This post was originally published on this site.
âIâm here to sound a warning bell for those who are now in the position I was several years ago.â
In the following guest post, Noah Gordon, who earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Southern California, shares his experiences on the non-academic job market, thoughts on our current economic and technological situation, and advice for those considering leaving academia.
There are lessons in his reflections, as well, for philosophy departments interested in supporting the pursuit of non-academic work.
Trouble in the US Non-Academic Job Market and What It Means for Philosophers
by Noah Gordon
Disclaimer: This piece is based primarily on my own experience on the US non-academic job market, my evaluation of news related to this market, and my evaluation of many other anecdotal reports.[1] While I have tried to assess my claims in light of rigorous, reliable studies and data, and sometimes reference such work below, my attempts to do so have revealed that such resources are lacking. My sense is that radical changes in this job market have been occurring only fairly recently (in the last few years), are currently diffuse (highly dependent on specific roles and industries), and that it will take some time before these changes are captured by the slow process of economic measurement in academic journals, government reports, and so on. I am not an economist or a labor theorist, and I strongly encourage you to do your own research and analysis before relying heavily on the conclusions and analysis here.
[If you are only interested in my concrete advice, I advise skipping to the last section and then reading back for justification.]
One Philosopherâs Experience on the US Non-Ac Job Market Post-COVID
I finished my PhD in philosophy at USC in May 2023. I considered it a success: I contributed to the philosophical dialogue with some publications and presentations, met some good people, and got to spend years studying some fascinating esoteric topics. I did not go on the academic job market. Instead, I had a plan to spend some months preparing before starting applications to non-academic, white-collar jobs in the US. Primarily, this meant doing research on relevant industries and positions, brushing up on and obtaining online certifications for relevant technical skills, doing personal projects and freelance work that would be attractive to employers, and updating and polishing job app materials, like a personal website, LinkedIn profile, and generic resumes. I had a sense of what types of positions I wanted to search for: primarily something like âTechnical Writerâ or perhaps that strange-sounding title âOntologistâ, which frustratingly goes by way too many different names on online job boards (youâll also see titles like âTaxonomistâ, âSemantic Data Modelerâ, âLinguistic Engineerâ, âKnowledge Graph Managerâ, and many other variations). I had some loose geographic preferences within the US: West or East coast, if not remote.
Although I was clearly a bit unfocused, I felt that my chances of securing some or other decent job in the specified market were pretty good. I had some white-collar work experience outside the confines of academia, unlike many other philosophy grad students. I had an undergraduate major outside of philosophy in a relevant field to the positions I was interested in, specifically, in IT. And I had (and this is the tasteless part where I brag about my academic credentials), all the academic insignia which are sometimes purported to be valuable on the non-ac market, including a high GPA and a higher degree from a fancy name-brand university (though not an Ivy-league one).
The results of my on and off applications over the past 1.5 odd years are a hodgepodge of unstable and generally lowly-compensated freelance and contract positions with poor working conditions. Even initial phone-screens have been few and far between over hundreds of applications, and thatâs before you even get to the many layers of interviews white-collar positions in the US now require (generally, after an initial recruiter phone screen, you will have at least one interview with HR and one with the Hiring Manager, however this is a minimum and often there are many more rounds of interviewing).
While I would love to complain more about my particular circumstances, thatâs not the point of this piece (itâs just the hook). Instead, Iâm going to give my analysis of the broader conditions behind my experience and some things those within philosophy with an eye on the non-ac market (including current and prospective grad students and undergraduate philosophy majors) should be thinking about. Especially if you are a current philosophy graduate student thinking about the non-ac market, even as a plan B, I strongly encourage you to think about these issues carefully. Academic philosophers are, bless their hearts, mostly blissfully unaware of the non-ac job market, and many of them will only have experiences to share about previous students who went non-ac. However, this particular configuration of troubling conditions on the non-ac job market are quite recent (post-COVID, especially 2022 and later), so those experiences may no longer be representative. In short, you probably wonât hear it from them and you should take any older experiences with a grain of salt. Iâm here to sound a warning bell for those who are now in the position I was several years ago.
The Situation in Tech and Three Deleterious Trends for US White-Collar Work
The job market in tech in the US is undergoing a major contraction. From a high-point in 2022, job-listings on major job boards for positions like Software Developer and IT Operations are way down:
Meanwhile, mass layoffs by tech companies began in earnest late in 2022 and are ongoing. Some commentators are, or at least were, convinced that this is merely a correction due to some combination of tech âoverhiringâ during the pandemic, copycat behavior between businesses, and some very general macroeconomic conditions around high inflation and low consumer demand. I see little evidence to think that this is the case, and stronger evidence that this is not the case in the excellent economic performance and profitability of these companies throughout the relevant period. As one representative example, Meta recently laid-off 5% of its workforce despite reporting large increases of 48% in income and 59% in profit in 2024.[2] In other words, even taking the premises about the macroeconomic conditions at face-value, âoverhiringâ does not seem to have hurt the performance of these companies in a way that explains the layoffs.
I believe that instead the tech companies are direct witnesses to, and early adopters of, three concerning labor trends that predate COVID, but have been greatly exacerbated and enabled by it. The tech companies, I believe, are going to function as test cases for slower, more risk-averse, and less technologically competent industries. If the success seen in the tech industry continues and these trends intensify as I expect them to, you can expect the situation in the tech industry to spread to many other sectors in the coming months and years.
Remote Work and Offshoring
US companies have experimented with offshoring white-collar work to cheaper labor markets for decades. My understanding of the history of offshoring for white-collar work is that its success has been mixed, and that it largely has not had noticeable negative effects on the US white-collar market.[3]
However, things seem to be different post-COVID.[4] The pandemic effectively functioned as a nation-wide accelerator and test case for making many white-collar positions fully remote. The infrastructure for doing all sorts of positions remotely was developed rapidly, and employers and employees alike became familiar and competent with relevant processes like replacing in-person meetings with video calls.
Many employers found that a good number of white-collar positions could be done at a level that was at least close to the performance they saw for in-person work.[5] The same tech companies that are laying off thousands of workers are increasing their hiring in cheaper labor markets like India and Mexico. The inevitable reasoning becomes âIf this work can be done fully remotely from the US, why canât it be done from Krakow or Lima? We could cut our salaries immensely and still offer top-market rates in those areas.â
These offshoring efforts are now more likely to succeed because of the increasingly mature infrastructure for remote work, and also the increasingly skilled labor pool in cheaper markets. Of course, over the long run economic logic dictates that things should even out in a globalized labor market, but there is a lot of pain coming for those in current high-cost labor markets in the meanwhile.
AI and Automation
The tech businesses that are downsizing are the very same ones currently building frontier AI systems explicitly designed to automate a massive amount of white-collar work. This could just be a coincidence, but I suspect that the front-row seat decision makers within these businesses have to the progress of AI development has given them a sense that they will soon, if not already, be able to do more with fewer human workers.
The effects of AI automation on labor are a subject of massive debate amongst economists and others. The economic consensus appears to be that automation has, in the past, led to the creation of new types of work that have made up for the loss of previous human work. It remains to be seen whether this will also be true given the fundamental differences between AI and previous technologies.
What is increasingly less a matter for reasonable disagreement is that AI systems that can perform the cognitive component of most knowledge work at or above the level of human experts are indeed coming in the near future (read: within the working careers of anyone under 40). Philosophers should not stick their heads in the sand on this point. I was much more of an AI skeptic just 6 months ago, so let me share some of what has changed my mind.
- The position I just described is increasingly the consensus of AI researchers and scientists working in the field.[6] I am not talking about business people and âthought leadersâ who are incentivized to spout high claims about AI to sell their products and narratives. I am talking about sober-minded people with verifiable credentials and research accomplishments who see the progress on these systems every day and have only weak incentives to exaggerate.
- My personal experience in areas that I am competent in has made me more confident in AI progress. When GPT 3.5 was released in November 2022, its performance on some teaching materials for a course I was TAing were not impressive. Already by the next semester with the release of GPT 4, AI models were able to produce papers better than my average undergrad student. In the past 9 months or so I have worked on several freelance projects helping to train and evaluate AI models on philosophy tasks, and the progress is alarming. The newest models can accurately answer questions about which conditions to impose on possible-worlds models to guarantee specific principles about counterfactuals within Stalnakerâs semantics, and can identify an accurate summary of minute points within a paper by Selim Berker about normative principles from amongst ten plausible-looking options. I also freelance doing whatâs called âtechnical content writingâ, which involves writing those annoying blogs you might see on a businessâs website if you Google âwhat is AI explainabilityâ. Frontier models can now produce a draft in minutes of a quality that takes me nearly a full day of work to equal.
Though I still think at the moment of writing a reasonable case can be made for a more pessimistic view on the timeline towards such AI systems[8], this case is rapidly becoming less plausible. And let me be clear: if your view on AI progress is informed primarily by interacting with older AI systems, talking points about âstochastic parrotsâ, or funny pictures of AI systems being unable to count the number of times ârâ appears in âstrawberryâ, then your views are out of date and epistemically unjustified.
Even if you are not convinced by my brief case for optimism about progress towards AGI, you should bear in mind the following points. First, the effect of AI on the job market in the near-term depends more on employer perception of AI progress than the reality of it. And second, AI progress will be uneven and even if some areas of white-collar work remain resistant to AI automation, others are quickly falling. Later I will give some reasons to think that the areas quickest to fall will be the ones that philosophers are most qualified to work in.
Gigification and Contractification
Academics are aware of the increasing use of adjunct labor on the academic job market. In parallel, labor theorists talk about the rise of the âgig economyâ. The proportion of work done outside the confines of a traditional employer-employee relationship in the US is increasing. In the traditional model, you work full-time for just one employer. Your position has no set end date, and it is reasonable to expect in many cases that your employment situation will be fairly stable. Your employer provides health insurance and other benefits like retirement contributions.
By contrast, in these alternative work arrangements, your situation is far more precarious. Worryingly, it seems that, particularly post-COVID, many positions in the US white-collar market that used to be secure full-time positions are being converted to these alternative arrangements. This is particularly noticeable for entry-level positions of the kind that philosophers entering the non-ac market would be competitive for (you are fooling yourself if you think that your PhD in philosophy will vault you into the hallowed halls of middle management). Let me highlight some of the issues you are likely to face in two of these alternative arrangements:
- Freelance / Independent Contractor: These are arrangements where you accept tasks or projects on an ad-hoc basis. Some of the larger platforms that manage this work include Upwork, Remotasks, and Mechanical Turk. While the flexibility afforded by freelancing is nice, you will receive no benefits, including no health insurance. Moreover, the work tends to be inherently unstable, with projects coming and going on a dime. You often have no way of communicating directly with the client that commissions the work, leading to numerous problems. And the larger platforms are inhuman labyrinths of logistical routing that sprout kafkaesque horrors at every turn.
- Contract Positions: These are arrangements where you are rented out by one company (the contractor) to do full-time work at another company (the client), usually for a set time period. There are a number of reasons why the client might want a contractor rather than a regular employee, but the bottom line is that they arenât prepared to hire you as a full-time employee and are not committed to your long-term success at their business. You may be treated as a second-class citizen at your primary place of work, even (or especially?) if the client is large and wealthy. For example, you might be denied benefits like parking or have limited access to internal resources and opportunities. The client is likely to decide at any time to switch contracting suppliers or decide the whole project is going to be scrapped; after all, that flexibility is a primary reason to use contractors rather than regular employees. Meanwhile, the contracting firm is your official employer responsible for legally required benefits like health insurance. Existing as a mere skeletal intermediary with no particular expertise besides filling seats with cheap labor as quickly as possible, these companies can be roiling cesspools of incompetence, indifference, and general sleaziness.
There is good reason to think that, within the relevant market, the proportion of work done using these alternative arrangements will continue to increase post-COVID.[9] The reason is that the same infrastructure built up to support remote work also provides the needed basis for more easily converting regular positions to alternative work arrangements.[10] If it can be remotely by one person, there is a decent chance it can be chopped up into tiny pieces and done by dozens of online workers that you donât need to give health insurance to.[11]
Hopefully you manage to cobble together enough meaningful freelance and contract experience to become competitive for regular positions. But either way, there is a good chance you may spend years on the job market dealing with these conditions first. One takeaway: you should not be confident that you will avoid years of adjuncting merely by going non-ac.
The Overall Unemployment Rate: A Bad Objection
I will now pay homage to my philosophical training by anticipating an objection. However, I will dishonor this training by considering not the strongest objection, but rather the one I think will most quickly pop into the average readerâs head.
Objection: The overall unemployment number is near a 20-year low! Surely things arenât as dire as you are implying.
There are many reasons why this is a bad objection. Let me highlight two of the most important.
- I am concerned about the availability of decent The overall unemployment figure includes part-time workers, freelance workers, contract workers, and does not consider working conditions or wages. Someone driving for Uber a few hours a week while unable to find white-collar work in their desired field counts towards the overall employment rate. I would count towards the success side of this figure during almost my entire job search. The overall unemployment figure is not a good measure of the availability of decent jobs that philosophers would be competitive for.[12]
- By many estimates, more than half of Americans are only partially literate. Less than 40% of Americans have an undergraduate degree. The kinds of positions that philosophers are likely to pursue and be competitive for are a sliver of the US job market. And while itâs easy to think that this might give you an advantage in applying for positions outside this sliver, you are more likely to be labeled âoverqualifiedâ or âan academic eggheadâ. Whatâs true at the general level may not hold for this particular market.
These Trends in Relation to the Philosopherâs Skillset
Worryingly, there is reason to suspect that the particular skillset of the philosopher renders us especially vulnerable to these trends.
- The jobs that you are competitive for with only a degree in philosophy are mostly not insulated by regulation from any of these trends. There is no regulatory framework preventing jobs in, e.g., project management, grant writing, or academic administration from being either automated or sent overseas. By contrast, some fields require specific US-based certifications, such as in law, pharmacy, financial advising, and actuarial work.
- The primary work outputs of the philosopher are fully digitizable and tailor-made for LLMs. These are verbal and written natural language outputs. These outputs can be transmitted remotely, and the training corpus for LLMs primarily consists of written natural language inputs, rendering them especially competent with this facility. Contrast cases: engineers, lab technicians, healthcare workers, architects, etc.
- Training in philosophy does not equip you with a deep body of specific or geographically-restricted factual knowledge. AI systems currently have problems reliably recalling or retrieving particular facts: they âhallucinateâ. And non-US workers are less likely to learn deep bodies of geographically-restricted knowledge, such as detailed knowledge about the contours and history of specific energy markets in the US. A mastery of these sorts of bodies of knowledge may give you an advantage relative to an AI system with a limited context window or an offshore worker, but this advantage is one training in philosophy does not afford.
- Training in philosophy does not equip you with expertise in more difficult or obscure software programs. Most philosophers are certainly capable of quickly learning some fairly simple software systems that are commonly used in jobs within the relevant market, such as a content management system or a client management system. But even for an intelligent philosopher, it would take much more time to learn, and prove to employers that you have learned, more difficult or obscure systems like computer-aided design software. The issue is that AI systems will much more quickly be integrated with the former kinds of software programs for a number of reasons, including the greater market size for AI agents capable of interacting with them, the greater availability of training materials, and the more robust development ecosystem around them. And the larger the technical moat, the smaller the supply of offshore labor with the relevant skills. Those with proven skills in these programs will be less susceptible to replacement by both.
Sadly, it seems to me that someone coming onto the non-ac market with nothing but a BA or PhD in philosophy is among those most vulnerable to the deadly trio of offshoring, automation, and gigification.
Your Options and What Not to Do
So whatâs an enterprising philosopher to do? Letâs assume you are sticking to white-collar work and staying within the US. Here are your options as I see them.
Play the Lottery
Getting a decent non-ac job as a philosopher using the traditional playbook (e.g. marketing oneâs experience writing a dissertation as âproject managementâ, or attending a short coding bootcamp) is still certainly not impossible, and there are many cases of philosophers entering this market for the first time even post-COVID and succeeding. The good news is that compared to the academic market, the size of the non-ac market is such that youâve got practically unlimited chances, and the only costs are your time, energy, and sanity. If you opt for this route, I strongly recommend investing heavily in networking, or ânepotismâ as it is spelled in some dialects, which is undoubtedly the highest value currency in any job market.
Stay Academic
Every philosopher has been warned up and down about the horrors of the academic job market, and mostly rightfully so. In the nearterm, it is only getting worse due to the debacle with federal funding. But there are at least two good reasons to think twice about abandoning the academic market if the situation on the non-ac market is as I have described it.
First, you may be overestimating your prospects of getting a position on the non-ac market that actually satisfies the reasons you donât want to go on the academic market. In my case, for example, two of the biggest reasons were not being maximally geographically flexible and disliking teaching. However, the difficulties Iâve experienced have made me far less confident that I will be able to stick to my geographic preferences and get work that aligns better with my preferences in an increasingly tight US non-ac job market.
Second, academic philosophy is actually somewhat insulated from the market forces I have described. My hypothesis is that the primary economic value of the academic philosopher in the future will be as something like a social set piece. Philosophical research, to be clear, is strongly under the gun for automation[13] and offshoring, but this research has little economic value except to the publishing companies, who do not pay philosophersâ salaries. In other words, no academic administrator would react to the news that Philosophical Studies is filled with LLM-generated papers and that AI is now better than humans at coming up with counterexamples to the KK principle by deciding âwell, I guess we can now layoff the philosophy departmentâ. Philosophers will largely be left to their own devices to figure out how to deal with the automation of philosophical research. The real economic value of philosophers for universities, of course, lies in students wanting to take philosophy courses. And even though there is early evidence that AI systems are already remarkably effective as teachers, I donât believe that this will greatly reduce the demand for philosophy courses run by humans. Most students are not going to want to sit at home on a computer with an AI-based education system overseen remotely by a few lucky philosophers in Bangladesh. They will want to come onto a campus and sit in a stately looking room with other students where an eccentric person who rambles on about justice makes them feel like they are in Dead Poets Society. At least, thatâs my guess.
Look for Havens
The broad factors I have identified will not affect all white-collar positions equally. Jobs in the national defense industry, for example, will certainly not be offshored (though they might be automated). Unfortunately, I suspect many of these havens will require qualifications beyond a PhD or BA in philosophy to be competitive for, and if they do not, they may be overrun by people from other sectors anyway. Law, for example, seems to be a promising possible haven: the requirement of a US law license for many legal actions makes automation, offshoring, and gigification less likely, and the legal industry still has a strong culture of recruiting true entry level positions from law schools. However, if this prediction is incorrect, you may find yourself tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and a few years older but back in the same situation.
In terms of what to do positively speaking, then, I have little concrete advice other than to take the non-ac market very seriously if it is at all on your horizons. Try to do internships, freelance work, or other non-ac work during the summers, even if this cuts into your research or dissertation time. Aggressively and shamelessly network.
Things to Avoid
What not to do is a little easier to say. Do not:
- Reason that because the academic job market is so difficult, the non-ac market must be easier and better.
- Take for granted that because philosophers have succeeded on the non-ac market in pre-COVID times, that they will continue to do so.
- Reason that because the general unemployment rate is low, that therefore you will get a decent job.
- Reason that you will get a decent non-ac job because you are smart, competent, or have academic credentials.
- Assume that you will avoid years of adjunct-like conditions (unstable employment, low wages, and poor benefits) by going non-ac.
Good luck out there.
[1] If you want to scare yourself with an endless supply of these anecdotal reports, I recommend browsing reddit.com/r/recruitinghell, while bearing in mind that there is a strong selection effect with those that post experiences there.
[2] Predictably but infuriatingly, top Meta executives responsible for this layoff nearly simultaneously increased their own salary bonuses by millions of dollars.
[3] Broecke 2024 has a good discussion of the history of offshoring and its potential directions post-COVID.
[4] Baranes 2025 appears to contain a discussion of the issue, but I havenât been able to access the text.
[5] A relevant piece of counterevidence is the widespread partial RTO (return-to-office) mandates at US companies, generally at 3 days per week. My expectation, however, is that these are due to factors that will not persist. Companies may reason that they donât plan to take the radical step of immediately cancelling all office leases and selling off their physical infrastructure, and so âwe may as well as get them in instead of having the buildings sit emptyâ. Decision-makers may also prefer to have people RTO for non-monetary reasons, such as preferring the environment of a teeming corporate office. Such reasons may not hold sway for long. Overall however, I recognize that current evidence on the effectiveness of in-person vs remote work for the relevant positions appears mixed.
[6] The highest-quality recent survey of the relevant experts that I am aware of was done at the end of 2023. It found an aggregate prediction of a 50% chance of such AI systems existing by 2047. While this might seem like weak evidence for my claim, bear in mind the following: (a) the trend of these predictions is towards shorter timelines: in the same survey in 2022, the 50% figure was at 2060; and (b) in my view, incredible AI progress has been made since late 2023 and an updated survey would reflect this.
[7] There are some outstanding concerns about this particular result. For a good discussion, see here.
[8] For a recent well-informed counter-perspective on this topic, see here. For the record, I share the intuition of some AI researchers that current AI systems appear âbrittleâ in a way that indicates a lack of some fundamental component of human intelligence. However, my expectation is that overcoming this will not require some fundamental change in current AI architectures, that there are currently research directions in AI that seem promising for this issue, and that the vast sums of energy, attention, and money being thrown at AI development will be sufficient to fix the issue in a timely manner.
[9] See ch. 2 and ch. 8 in Countouris et al 2023 for discussion.
[10] Woodcock and Graham 2020 (ch. 1) give at least three factors contributing to the rise of alternative work arrangements that are strengthened by this phenomena: platform infrastructure, mass connectivity and cheap technology, and digital legibility of work.
[11] This reasoning doesnât explain why contract positions have increased or will continue to increase. I am less confident in that prediction.
[12] There are also other oddities with this measure, such as not including people whoâve given up trying to find work within the number of unemployed. To be fair, this population seems to be fairly small.
[13] Any philosopher who believes that there is something distinct about philosophical inquiry that makes it uniquely immune to AI systems, such that we might live in a world where adjacent areas like math and legal research are automated but philosophy remains a stubborn holdout is, I believe, deluding themselves.
Related: Non-Academic Hires