be no next one. All money in the economy is funneled through military, "AI", and healthcare directly to oligarchs/elites and it doesn't translate into military, healthcare, or AI milestones or achievements, except death. We are slowly transitioning into a war economy.
I had a little reply to another commenter about my experiences, but that was when the Vietnam war had recently ended. Afterward, paying the piper took longer than the war and cost more. Something about compound interest and the government being in deeper debt to fund the war IIRC.
That's pretty stereotypical. In order to be successful, you need to find yourself in places where you can convince others that it's worth giving opportunities to you. Social skills help. Being extroverted helps. Being neurotypical helps. But many other things help as well, and the world is a really weird place.
A PhD always involves a huge random element. You commit to working long term under the close supervision of a person you don't know, often in an unfamiliar place far away from home, in a project that may not lead anywhere. And you may not even know if research is actually something you want to do and your personality is suited for. Most of the time things ultimately work out, but for many people they don't. Most of the latter manage to find something else, but there are always some unlucky people who don't. (And who may be scarred by the experience.)
Every single job requires many YoE at this point. Every. Single. One. And the worst part is that they really mean "years of employment" and not experience. Pursuing a PhD full time effectively _is_ employment, yet most companies and HR departments don't see it this way. Likewise for independent research, open source work, self-employment etc. My guess is he has dedicated his life to his PhD studies, meaning he has little "ReAl ExPerIeNcE" so no one wants to hire him because... reasons? Who knows, hiring is broken.
A PhD is not the same thing as professional experience. The contexts, goals, and nature of the work are very different, and employers are right to not count them as the same. It's more meaningful than undergrad, sure, but a 4 year PhD is not 4 years of professional experience (it might be worth more in some cases, but it is on average going to be worth less).
I find myself really disliking articles like this one, because it seems they don't present any information that can challenge people's perceptions. The image they want to paint is that this individual is extremely talented and still can't get a job, so what are the chances for those who are not? Yet this is one data point, and many of us have seen people with much less impressive resumes get jobs. There's no reason for this one data point to carry any more weight than your personal anecdotes, and we're not even seeing his resume. We only hear what he (and his parents) say. Not exactly independent observers.
So it seems to me that the article only serves to confirm your biases. After reading the article, you might feel that the job market is impossible, or you might feel that there's something important left out about the subject of the article. Or even both. Either way, I don't see anyone reading this article with their view of the world challenged.
I couldn't access the whole story but came to a conclusion anyway.
> He first pursued corporate science jobs and prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories. Then he cast a wider net, applying to software engineering and other roles. Eventually, he was getting ghosted for food-preparation jobs, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes.
> For a time, Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics. That work dried up too.
I surmised that they expected a certain kind of job. Couldn't get it, then applied to general 'software engineering' jobs and was out-qualified by other applicants. Did some basic jobs and decided that wasn't their cup of tea. Note you can also be overqualified for basic jobs. I worked part of a summer in retail at a sports/clothing store training with high school kids. I was directly asked why I was applying and I answered that I was bored and had a lot of spare time. Ended up outlasting many other hires through the summer and quit in the winter. Best position ended up being in womenswear--I gave frank looks great/better/worse answers which seemed to be highly appreciated.
I completely agree. Back in the early 2000s, I was graduating out of college and desperately wanted a job to pay off some financial obligations. I wasn't the top scorer in class and didn't even make the cut off for the good jobs. However, I was pretty confident in my skills almost to the point of arrogance and showed that unapologetically to the lady from HR in charge of hiring. She gave me a chance and I got the job (which I later found really boring but that's a different story).
It was a mix of opportunity, the willingness to seize it, how well you talked and finally, in a large amount, luck.
While, in general, I would agree, I fail to see how this point is relevant to the situation at hand.
What is being argued is that, currently, there's a hiring crisis across many industries, that affects even highly qualified people.
What you said would be relevant only if applied to today's market, not to the early 2000s.
Why would the author not ask how many interviews they got and what stage to give some picture of the pipeline? Impressions on where they think they goofed in the process? It's frustratingly opaquely written
Perhaps for data points in similar extremes, but there are definitely a good many theorems that show there is reason to weight extreme outliers more heavily. And practical experience using them as a signal to test for measurement errors etc.
Run the experiment in different eras.
Did Ivy League phds boomers not get jobs after 2000 applications?
What has changed the opportunities in the job market?
Don't know about boomers, but I knew a guy with MS from Stanford who worked at a Bay Area Fry's in late 1990s. That was when the dotcom was spinning up in full force and anyone who could tell Perl from HTML could aim for a CTO at some lavishly funded startup. So nothing much changed in the past 30 years: a prestigious degree is not a golden ticket, you need to make connections while getting that degree and then use them productively. It also severely hinders your ability to get most of the jobs (like the article's protagonist applying for a food prep had any chance) - that guy only got Fry's job because all of the people who normally would be selling Gateways and eMachines to soccer moms had been already writing CGI for dotcoms at the time.
Maybe people have wised up to the fact the prestigious degrees are not a 100% signal of competence? I dislike the framing of this article because the situation of one person like this only means something if you think such a degree implies you are utterly guaranteed a job.
That puts the cart before the horse, in the past these prestigious degrees signaled elite status, they are the people who decide where capital flows, if they couldn't get a job they'd just make one. More likely people haven't wised up, they just stopped making hiring decisions, leaving it to AI.
The point is precisely that with a sample size of one, this doesn't tell us anything about whether Ivy League PhDs in general don't get jobs.
Maybe this person's applications include things that are big red flags. Maybe when they get to the interview stage they give off the impression they are a fraud?
Maybe they're even lying about the 2000 applications.
Maybe they're applying to jobs completely outside their field.
Maybe their resume is just written really badly.
As you say, there's just nowhere near enough information.
>Did Ivy League phds boomers not get jobs after 2000 applications?
>What has changed the opportunities in the job market?
Good questions, I don't have many answers since I'm only one of the above, certainly not an Ivy League PhD :)
So I'll respond with a short response to your prompt, using only the natural intelligence this senior citizen has remaining .
>graduated summa cum laude from Rice University and enrolled at Princeton for his Ph.D. in 2018. His research on ice formation was cited by the Nobel committee when it awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2024.
>he aimed to work in science roles at pharmaceutical companies.
This shows a certain kind of kind of ambition and brilliant capabilities. I would think if he had stayed in Houston in 2018 and went straight to work at an oil company or chemical company he would done a lot better by now. Then with a company helping pay for the advanced degree, they will already be more invested in your progress after that.
I almost took this route myself when I was right out of school, my first employer was fairly ideal as a research company that had some money-making chemicals (including a pharmaceutical I didn't know about until I got the job), however it was the only chemical place at all in the college town, founded by one of my professors 20 years earlier. That's just about the opposite of how it is in a truly industrial location.
>The response to numerous applications was mostly silence, with a few rejections.
For me it was from applying at non-chemical outfits so I could potentially survive the Nixon recession and remain in the college town to regroup and see about further degree pursuit.
I'm not up-to-date but I would think that staying in Salt Lake would also limit the job possibilities for pharmaceuticals compared to places like New Jersey. All things being equal a local candidate can often be preferred precisely because the screening process takes so long, by the time they get close to selecting the winner, the need to get to work immediately rules out any further delays. Job goes to the one that can start the next Monday without involving any personal "logistics", and who can put the nose to the grindstone uninterrupted immediately without distractions, making up for time lost when the position was unfilled.
>Weis studied chemical principles and molecular interactions,
I did that, it was a very worthwhile stepping stone, no doubt about it, I also accepted a destiny to thrive or not based on my own technology. I'm a chemist, not an engineer though.
When an opening came up at my local target chemical employer, the competition was so overwhelming in number I didn't stand a chance. This felt about the same point in the recession as it is now. I began to realize I needed to start looking in another state, so that was going to be after my fiancee graduated if we could survive that long.
No such thing as on-line screening yet, and phone screening had become out-of-the-question, with hundreds of applicants, employers never had any more time for that, especially for jobs where the application form is what you need, not so much a resume. Fax machines were not even out yet.
So you applied in person and it was personal screening from that point forward. During normal times an open position would draw a few applicants a week, and it could always take a long time for a candidate to get hired whether the employer was seeking some uncommon previous experience or not.
The problem was, there were now hundreds of applicants per day for jobs of any kind, and it was getting worse.
The real break came when I was applying for miscellaneous local jobs (hope was still declining across the country), one time at a lumber company. I didn't think my chances were too good after I talked to some of the other applicants, a number who had at least a few years somewhat related experience when I had not much.
But I was already wearing a tie so I stopped by the old chemical plant when there wasn't an opening and the Personnel lady[0] liked me and pulled my original application to review. I toured the plant and labs with the actual hiring PhD, and within a week they made me a part-time job 4 days a week Tue-Fri. I tried my hardest to kick butt in a visible way and within 6 months some of the other workers started to say "to themselves", "why doesn't he have to work on Monday?". So that's how I got the first full-time job in my field :)
Things were still not ideal concerning pay and (chemical) toxicity, and after I became a more experienced candidate I went for "greener" pastures, some of which were uniquely toxic in their own ways :\
There was a real big difference once I got to an actual major industrial environment. There are more diverse opportunities, but more normal in the sense that the majors have money-making chemicals first & foremost usually based on natural resources more so than technology, then their research is also massive in scale afterward, when they simply need it more and can afford it better. Realistically, though the number of opportunities are far more abundant, I would still say the biggies fund far less experimentation than the amount they could actually afford. Which turned out to be where I found my niche and eventually started my own research company, with somewhat deeper theoretical background for the most part after more than a decade of more intense experimentation, and leaning much more on ambition to make up for the lack of advanced degree. By now it's been a few more decades of further advances.
>Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics.
I know a little but sure don't think I could pull my weight doing that compared to a decent engineer. However I still feel confident I could turn him into a money-making lab worker right quick, no engineering required. Just like I did the last time the employer I had hired a ChemE PhD for me to train.
For this person in particular having circuit boards on the bench without being under an employer's direction, that is one thing most ChemE's don't do. I think a good one-word piece of advice might be "electrochemistry", and would consider focusing on networking with as many of those in every level and position in the battery technology landscape. I would play the odds that there's more employers who don't have "any" open positions (compared to those that do where odds are in your favor) and focus on the former (after already experiencing so much of the latter) so that when something does come up you might have a better chance.
[0] The "HR" designation for the established Personnel Office at corporations was still in the coining process. With the unprecedented amount of meat they now had to draw from, it could then be recognized as more of a "resource" to be exploited, and huge compared to the personnel they still had working after the widespread cutbacks. A great deal of rebalancing took place between the effect these external untapped resources have versus the internal human resources, especially with regard to pay & benefits. Once it got underway it did kind of snowball in a lot of areas. For instance you could start a salt mine based on a natural resource, but eventually once you had thousands of employees and for some reason growth has stalled, quarterly figures can still be goosed toward increase by extracting more from human resources along with the same old salt. It's all just salt of the Earth to some people when you think about it ;)
This feeds off a misconception people have of the idea of a PhD. A PhD is not something you get by studying more, taking a few years more in advanced courses.
It is something you get by specializing on a topic so much that you are pretty much THE expert on that specific topic. (The inside joke is that at the end of your PhD you must know everything about nothing)
This fundamentally makes the usual job search strategy of casting a wide net completely useless. A PhD is typically a worse employee than a normal malleable undergrad you can train unless you really need an expert on the topic the person has a PhD on.
It’s not uncommon for top tier Phds to land good jobs regardless of, but that’s more because of willingness to do different things, give up on solving problems you have invested half a decade into, and the general availability of researchy jobs.
The last one is the least important.
While this is somewhat true, people also overstate how narrow a Phd student’s general understanding of the field really become as they specialize. For pretty much any serious field, specialization is inescapable without spending decades minimally studying the field via many branches, but a Phd isn’t just preparing you to have a specialized understanding of a specific branch within the field, because very often contributing something mostly new and worthy to that branch requires a mix of depth and breadth, the proportions of which depend on the exact field, branch and specialized topic. Most Phd curriculums I’ve seen still require students to take several advanced courses outside of their main topic area and take exams in multiple areas within the field. Somebody working in only one area would need to have at least graduate level understanding of multiple branches to get through these. I have also seen Phd students who are not broadly interested or comfortable in certain core branches of their field so there are all types and different requirements for different programs.
The graduate level understanding of multiple branches can be pretty hollowed out.
In practice you read the relevant papers, and have mentors and collaborators explain the insights useful for a particular purpose until you get the zeitgeist but not an in depth understanding of a neighboring field.
I wasn’t talking about altogether different fields, perhaps you meant branches of the same field in your last part?
This is a very simplistic view of a PhD and basically a prejudice.
During conducting a PhD, you learn a lot about organizing yourself, about how to work together with others in a professional context, about teaching and guiding others, about presenting you and your results orally and in a written way, about using certain tools (whatever applies in your field) and so on.
Some people like to view it the way that a PhD makes you a expert in one field and rendering yourself useless for any other task. But this is in general far from reality. As a PhD (at least where I live in Germany and in the field of engineering) you are indeed expected to have a broad view such that you are able to know where you are located with your PhD topic and such that you are indeed not a narrow expert.
I know that many American lectures are given by "TAs" that are PhD students, but do most American PhD students (or in Germany in your case) teach and guide others? That is certainly not the case for my European country: even if one wanted to teach as a PhD student for the experience on one's CV, the answer is usually that the department's budget wouldn't allow creating another teaching position for you.
Here, you may give seminars. These are often about solving some tasks (e.g., "compute the Fourier transform of a triangle"). Sometimes it is just consultation where students can ask stuff about the lecture. You may als be asked to conduct lab experiments with students. Sometimes your only teaching consists of supervising student research projects, Bachelor's theses or Master's theses.
The lectures are usually given by the professor (head of the research group). Sometimes a PhD gives a lecture when the professor is away. But yes, it depends on your employment contract. If your contract involves a lot of teaching you might even give a whole lecture - though this is rarely the case for employees without PhD.
Yes, so this could be the case for countries where PhDs are employees of the university. However, in other countries PhDs might be entirely externally funded and not department staff, so they would not do any teaching or guiding during the PhD (or possibly even during their postdocs).
There are a lot of PhDs in my company and basically none of them was hired because of the specific topic* of research they were pursuing during their thesis. Yet having the PhD was a huge plus during hiring and in most cases even an (informal) requirement.
I think it happens quite rarely that a company is looking for a PhD based on the specifc topic of their thesis. If that ever happens, you can consider yourself lucky though, because they will probably pay you a fortnue if they really think that they couldn't put any other PhDs on that topic.
*that is not to say field of research like "Machine Learning", but rather something like "loss functions for graph neural networks".
The article does not talk about numbers. It is hard to understand competition in the field he is applying to. Then having the opinions of his parents does not help, it’s odd I need his mom telling me the CV looks good. It would have been better to question Princeton here as it is in their interest to make sure alumni get the jobs. It would be useful to ask some recruiters about the possible red flags for this guy, just to be sure. In any case sure I understand and sympathise, anyone would be mentally broken after that many job applications.
Given the range of jobs he seems to have applied to, numbers don't mean a thing. I mean, it ranges from high profile research labs to fast food prep.
> It would be useful to ask some recruiters about the possible red flags for this guy, just to be sure.
Unfortunately, it seems much of the hiring process is automated, and they are not going to tell you how to navigate that.
The job market is tough, and the entry-level hiring process is pretty broken for general applicants.
But still, it feels like there is some missing information here. Surely, with a summa cum laude from Rice and a Ph.D. from Princeton in ChemE, he has impressed someone along the way. He needs to concentrate on places where he has a connection, however tenuous. Especially at the relatively rarefied Ivy STEM Ph.D. level...
If he is having trouble getting people to make connections for him, well, that would definitely be an important piece of the puzzle...
Your credential is only one factor that determines your employability. Others include things like: competence, experience, personality, culture fit, and qualifications. Having a 10/10 credential is nice, but having a 0/10 in any other area is often still disqualifying.
This just confirms what I've suspected all my life... I should have been a plumber.
Meanwhile big firms are fighting for AI/ML phds for hundreds of thousands dollars.
Millions. Some of those more senior researchers are paid between $1-2.5M just in cash comp.
He can still go for gig jobs like 320 million Chinese do.
Could anyone copy the text for us paywalled peasants?
I have a gift for you https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/labor-market-freeze-ph...
In the future, just know that typing archive.is/{paste article link} in your URL bar almost always removes paywalls. There’s also an extension that does this automatically for most news sites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294166
archive.is blocks the whole of Finland, which is annoying.
> [site] blocks [Country]
Are you sure it is not the opposite? Why would they...
Not just Finland. Apparently, it’s some russian dude who doesn’t like certain neighboring countries.
archive.today has had a DDOS fake captcha for years for Finnish visitors, targeting a Finnish blogger they don't like
https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
https://wallhop.io/https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/lab...
He entered the STEM job market in the US at the worst possible time, between BigTech layoffs and the current US exec branch attacks on domestic STEM employment in general. And having a PhD can be a turnoff to many potential employers and hiring managers.
I've seen people like this before. The problem is not the job market, which merely happens to be fucked as well right now. But with a summa cum laude degree from Rice and a PhD from Princeton you usually knock at any big firm remotely interested in STEM and you will at least land an interview with someone important. There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept. A double PhD from Oxford will not save you if you can't hold a conversation. This stuff doesn't matter that much in school, but it is absolute paramount in the real world. To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,
1. Your ability to speak.
2. Your ability to write.
3. Your ability to think.
- in that order! If you suck at social communication, you basically have to be an era-defining genius like Newton in the thinking department if you want to make it. And even he almost didn't get his most famous work published if Halley (yes, the guy from the comet) hadn't seen beyond his social quirks and realized his genius.
I read this as basically an expanded form of "just know someone who's hiring" or "know someone who knows someone who's hiring". That's all you really need.
> Your ability to write
Be careful also of the environment you plan to enter, because there exist ones in which people (or some people) cannot read past the "John eats an apple" level of complexity. You need to be able to calibrate.
You could say being good at 1 and 2 with people who are worse than you at 3 is basically a guarantee to success in almost any field. That's the kind of person who diffuses to the top, even if they are just slightly above average at 3.
I am afraid we need to mention the dark side, as a warning:
convincing people will "climb".
That, in bad environments of people of little judgement, includes the worst: high convincing skills but low or rotten substance. Some people are just pure climbers: it takes an environment of clean eyed people to prevent their damage.
"just be good at all 3 bro"
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept. A double PhD from Oxford will not save you if you can't hold a conversation.
I imagine for a lot of positions this is true, but surely not every position is like this? Like say, at an HFT firm/hedge fund/etc. -- if you can make people ridiculous amounts of money, they'd be insane to turn you away just because you're socially inept. They would just give you a room to do your thing solo and make everyone rich, no?
This kind of job is one in a million. In all other jobs you are expected to work in a team and if the interviewer thinks that you're lacking the basic interface for that - i.e. being able to articulate your thoughts in a concise way and not being annoying to work with - they just cannot hire you.
Very few jobs work like that, though. I've worked with brilliant engineers who are bad at collaboration and communication: this can be bad enough their contribution becomes negative.
A shared social history, which over many years cements in place a set of common habits and bonds, is what determines a good collaborative fit within the mainstream of a given field.
That isn't an inherent skill to be 'naturally' good or bad at, as it's the holistic result of an entire social existence to that point.
Those engineers may (or not!) have been especially brilliant at collab&comms, when interacting with people very like themselves - had there been any present.
This might be the case in some examples, but I've found that for certain personalities/collaboration approaches putting like with like is potentially the worst outcome (and I've heard of researchers studying personalities and teamwork deliberately doing this during studies in part just to watch the fireworks, though this is just apocryphal anecdotes).
There are some jobs where you can still be paid a pretty penny even while you are completely socially inept.
In the vast majority of jobs however, being technically competent only matters to give you a chance of getting the job. Being more technically competent increases your odds.
But what will be the defining factor is the evaluation if "Can I like (or at least tolerate) communicating with this person on a daily basis?"
Even at companies where you have multiple rounds of leet code, there will be a couple of behavioural interviews in the mix. Those are definitely not fluff.
It is a valid assumption but I would have expected the article to provide such details. And why would you not want to hire a socially awkward person, if I do that for my business I just want results and awkwardness doesn’t matter much in technical positions.
Have you ever tried to hire such a person? I can guarantee you it is not as easy as you might think to get something useful out of them. Normal smart people simply can't deal with others who have severe Asperger's (or any Autism spectrum disorder for that matter). The only place I could see for those people is in a back room in some university where they get to research whatever they want with no teaching duty. But these positions are ultra-rare and you basically have to be super accomplished before you are even considered.
There are other cases, and it can be very valuable to be able to get something out of someone with a lot of technical ability but poor collaboration, but I do agree it's something that will reduce their value to most employers substantially.
HR ladies are basically undefeated against socially awkward chuds. He would have to be at least 6'4" to stand a chance of still getting hired and avoiding a sexual harrassment saga.
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point
Really? You make a rather harsh, specific point. Where's the evidence? I'd wager competition and suitability for the job would also weigh in, especially after such a superficial introduction.
> To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,
Yeah, that's meritocratic wishful thinking. Criteria obviously missing are: good looks, and a good network, which includes rich or otherwise influential parents.
I only have a second-hand experience with PhDs looking for jobs. It seems very similar to programming jobs market: it's saturated with worthless applications and the filtering on the receiving end is completely broken. I don't have numbers and wouldn't know how to measure it, but it feels like most applications never get assessed by relevant experts at all. Basically, no matter what you put in your resume it goes straight into the garbage bin.
So, your professor's rules are no longer relevant. There's nobody to speak to, no matter what you write it's not going to change anything. Thinking isn't a priority either.
You need to know people. That is all.
Anecdotally, I had this happen to me. For the context, I'm moving back from the Netherlands to Israel. I've been looking for a job in the Netherlands before giving up and leaving. Despite maybe a hundred or so applications that I've sent, I've never heard from anyone. I think, Dutch law requires a timely response to the application and so I would get template rejections most of the time. Sometimes seconds after applying.
Back in Israel, I also applied through LinkedIn and Indeed. But I also happen to be on the file in some HR agencies which supply candidates to the programming jobs. I've received an invitation from such an agency to interview for a job with a company I've already applied to through LinkedIn (and was promptly rejected). I've landed an interview, and when asked about my job hunting efforts in the Netherlands, I jokingly described the application through LinkedIn and the likes as futile, as nobody reads those applications.
The interviewer start beating his chest assuring me that they would never... I decided to withhold from them the fact that they actually would. I'm still at the... third interview with them now. So, we'll see how it goes.
Anyways. My larger point is: the automation brought to job hunting is very disadvantageous to the junior workforce. Connections always played a role, but now their role is exaggerated. The article describes it as decreased job mobility (nobody quits, so there are fewer jobs to hire people into). And while it keeps the appearance of low unemployment, the problem with it is that it's the same people who are unemployed all the time. Our unemployment model isn't prepared for this. The idea behind social security unemployment compensation is that you find a job relatively quickly and only need a few months to get by before you do. This doesn't work anymore, as unemployment lasts years.
This is bad on many levels: it lowers the number of professionals entering the field, it leads to the loss of expertise as older workers retire w/o having trained a replacement, the effort spent on acquiring expertise is wasted by the young workforce as they are forced to change direction.
It's not only about juniors and not only about Netherlands. There are no jobs and there is(are) war(s). If you lose your current job there will be no next one. All money in the economy is funneled through military, "AI", and healthcare directly to oligarchs/elites and it doesn't translate into military, healthcare, or AI milestones or achievements, except death. We are slowly transitioning into a war economy.
I had a little reply to another commenter about my experiences, but that was when the Vietnam war had recently ended. Afterward, paying the piper took longer than the war and cost more. Something about compound interest and the government being in deeper debt to fund the war IIRC.
That's pretty stereotypical. In order to be successful, you need to find yourself in places where you can convince others that it's worth giving opportunities to you. Social skills help. Being extroverted helps. Being neurotypical helps. But many other things help as well, and the world is a really weird place.
A PhD always involves a huge random element. You commit to working long term under the close supervision of a person you don't know, often in an unfamiliar place far away from home, in a project that may not lead anywhere. And you may not even know if research is actually something you want to do and your personality is suited for. Most of the time things ultimately work out, but for many people they don't. Most of the latter manage to find something else, but there are always some unlucky people who don't. (And who may be scarred by the experience.)
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept.
Harsh words for someone you've had no social interactions with. To me this statement says more about you than Jack Weis.
Every single job requires many YoE at this point. Every. Single. One. And the worst part is that they really mean "years of employment" and not experience. Pursuing a PhD full time effectively _is_ employment, yet most companies and HR departments don't see it this way. Likewise for independent research, open source work, self-employment etc. My guess is he has dedicated his life to his PhD studies, meaning he has little "ReAl ExPerIeNcE" so no one wants to hire him because... reasons? Who knows, hiring is broken.
A PhD is not the same thing as professional experience. The contexts, goals, and nature of the work are very different, and employers are right to not count them as the same. It's more meaningful than undergrad, sure, but a 4 year PhD is not 4 years of professional experience (it might be worth more in some cases, but it is on average going to be worth less).
> A PhD is not the same thing as professional experience.
You're correct, academic experience and credentials should be worth _more_.
You must have a very different experience of people with PhDs than me.