In this post, I want to share my experience of job hunting in North America in 2026, in the hope that it helps people who are looking for jobs right now. I had planned to take my time and only write about job-hunting advice after finishing my PhD Grind series. But the job market changes so fast that by the time I finished writing slowly, all of this might already be out of date. So I decided to stop procrastinating, even though another post of mine, about doing a PhD, has already been dragging on for a month and still isn’t out. (Please push me to do that and write more, haha.)

A quick disclaimer first: everything I talk about here comes from my own experience. It is my own data point from a very ordinary PhD, and it may not apply to other people.

I think the most important thing in the whole process is mindset (though mine was never very good): a big part of how a job search turns out is luck. So don’t get too excited too early when you land an interview, and don’t doubt yourself when you get rejected.

This Year’s Market Is Very Hard for People Without Work Experience

2024 and 2025 were still fairly good years for job hunting. But in early 2026, agents suddenly got a lot more capable, and everyone felt it was time to go out and find a job: third- and fourth-year PhD students, plus many people who would otherwise have entered the market a year or two later, all flooded into the job market at once. At the same time, people already in industry were job-hopping like crazy. I started job hunting more seriously around April and May, when the market was also full of people who had just been laid off (xAI, for example, had laid off a batch of people), which meant many more experienced competitors. Experience here doesn’t just mean work experience; it also means interview experience and an understanding of the job market as a whole. And with work experience, you know the problems that come up in real-world settings, so you can handle interviews with much more ease.

Given all this, companies naturally prefer to hire experienced people, so finding a job is much easier for people with work experience than for those without. Many new grads around me who graduated this year, and who are better than me, didn’t have an easy job search either. Of course, some extremely, extremely strong people found jobs very smoothly, but some people I consider very, very strong, much stronger than me, may have only landed a job from return offers during their internships. They were also much better at interviewing than I was. I kept forgetting things right after learning them, and while preparing for interviews I couldn’t stay as energized as I was in undergrad, or even high school, studying and working at full intensity every day. So looking back, the struggles I had in interviews make a lot of sense.

It also makes sense that companies prefer experienced people. After talking with people in industry, I realize that what we can learn in school is actually very narrow. People who have spent some time in industry may not have papers (though papers don’t matter much these days anyway), but they understand a lot of practical things, and both their interviewing and their working skills grow much faster than if they had stayed in school. In this respect, we new grads really are at a disadvantage. (Actually, since I stopped doing research projects in August, I feel my own abilities have grown a lot. I’ve explored a much wider range of things and become much more attuned to the problems and needs of industry, and to the problems that are likely to come up. When I was doing research, I was too focused on polishing the details of a narrow area and knew little about anything outside it.)

I’ve also talked with some younger students recently; many third-year PhD students are already job hunting. One common situation is people who used to want to go into academia but now want to go into industry: since everything they did before was aimed at the academic path, the job search can be more of a hassle for them. This is especially true in China, where it’s already very common for PhD students to intern at foundation-model companies, and if you haven’t interned at one, finding a job is really hard. In North America, as an ordinary PhD student without connections, you’re simply competing with everyone else, and compared with people who have worked for a few years and have real work experience, we’re at a big disadvantage.

That said, this kind of experience can be gained quickly: a year or two of working in industry is enough. So I think a good strategy right now is to get a job first and figure out the rest later. For your first job, the first goal is simply to find one, especially in today’s not-so-great job market. Believe in your potential, believe that you’re not worse than anyone else, and believe that your growth curve is exponential rather than linear (so a year from now you can grow and improve a lot); you just need the right opportunity to start growing exponentially. Entering industry later than others may be hard at first, but it also means we have a lot of room to improve, and we’ll see huge progress in ourselves soon after we start working. From this angle, these transitions are actually quite exciting. It’s just that the road to your first offer is truly agonizing.

Interviewing: A Very Noisy RL Process

A lot of job hunting comes down to luck. Which questions you get and which interviewers you meet often have little to do with your ability: maybe you happened to review that exact question right before the interview, or maybe the interviewer really appreciates you, so even if you don’t do very well, they keep giving you hints and pass you in the end. Even for the same performance, some interviewers will pass you and others won’t.

If the technical parts are like this, the non-technical parts, such as presentations, are even more subjective: whether the interviewers like you, whether they’re interested in what you’re talking about, whether you’re the kind of person they’re looking for, and even whether they can follow what you’re saying.

What’s more, interviewers are often not that impressive themselves. When they first looked for jobs, they may well have struggled just like us, and then, through good luck or by landing a full-time role through an internship, their careers kept getting better from there. I’ve had interviewers who weren’t familiar with the question themselves, and interviewers who suspected candidates of cheating; I even had one who turned off their camera and ate during the interview. And quite often, interviewers give you the wrong signals at the end of the interview, making you think you did really well, and then a rejection letter arrives.

The most painful part of all this is that you don’t know why you failed. Interviewers don’t give you feedback, so all you can do is guess. If you knew why you failed, you could at least improve in that direction; but as it is, every interview seems to end in failure, you can’t find the reason, and none of your past interviews can be turned into experience that helps you improve. When I talked with other people, their advice was to have friends do mock interviews with you. Personally, I don’t think that helps much. For me, the only thing a mock does is help me put my attention in the right places and remember the material better.

Also, don’t put yourself in an inferior position and assume by default that every rejection means you performed badly. Very often it’s the interviewer’s problem, because the whole thing is just too subjective.

Preparing for Interviews

For me, preparing for interviews is harder than preparing for exams. I’m actually not good at memorizing things, and not very good at solving problems either; even in undergrad, I only crammed in the few days before an exam. I also don’t like people watching me while I solve problems, write code, or work. After high school, with no more exam-oriented studying to do, I got used to not keeping everything in my head: all I needed was a rough idea, and to know where to retrieve things when I needed them. But interviews require me to actually hold all of this in my head, to memorize it. And it’s different from preparing for exams in high school or college: for an exam, you roughly know the scope and where to start reviewing; interviews, on the other hand, cover a huge range, and you often don’t know where to start. On top of that, compared with when I was younger, my memory has gotten worse, I forget things easily, and I’m not as efficient at studying and working as I used to be.

I wasn’t preparing for interviews full-time back then: I was interning and reviewing at the same time. It felt like most of my time went into reviewing this material, yet I wasn’t very efficient and kept forgetting things. If circumstances allow, preparing intensively and full-time should be better than the state I was in. I’m also very grateful to my mentors at my two internships. They were very understanding: even though I didn’t accomplish much in research or in the work on my plate, they understood that I needed to spend a lot of time interviewing. As an intern, I was a big failure: I didn’t produce anything much in either internship. If my dear mentors hadn’t all been so nice, my mood and state during the job search would have been even worse.

As for interview intensity, I scheduled at most one interview a day (and tried to keep it to no more than three a week). Later, talking with others, I learned that some people schedule three or four a day, five days a week, which is very intense. I had other things to do at the time, so I couldn’t keep interviewing like that from start to finish. Interviewing itself is extremely draining. Still, concentrated interviewing really is much better than my scattered approach; otherwise, you have to refresh your knowledge before every single interview.

Some Advice

Here are three pieces of advice, based on pitfalls I fell into myself. They don’t necessarily apply to everyone (I’ve found that many new grads never even fell into pitfalls like these).

(1) Only interview at places you’d be willing to join if you got an offer. A common piece of advice is to save the places you want most for last and practice on other companies first. I’m not sure that’s good advice. I started practicing on companies I didn’t want to join very early (even a year in advance), and later found that the experience I got from those interviews was completely useless, and their questions didn’t carry over at all. There are two reasons for this. First, interviews differ quite a lot from company to company. Second, as I said earlier, interview outcomes are very random and very personal: being rejected by a company you don’t want to join doesn’t mean you’ll be rejected by a good one, so it’s hard to learn much from it. Besides, when you interview somewhere you don’t want to go, you probably won’t prepare seriously, so it’s very inefficient. And stretching the timeline out that long was truly agonizing, both physically and mentally. (Of course, that’s also because I’m not someone who handles stress and pain very well.) It was only later, when I started interviewing at companies I actually wanted to join and prepared for them seriously, that I made a lot of progress in both knowledge and interview experience. Even though those companies also rejected me in the end, preparing for them helped me a lot in later interviews. Time is precious: rather than spending it on companies you don’t want to join, it’s more worthwhile to spend it reviewing or doing other things. If you really want to practice, try to pick companies at the same level, or ones you could potentially want to join, so at least the interview content will be similar. (“Willing to join” here doesn’t mean “ideal”: as I said earlier, for your first job, the goal is still simply to find one.)

(2) You don’t have to reply to every “opportunity.” At first, I replied to every opportunity that came my way and tried to get an interview out of each one, including some completely unknown small startups; at the time, I wanted to use them for practice. They probably didn’t really want me either; they were just casting a wide net and reaching out to candidates everywhere. Whether or not it was a good fit, I said yes to all of them, and looking back, it was a huge waste of time. And at first they were extremely warm toward you, so warm that you’d feel bad ignoring them; but once you were rejected, they ignored you completely. That change in attitude really hurt. After many uncomfortable interview experiences like that, I generally stopped replying to recruiters like these. I had never wanted to go to these places in the first place; the only reason I was willing to spend time replying was that they seemed like “nice people,” so I wasn’t making the decision that was actually best for me. But if that warmth was also just an act, part of their “professionalism,” then the time I spent wasn’t really worth it. Also, I sometimes worried that not replying to everyone who reached out might make me miss some opportunities. (I used to treat every stranger who messaged or emailed me this way too, replying to every single message, because many of the major turns in my life so far came from exactly this kind of “chance.” But later, especially after replying to everyone burned me out, I started to see this differently and to redefine what an opportunity is. Many things I call opportunities, but are they really “opportunities”? Do opportunities come looking for me on their own? This burnout also made me try to change my personality, to seek out opportunities more proactively instead of waiting for them to come knocking. In fact, I’ve already changed a lot: I’m now willing to speak on public platforms and share more of my opinions, letting people know what I’m thinking, what I’m reflecting on, and where I stand. But when I talk with a group of people, I still feel I’m too introverted. I often have ideas similar to other people’s, but every time, someone else voices them first, and my voice never gets heard. I hope I can make progress on this too.)

(3) Don’t wait until you’re “ready” to interview. Don’t keep putting it off, telling yourself you’ll start interviewing once you’re ready. Preparation does help, of course, but very often the outcome of any single interview doesn’t depend that much on whether you were ready or how long you reviewed; it’s more about luck, just like exams, such as whether you happen to be able to solve that particular question in the moment. So don’t treat the result of one interview as a reflection of your ability. Of course, some very strong people don’t need luck and perform consistently every time; but someone like me can’t guarantee being at my best in every interview, remembering everything I know clearly and delivering it clearly, and that doesn’t have a strong causal relationship with how long I prepare. Just give yourself “enough” time; too little and too much are both bad.

Big Tech or Startup

First, you need to figure out where you’re actually willing to go. But there are only a handful of big tech companies, so if you only consider big tech, you might end up without a single offer.

I used to know very little about how big tech and startups differ. After interning at big tech companies, I felt these places really weren’t a good fit for me (of course, some people are better suited to big tech): for example, the scope can be very narrow, the processes are too cumbersome, and the work repeats day after day, which doesn’t really match what I want from life. I’m someone who thinks about life way too much. As soon as there’s nothing exciting in my life, I start pondering the meaning of life, the meaning of work, the meaning of making money, and what I’m even doing every day. Compared with life at big tech, being able to work on things I found interesting and set my own schedule during my PhD made me pretty happy. The upside of startups is that they move fast, there are fewer people, and everyone gets a relatively large scope. It’s a bit like being in school: you get more of a sense of accomplishment, and you have ownership. This isn’t absolute, though; I should add a qualifier: “the right startup.” It’s like a key opening a lock, and the right key is genuinely hard to find. Also, the reason to decide between startups and big tech at this point is mainly that their interview styles are very different and call for different preparation: startups barely do LeetCode, while big tech companies still have more or less traditional interviews. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I still don’t have a “LeetCode” mindset. Everyone says you just need to grind some problems, but it just doesn’t work for me: I spent a lot of time on it and never got into the groove. So I didn’t consider any LeetCode-style interviews at all.

But startups also carry more risk. First, a lot of what you’re offered is “money on paper”; in the end, the base salary may be the only part you actually get. Second, you don’t know how long a startup will survive, and for international students that means a real visa risk: you might suddenly be let go, or the startup might go bankrupt, and you’d have to find a new job in a short time. Looking back now at some of the startups I once wanted to join: Character.AI filed for bankruptcy; another one, whose reputation I initially thought was excellent (maybe because I had friends there), gave me what may have been one of the worst interview experiences I’ve ever had, and I didn’t think much of some of the people there either. Others I had considered later made the news for acqui-hires, and I don’t know what’s become of them. When we choose a place, we hope it will keep getting better and eventually be acquired or go public, but there’s still a big gap between “best wishes” and reality. We can have best wishes, but we also need to look at the actual data.

I had never thought about what would happen to these startups from a financial perspective; I just enjoyed the excitement of the moment. But if you think further ahead, you need to consider these risks: will it eventually be acquired or go public? What is the total compensation they’re offering actually worth after you discount it? If it’s the kind of acquisition that takes only some of the people, will you be in the group that’s taken, or the group that’s left behind? I had never considered any of these questions before; I only realized them after going through the job market once. I’m also grateful to some more senior people who gave me a lot of advice at the time.

The Anxiety I Couldn’t Shake

When you’re job hunting, everyone is probably in a similar state: extremely anxious. Looking back, my anxiety came roughly from these sources:

(1) It was my first time looking for a job. I had no experience and didn’t know how long you should expect it to take before you can actually find a job. Job hunting is a bit like applying for PhD programs: both put you under enormous pressure for a concentrated period of time. But PhD applications have a fixed endpoint, so you know when the hard days will be over; with job hunting, you don’t know when it will end, or when you should stop.

(2) Until you’ve gone through a complete process that ends with an offer, you get no positive signal at all, and it feels like you’re failing all the time.

(3) My stage of life had changed, and I needed to become financially independent. Before, I always knew what came next. With a PhD, for example, from the day you accept the offer, you don’t need to think about money for the next five years; and even if you don’t get into a PhD program, it’s relatively easy to find something like an RA position. But when it came to job hunting, I worried: Can I find a job? What if I get sick? It felt as if I had suddenly gone from being a student to being an adult who needs to take care of myself financially.

(4) I was under a lot of pressure and got sick a lot, and being sick made me even more anxious and upset. All kinds of bad emotions mixed together, and I was stuck in a very negative loop, not knowing how to get out.

By mid-to-late July, I felt I couldn’t hold on any longer and was ready to give up. In fact, since early July I had already been postponing interviews often because of burnout. By then I was incredibly frustrated (although I only started searching intensively in May, before May I had applied and interviewed at many places I didn’t want to go, so counting the whole timeline, it had been about a year). I emailed every place I was interviewing with at the time and told them I wanted to postpone for a few months. I also turned to a friend’s startup, thinking I would work with them for a while first and, if it was a good fit, just join my friend. I couldn’t stand being evaluated over and over again, while the people sitting across from me evaluating me couldn’t see anything good in me (I felt that if they were graduating this year and standing in my shoes, they would struggle just like me). As someone whose confidence was already very low, no matter how I tried to comfort myself and make myself more positive, the blow this frustration dealt to my mental state was so heavy that I couldn’t go on.

Even though I had emailed every company, HR at one of them (Fireworks) encouraged me to keep interviewing, and I later got their offer, a very ideal one. Only then did I slowly start to feel better. My internship ended around then too, and I went back to China to rest. After getting this offer, I didn’t interview anywhere else. Back in China, I felt so much better; I brightened up completely and felt like a different person. Before that, I truly didn’t know how to feel happy.

My interview experience with Fireworks was great from start to finish. Everyone I met made it a good experience (special thanks here to HR and to my interviewers): no drama at all, and nothing that made me uncomfortable. Before that, I had comforted myself by saying that the places that rejected me were probably just not the right fit, and that I would find the right job. But after being rejected so many times, I began to doubt whether that “right job” even existed, and I no longer dared to think positively, because the higher your hopes, the harder the disappointment. In the past, when interviewing with certain companies, I would even turn to superstition, looking for signals that “this is the right place” and encouraging myself by saying, “This must be where I’m meant to end up.” After a few rejections, I stopped daring to look for signals. Later, I no longer dared to treat “the interviewers seem nice, and they seem to like me” as a signal either. When I finally got the offer, I was still a bit dazed and could hardly believe it: was my long, painful job-hunting journey really over, just like that?

Final Thoughts

Going from school to work is a big transition, and to this day I still haven’t worked out how to think about it.

In school, everyone’s path is roughly the same, so you know what comes next: in undergrad, you spend the next four years in undergrad; in a PhD, the next five years in the PhD. Even if you become an assistant professor, you roughly know that you’ll become an associate professor in five years and a full professor five years after that. The path is clear, and you have an expectation you can use to plan.

After you start working, it’s hard to plan: Should you join a startup or big tech? What kind of work should you do? What work intensity can you accept? Should you climb the ladder, or stay where you are and coast? And what about all the politics I’m not good at? Your environment changes too: you used to be surrounded by classmates, and now it’s coworkers. Thinking further, there are even more fundamental questions: What is the meaning of life? What am I doing right now? Is my goal to make lots and lots of money, or something else? I still don’t have answers to any of these questions. In the end, I still don’t know what kind of life I want; figuring out life is a lifelong question.

Finally, I want to give a little pep talk to anyone who might be where I was back then. I know pep talks don’t do much; even if I had read a similar post by someone else at the time, it probably wouldn’t have changed my depressed, hopeless, painful state. But if it can make people who are struggling right now feel a little less awful, even for a short while, that’s enough. I’ve talked with many people, and this year’s market really is bad; quite a few people who had worked at big tech companies for five or six years wanted to switch jobs and may not have managed to (though, of course, maybe they weren’t working on large models to begin with, so there was some domain gap). And the people you get to see are usually the stronger ones: this person got this offer, that person got that one. There’s a lot of selection bias here: people who were in a really bad place and only found a job after a long struggle aren’t going to let you see that. On top of that, our society tends to put people on pedestals, and people tend to package themselves as more impressive than others. As for the hardships of ordinary people, first, nobody cares; and second, showing your most polished side pays off far more than honestly showing your worst.

I still have so much more I want to write about, including the little interview stories that warmed my heart, from kind interviewers to a few friends who were job hunting at the same time and kept encouraging and helping me. I’ll write about them when I get the chance.