Something like half of americans under 30 live with their parents. There’s an obvious story and a not-so-obvious story underlying this. The obvious story is the bad job market, grads can’t get hired, everyone retreats to their childhood bedrooms to save money on rent they can’t afford. Or maybe they never left.
But one number that’s less obvious is that something like 70% of those 25-35ish still living at home, are actually employed, and that’s been roughly true for the last 25 years. And the problem is that even though these people have income, they’re struggling to turn it into an independent life becuase home prices are up more than 30% in the last 8 years.
This housing market explains why even employed 25-35s are struggling to leave home. But at the same time, one of the clearest routes of our generation into a high-paying career - and therefore out of that situation - has become magnitudes harder to break into.
But also, and this at least is heavily relatable to my own story, is that between 2010-2020, the entry level tech job market was absurdly forgiving. This is basically the opposite of your grandpa’s “When I was a kid we had to walk 5 miles uphill in the snow just to get to school”. When I was just entering the job market, things were pretty sweet. Demand was way higher than supply. Bootcamp grads with 3-6 months of functional experience could get 6-figure starting salaries. Now almost all of the bootcamps are defunct or have pivoted to doing other things.
Let’s look at some figures from the past few years:
New grads made up only 7% of hires in big tech in 2024, down a quarter in a single year and more than half from pre-pandemic levels.
In startups, new grads made up 30% of hires in 2019, and under 6% in 2025.
Functionally every single task that a junior would cut their teeth on can now be done by AI models for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time, also saving senior engineers even more time by not having to commit hours to code review and mentorship. As a result, a smaller team can now do far more with far less.
The way junior talent/output traditionally worked was that this lowest rung of the ladder was never (really) important for its output; it was important as an investment - juniors would absorb best practices by osmosis with the promise that at a later point they would be able to contribute (more) meaningfully. Now that rung is automated. Is this change priced in (yet)? What happens when every company wants senior eng talent but nobody will train juniors? Will that even matter? (AI becomes the senior talent) Not sure.
Entry level hiring also cratered at the exact moment cheap money ended and the 2010s overhiring binge got unwound. The new market paradigm is ruthless, there is no mercy for the average. You must be exceptional to make it. But that still doesn’t make it any easier in the housing market. Fight tooth and nail for a sweet job, hit the housing wall anyway. Two walls compounding. Effectively, the economy now hands us a paycheck but revoked most of what the paycheck used to buy.