i wonder about fresh graduates and how they're going to survive this job market.

i graduated with an electrical engineering related degree, but it was immediately after the dot com bubble burst so there were no jobs in my field to be had, but i got lucky and found one doing IT and (at the time) there was still strong a enough demand for software development that my IT experience was deemed "good enough" to allow me to enter the field.

22 years later, i got burned out by the culture that software engineers tend to gravitate towards and pivoted back to IT at a non-profit that serves lower & middle income students. i've had to work with some of them as part of work-study sort of thing and every single one of them is sharp af -- much more than i was at that age and especially so when it comes to ai -- but i see every single one of them (justifiably) freak out about their prospects and i feel for them based on my own experiences.

the colleagues at my new firm have been doing this for 30+ years and have never faced layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, etc. and their callous attitude towards fresh grads wrestling this specter is weighing on me just as much as the dominant i've-got-mine-fuck-you type of culture that software engineers tend to adopt when in the field.