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A Princeton PhD Applied to 2,300 Jobs. He Still Can't Get One

29 points mid1110 2 hours ago 24 comments

aswegs8 1 hour ago | parent

Could anyone copy the text for us paywalled peasants?

nikolqy 1 hour ago | parent

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

stevekemp 46 minutes ago | parent

archive.is blocks the whole of Finland, which is annoying.

mdp2021 35 minutes ago | parent

> [site] blocks [Country]

Are you sure it is not the opposite? Why would they...

salahadawi 13 minutes ago | parent

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-...

sigmoid10 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mdp2021 58 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

sigmoid10 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

mdp2021 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

sublimefire 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

sigmoid10 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

kdavis 8 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

dataflow 4 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

jltsiren 1 minute ago | parent

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.)

syngrog66 1 hour ago | parent

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.

sublimefire 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

tgv 2 minutes ago | parent

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.

lancebeet 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

littlexsparkee 19 minutes ago | parent

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

noufalibrahim 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

newsclues 5 minutes ago | parent

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?

ratsimihah 45 minutes ago | parent

Meanwhile big firms are fighting for AI/ML phds for hundreds of thousands dollars.

0xbadc0de5 2 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

feverzsj 1 minute ago | parent

He can still go for gig jobs like 320 million Chinese do.