I gotta warn you, as an autistic person who graduated last year with an engineering degree…shit sucks. Half the applications are fake, half the interviews are fake just to scare the overworked employees. The hiring managers are perfectly willing to waste your fucking time justifying the existence of their jobs. I’ve applied for over 350 jobs and internships and gotten zero offers. Same with my classmates. Expect multiple rounds (3-6, maybe more) before getting an offer.

And engineering was supposed to be a “safe” degree. I can’t imagine how much harder it is for humanities.

It’s honestly about who you know, then how wealthy and privileged you already are, if you currently have a job, then how personable you are, then a whole bunch of factors I haven’t been able to identify, and then at the very end, how competent you’ll be in the role.

Make sure to go to your school’s career fair. Dress up as much as possible and bring ~69 copies of your resumé (yes, around seventy, but I’m a manchild so I actually printed exactly 69 last career fair) and hand them all out to employers you can tolerate working for. Typically, you will be expected to know about their company’s work and what positions they have available. I noticed that a lot of companies are there just for brand recognition, i.e. they’re wasting your time. If they’re not wasting your time, there’s a good chance that the person standing there is either a braindead hiring manager or your direct supervisor, or anything in between. At my college, the companies actually list the positions they’re hiring for. If there are none, I don’t go to that company, because they’re wasting my time or aren’t serious enough to fill out the paperwork.

If your school publishes the employers who will be at the fair, make sure to scan through the list and target employers you want to talk to. Many employers have long lines, so plan accordingly. As an anarchist, I also do a bit of research on each company to make sure they’re not defense contractors, police collaborators, prison contractors, etc. This eliminates a third to a half of the possible employers at my school.

Career fairs are, from my experience, emotionally and physically draining events that need several days of preparation to get any benefit, and several days of recovery. They are surprisingly loud (bring inconspicuous headphones or earplugs).

Make sure you have experience in the field you’re applying to work in, even if (especially if) a job posting says you don’t need it. They’re lying. They’re always lying. They basically don’t want to train you at all. Experience in my field is internships and other free work, or a previous job. Research does not seem to count as experience. I hope your field is different.

Don’t give out your personal info over email to a job posting. Don’t do email interviews; make sure you see an actual moving human, be it over a video call or in person. Got my identity stolen that way. And don’t work for a company that will make you cash a big check (about $5000, right up to the deposit limit for online banking) for “office supplies”. It’s a scam. However, legitimate companies will also ask you for basically the same information and store it in an equally insecure plain-text database, and you’re expected to provide it.

For DEI stuff, you can fill it out, or not fill it out, or whatever floats your boat. For example, I fill out that I am Hispanic, but not that I’m autistic. I dunno; I just don’t trust engineers to be cool with an openly autistic person based on literally every engineer or engineering-adjacent person I’ve ever met in person ever.

Besides letters of recognition, make sure you have people you can use as references who are actually willing to be contacted by phone.

Technically, you should tweak your resumé for every position. However, because I’m so done with this shit forever, I basically keep a few classes of resumé for different job types. For example, I have a “generic” electrical engineering template, a “control systems” template, and a “data science/software” template. If there’s an opportunity I really want, only then will I tweak it by mirroring the content of the job post. It’s super important for your resumé to be searchable, because the employer is probably going to just do a Ctrl+F to find relevant terms.

Make sure to also have a plain-text version of your resumé lying around. A common pattern is for the employer to have you upload a copy of your resumé and not even fucking attempt to parse it, meaning that you have to re-enter all its information by hand into their shitty form. Generally speaking, you should be expecting to spend about 15 minutes per application.

Don’t put absolutely everything on the resumé. You need to leave some stories for interviews.

Do your phone and Zoom interviews in front of a computer with a text editor open. I actually take notes during and after the interview, and then commit it to a remote repo so I can pull it onto any computer and get all my notes from all phone calls. You should also have a copy of the resumé you actually submitted to the company on hand.

Technically also you should write cover letters for every position, but again because I’m so fucking done with this bullshit, I rarely do. If I’m feeling like doing a half-measure, this is actually an excellent opportunity to use ChatGPT or an open-source LLM to write for you, of course with proofreading, because this is an application where a bullshit machine IS FUCKING DESERVED actually works since they socially expect bullshit. Not like they’re reading it anyways.

I’m “pro-work,” if anything. I want a career.

Can I be honest? I desperately want to work too, but I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that it’s literally easier not to fucking bother and just live off the government, parents, rich friends, and/or stealing. I’m actually a lot worse off than I used to be before studying engineering. I’m overqualified for my old job, but underqualified for engineering and tech work, and all at the price of thousands of fucking dollars of debt. Turns out capitalist “efficiency” is making it harder for us to be put to work.

Looking for work is a job in it of itself, except you don’t get paid.