Princeton PhD in hand, 2,300 applications out the door, and still no offer: that’s the reality for 30-year-old chemical engineer Jack Weis, the focus of a Wall Street Journal piece by Lindsay Ellis. Weis, whose ice-formation research was cited by the Nobel committee in 2024, has spent two years firing off résumés to big-name labs, pharma companies, and software firms—only to be met mostly with silence. A brief, $70-an-hour contract job training AI systems on chemical engineering lasted less than three months. “Eventually, he was getting ghosted for food-preparation jobs, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes,” writes Ellis.
Ellis uses Weis’ stalled career to probe what economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” labor market: people who have jobs are hanging on to them, which means there are fewer paths in for new workers. Layer on AI—both as a job threat and as a gatekeeper in automated hiring systems—and you end up with people like Weis. For now, he’s living at home, pondering law school, and applying to still more jobs. In his downtime, he used AI to design an LED laser-equipped drone that could kill the invasive weed myrtle spurge. “We never dreamed he would have issues,” says his father, who like Weis’ mother is a physician. “He’s an Eagle Scout, he helps others, he’s environmentally conscious, he’s physically fit. He’s smarter than I am.” Read the full story here.
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