I always feel a bit conflicted when I read these experience from new grads: on the one hand, there's no question the job market today is not the one they signed up for; on the other, the expectation of recent grads is completely alien to me as someone who entered the job market in the shadow of the dotcom bust.
The biggest thing that seems foreign to me is the expectation that "I'm a fit for the job, I should therefore get the job". When I entered the workforce every job was a competition.
The process was the companies would post a job, and then collect resumes until they felt they had a sufficient number of candidates to proceed (or some arbitrary deadline was reached). If you were the only good candidate, it was very common that they would feel there wasn't enough competition and would simply restart the search. This process could easily take months. Then, if there were enough qualified candidates, you would get the interview but you would always be competing with 3-5 other people that the company felt where roughly equal matches.
I had worked part-time (not purely interned) in my field for 3 years, so had plenty of experience at the entry level. Even then competition was stiff, and an interviewer simply not vibing with you was enough to lose a job.
I vividly recall having my target pay set at 2x minimum wage, eating canned stew because that's all I could afford and about to lower my standards when I finally got a call back after months of searching. So as a new grad with reasonably similar qualifications to the author, I was pumped to be making 2x minimum wage out of college.
And at the time none of my classmates considered it to be a challenging job market.
Flash-forward a few years and my younger siblings faced the GFC, I knew of tons and tons of really bright new grads that simply couldn't get work for years. I was shocked that most of them didn't complain too much and where more than willing to suck up to corporate America as soon as a job was offered (I personally thought a bit more resistance was in order).
I'm not sure I really have a point other than to emphasize how truly bizarre the last decade has been where passing leetcode basically meant a 6 figure salary out of undergrad. I'm typically a doomer, but honestly I think it's hard to disambiguate what part of this job market is truly terrible and what part is people who have spend most of their lives living in unprecedentedly prosperous times.
Much of your argument rests on refuting the notion that the author feels "entitled" to a high-paying job. In that point, I agree with you. Any engineering undertaking is most productive when it is a meritocratic and competitive pursuit. People that feel "entitled" to an engineering job unfortunately need a reality check on their true competitiveness.
However, that doesn't seem like the authors core point. The authors' core point here is that they feel that the level of competition is past the point where their meritocratic achievements have any weight because to be competitive in the present marketplace, they need to either (1) inherently be _born_ in a different country with a low cost of living, (2) give up certain basic freedoms, (3) settle for a less skillful job where they can be an outlier in the distribution (for how long?) etc. -- all of which, to them, feel less meritocratic.
Of course, they might also feel "entitled" to a job, but that's not the interesting part of their argument (at least to me).
I feel a lot of the same conflict, and I don't know how much of it is just because times are different now.
My first job was at a tiny local marketing agency building portfolio websites, for 1.5x the Aus minimum wage. As a computer science graduate. I'm pretty sure those kinds of jobs don't exist anymore - they've all been outsourced to Wix or Squarespace.
I think this expectation of getting a job when you meet criteria no matter what is a result of them being new grads - that's what happens in classes or exams, you do not compete with others, you just do your thing.
The biggest thing that seems foreign to me is the expectation that "I'm a fit for the job, I should therefore get the job". When I entered the workforce every job was a competition.
The process was the companies would post a job, and then collect resumes until they felt they had a sufficient number of candidates to proceed (or some arbitrary deadline was reached). If you were the only good candidate, it was very common that they would feel there wasn't enough competition and would simply restart the search. This process could easily take months. Then, if there were enough qualified candidates, you would get the interview but you would always be competing with 3-5 other people that the company felt where roughly equal matches.
I had worked part-time (not purely interned) in my field for 3 years, so had plenty of experience at the entry level. Even then competition was stiff, and an interviewer simply not vibing with you was enough to lose a job.
I vividly recall having my target pay set at 2x minimum wage, eating canned stew because that's all I could afford and about to lower my standards when I finally got a call back after months of searching. So as a new grad with reasonably similar qualifications to the author, I was pumped to be making 2x minimum wage out of college.
And at the time none of my classmates considered it to be a challenging job market.
Flash-forward a few years and my younger siblings faced the GFC, I knew of tons and tons of really bright new grads that simply couldn't get work for years. I was shocked that most of them didn't complain too much and where more than willing to suck up to corporate America as soon as a job was offered (I personally thought a bit more resistance was in order).
I'm not sure I really have a point other than to emphasize how truly bizarre the last decade has been where passing leetcode basically meant a 6 figure salary out of undergrad. I'm typically a doomer, but honestly I think it's hard to disambiguate what part of this job market is truly terrible and what part is people who have spend most of their lives living in unprecedentedly prosperous times.