Item — HN Reader

> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.

My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.

Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:

Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...

It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.

4 comments

> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.

It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.

Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.

(day job is cybersecurity and risk)

Anytime you see a lot of media claiming there is a shortage of some career it's a negative signal. The field will shortly be flooded

Same for the retiring cobol programmer myth. All those jobs were offshored years ago.

Not being directly in cybersecurity, is the situation there different from, say, CS grads as a whole? That is, not sure if the point is that hiring for entry-level tech is a disaster across the board and cybersecurity is one particular manifestation of that dynamic, or if cybersecurity is for some reason specifically worse than overall new grad employment in tech.

Big tech companies use their influence to push the "shortage" narrative in the media, because it gives Congress political cover to increase the H-1(b) cap.

I had a tech career spanning from the late '80s until the 2020s, and I read articles in major media outlets about a shortage every single year. In all that time we had a actual, bona fide shortage for about two years in the late '90s.