Hey friends,

For years now, I've been worried about the career prospects for college students.

It seems that big companies just aren't hiring juniors anymore. It used to be that big businesses would hire recent college grads. That gave young people a foothold in an industry, a chance to work hard, learn from more experienced people on the team, and prove their worth.

But for a variety of reasons (overhiring during COVID, public companies wanting to maximize shareholder value, tariffs, geopolitical events, and productivity gains from AI), it's incredibly difficult for a young person to get that first foothold in their career now.

I see it all the time. I run a meetup, and I keep seeing these young students show up who just can't find an opportunity. Internships, summer co-ops, etc are hard to find.

So this year, I decided to be the "change I wanted to see in the world," and we hired Ian Steyn (who's going into his 4th year of CompSci) as our summer intern at Transistor.fm.

Ian's been doing valuable work and learning multiple facets of how a small software company operates.

One of the tasks I wanted Ian to do was to create a podcast, publish regular episodes, and journal his experience working at Transistor.

You can find it here:
​https://pod.iansteyn.com/​

It's been a delight for me to listen to these episodes; seeing the "Transistor world" through his eyes has been enlightening.

In each episode, he explores:

• A high - something positive he experienced during the previous weeks
• A low - a challenge or difficult moment he had to overcome
• Piccolo - something novel he learned or experienced

He recently interviewed me and published the episode today. You can check it out here:

HIGH LOW PICCOLO WITH IAN STEYN • EPISODE 4 4 - Video! Video! Video! (w/ Transistor Co-founder Justin Jackson) 31:38 MORE INFO

This is also a good example of Transistor's video publishing features. Ian was able to upload the video and automatically publish it to:

• ​Apple Podcasts​
• ​YouTube​
• HLS in RSS (Which works on Amazon Music, iHeart, Fountain, True Fans, and soon, Pocket Casts)

He wasn't expecting me to do this, but I think it'd be fun if he got a bunch of listeners/followers. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Cheers,
Justin Jackson

PS: I've been using Claude Code to build some marketing sites with the Astro framework. My new workflow has been to connect to the GitHub repo in Claude Code on my phone, specify what I want updated, and have it automatically deploy the changes to Cloudflare Pages.

I can share more about this next time.

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YouTube version of Ian's latest episode is here:

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