Applying to tech firms in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Applying to the local firms who haven't hired for years and have been rapidly dissappearing as the technology industry consolidates to Silicon Valley and offshore. I most certainly am not lying, and the only hogwash is what's coming out of your mouth right now. You have no clue. Do you honestly think that Silicon Valley can drop its employment from 2000 levels, replace 30-40% of its domestic workforce with foreigners, and not have a massive impact on new college grads such as what I've experienced? Of course not. The numbers don't lie. And if there was demand in the tech industry for more labour (ie: hiring of new grads), then salaries would have been growing this past decade, which they most certainly have not.
You do realize that the United States is much bigger than just silicon valley don't you? And that there are many, many technical jobs besides just internet startups...right? So maybe that's your problem and your friends problem...their short sightedness in not recognizing that finding employment at a stable company with a real business model is probably a better alternative than trying to catch a ride on the next hot startup.
Right. But the secondary tech centres have shrunk as well dramatically, and larger businesses have been offshoring most of their IT work at a ferocious pace. Go into a modern IT department in a large business, its mostly Indians. Plus we're all competing with the tens of thousands of engineers laid off from the US manufacturing industry. The 'stable' companies haven't been hiring in the past decade, and have been offshoring as much as they possibly can. Don't you remember the 'jobless recovery' of 2003-2005? Even in 2006-2007, they barely had begun to pick up the slack of the people laid off previously, nevermind brought any new talent into the workforce. There is nothing wrong with me or my friends; we are all perfectly employable. Its just that, like the girl in the original post, the jobs don't exist, or they're being given to foreigners.
In the greatest economic downturn and the worst decade for jobs ever, its really, really mature to blame job seekers for their own unemployment. Really mature. Do you like kicking people when they're down? Just admit it, the system is broken. Employment of college educated people hasn't grown in the past decade, and the jobs have shifted heavily away from engineering, technology, and manufacturing, and towards finance, which uses a different skillset. There's really not much room in finance for the sort of people who excel at engineering/technology/manufacturing, unfortunately.
Absolutely. They do it all the time. That's not true at all. Entire IT departments get sold off to Accenture/EDS/BearingPoint, and they ship as much of it as they can offshore. Critical business functions in many cases. And the amount of value being captured by the outsourcers/offshorers continues to increase unabated. Maybe your company doesn't do it, but outsourcing firms such as Tata, Satyam, etc., have been getting huge doing exactly what you describe -- offshoring critical and private data and business processes overseas. The effect on IT has been brutal, and new grads have been hit disproportionately. And offshoring is far larger than that as well. Which has meant no jobs for grads in the past decade. Maybe you can find a few isolated cases, but if the labour market was good, salaries would have risen along with costs in the past decade, and they have not. Firms would not be receiving literally hundreds of resumes for each job they advertise. And people like me and my classmates would be getting calls from recruiters for each job applied for, and not be ignored.
Times are tough but this is NOT the "greatest economic downturn and the worst decade for jobs ever" and the system's NOT "broken." Your attitude sucks and is holding you back more than anything else. Either you can adapt and prosper or continue blaming everything external to you and fail. Your choice.
First off your problem may be that you're an argumentative pain in the ass more than any lack of CS/EE skills/experience. Care to name this top 20 university? I work in the Mountain View area and on the software side and a big chunk (25-50%) graduated in the last 5 years. You experiences don't mesh with mine at all.
This is the problem for the people that wants to get into the IT industry. They are competing for the same jobs against hundred of millions of other IT people, it is such a globalized occupation, that corps can hire CHEAP indians, chinese, koreans, australians, africans or whoever for the job. But they are hiring, no doubt about that. So these grads better learn another skill other than programming. Also after 9-11, the army was begging for IT people to join. They won't outsource those IT jobs.