Armed with a stack of CVs still warm from the printer, Ayara (a pseudonym) plunged into the career fair. The room was already packed with job-seekers. The second-year student wasn’t expecting much. In past years, a computer-science student at the University of California, Berkeley, could hope to emerge from this campus ritual with an interesting summer internship, possibly at a “FAANG” company – the acronym for Facebook (now Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Ayara’s best friend had snagged an internship at Apple at a fair like this one.

But none of the FAANG firms was here this time. Neither were Spotify, Salesforce, Uber or Microsoft. In any case most of those companies and almost 50 others – “all the famous ones” – had already rejected her internship applications a few months earlier. And that was before the latest round of job lay-offs. There were 120,000 tech lay-offs in January and February alone; Alphabet, Google’s parent company, accounted for 10% of those lost jobs. (Meta would announce another 10,000 lay-offs shortly after the fair.) By the time the fair came round in March, Ayara had scaled back her ambitions. “Any company that will hire me is good, at this point,” she told me later.

By the time the fair came round, Ayara had drastically reduced her ambitions. “Any company that will hire me is good, at this point”

Ayara muscled her way to a crowded stall towards the back, where Juniper Networks was holding court. Founded in 1996 – long before most college students were born – Juniper is a workhorse of Silicon Valley: it makes a decent share of the hardware underpinning the internet, and software that controls that hardware. It has none of the “sparkle” (one of Ayara’s favourite words) of a FAANG company – its talent-acquisition manager told me that students often haven’t heard of it. Yet at this fair it had one irresistible selling point: it was still hiring interns.

Ayara caught the eye of a Juniper recruiter and they started talking. The fair was a bit like a cocktail party – the polite smiles, the hard sell – except without alcohol to quell people’s nerves. Some students were tapping their thighs or pinching the…