Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates
"Every kid with a laptop thinks they're the next Zuckerberg, but most can't debug their way out of a paper bag," one expert told Newsweek.
Published earlier this year, but still relevant.
The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.
The numbers aren't too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.
It's important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field at a point in time. It is not unusual that there's no overarching plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to go through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next. We don't have to do it this way but that's how it's been decided for a while now.
I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn't find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don't end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn't have an answer then and people around me couldn't explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.
This should be common knowledge. I recall in the 1990s there was a huge push for truck drivers. Everywhere you went "Be a truck driver! Own your own business! Make six figures!" And only a decade later, employed drivers struggle to make ends meet.
If you see a huge push for a particular job - you better plan your exit.
One eight hundred, five five one, eight nine hundred. Diesel Driving Academy!
Nursing in the early 2000s, CS in 2010s. I'm guessing whatever University of Phoenix is pushing, stay the fuck away from.
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don't end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn't have an answer then and people around me couldn't explain it either but many were asking the same question.
You are looking at Universities^0 all wrong. Predicting the markets are not their job or role in society.
The primary purpose of a University is research. That research output comes from three primary sources: the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Naturally undergrads don’t tend to come into the University knowing how to do proper research, so there is a teaching component involved to bring them up to the necessary standards so they can contribute to research — but ultimately, that’s what they exist for.
What a University is not is a job training centre. That’s not its purpose, nor should it be. A University education is the gold standard in our society so many corporations and individuals will either prefer or require University training in exchange for employment — but that’s not the Universities that are enforcing that requirement. That’s all on private enterprise to decide what they want. All the University ultimately cares about is research output.
Hence, if there is valuable research output to be made (and inputs in the form of grants) in the field of “Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” (yes, I’m making that up!), and they have access to faculty to lead suitable research AND they have students that want to study it, they’ll run it as a programme. It makes no difference whether or not there is any industry demand for “ Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” — if it results in grants and attracts researchers and students, a University could decide to offer it as a degree programme.
We have a LOT of degree programmes with more graduates than jobs available. Personally, I’m glad for that. If I have some great interest in a subject, why shouldn’t I be allowed to study it? Why should I be forced to take it if and only if there is industry demand for that field? If that were the case, we’d have nearly no English language or Philosophy students — and likely a lot fewer Math and Theoretical Physics students as well. But that’s not the point of a University. It never has been, and it never should be.
I’ve been an undergraduate, a graduate, and a University instructor in Computer Science. I’ve seen some argue in the past that the faculty should teach XYZ because it’s what industry needs at a given moment — but that’s not its purpose or its role. If industry needs a specific skill, it either needs to teach it itself, or rely on more practical community colleges and apprenticeship programmes which are designed around training for work.
[0] — I’m going to use the Canadian terminology here, which differentiates between “Universities” and “Colleges”, with the former being centres of research education that grant degrees and the latter referring to schools that are often primarily trade and skill focussed that offer more diploma programmes. American common parlance tends to throw all of the above into the bucket of “College” in one way or another which makes differentiating between them more complicated.
Speaking for the US, major universities may be there for research, but they are a small portion of the mass of schools across the country.
People have mostly been getting degrees to get a good job since at least shortly after WW2. It’s silly to pretend people are going massively in debt without the expectation of a return on that investment.
Nothing against people learning for the joy of learning, but I absolutely hold schools accountable for not making job prospects clear when most of the students are both young and ignorant of the world.
So coding trade schools need to be created.
It's not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.
Today's programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.
In USSR there was a program of "programming being the second literacy", with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).
BTW, Soviet trade schools ("primary technical school" that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn't considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.
Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of "we can live like this no longer", and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn't see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.
What you describe might be true for Canada, but it doesn't apply to all universities. Many universities have two primary tasks: research and education. These are two separate tasks with overlap.
I do find it understandable if publicly funded universities place restrictions on how many students they accept per program as it's their duty to give back go society.
That's not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I'm not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That's why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I'd have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won't catch me claiming they're professional training factories.
the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes
They kinda do, but only the part where they increase program sizes after demand exists and only wind down when the market is saturated. They can't really work too far ahead if they don't know ow something will be in demand and they don't want to tell students to not do something they offer just because there are too many graduates. Add the four or five years to graduation and you get a system that lags behind reality even if the planning was better.
But a well designed post secondary education means graduates can go into similar or related fields, they aren't limited to what is on their diploma except in their own minds.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don't need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That's insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a "computer scientist", just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I've worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a for loop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I'm greatly oversimplifying. My point is there's no "computer science" involved.)
After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That's so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do something else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
I disagree on one point: the job of the education system is not to produce new workers, but to produce citizens. If I were I charge, I would force all stem students to take humanities courses. We have enough narrow-minded tech Bros.
What if I told you that in the Eastern Bloc many of the high schools used to be professional. In those schools you'd study most of the standard arts and science subjects, but also professional subjects like machining, automotive (mechanic, driver), construction, engineering, programming, agriculture, textile, food production, and many more. They used to produce ready workers in those fields. As a kid you'd choose which field you want to go to and apply after middle school, pass the necessary exams and get studying. If you wanted to go to university, you'd continue past high school.
I find it hard to believe the true numbers are this low. Every job posting gets many hundreds or even thousands of applicants. It's a shame so much talent is wasted by so many people being unemployed and doing "unproductive" things like spending months applying to jobs.
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don't end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/ does track this a bit, but I don’t know if universities use the info or if the site is intended for individuals instead.
It’s also just a general pattern that when a skill is in high demand, the jobs pay great. Everyone wants great pay, so the flood the schools to acquire that skill. Eventually things reach a saturation point.
And also there are always charlatan programs that take your money to hand out worthless certifications. As time goes by, these “educations” mean less and less, a lot of people just nab them online because they want to make better money fast, and there are fewer and fewer real jobs unfilled. Until we arrive at a point like this.
It’s a supply and demand issue.
Yes my point is that it's a feature of using the market to decide these variables in the economy, that includes the supply-demand dynamics. If we used some form of planning at the macro level that takes data from the industry and educational institutions, project long term direcrion, and propagate targets or at least expectations down the industry and educational institutions, we could save a ton of real resources and parts of people's lives, and reduce the negative social effects of this process. Effects that destabilize the whole system if they grow to any significant proportions.
This explains why people gave me a hard time for getting an anthropology degree....
its like psych degree, i heard people complaining in person about thier psych, yea you arnt going anywhere without a GRADuate degree for these majors, PSY-D/ PHD are the only options for that field, i assume thats what thier saying to you? anthropology might be more difficult, i assume your only going to be teaching at a university witha grad degree, but faculty positions are super-competitive asf, especially if its not a really in-demand degree.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech. Used to be full of other people like me and I really liked it. Now it’s full of people who are equally as enthused about it as they would be to become lawyers or doctors.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech.
I started my undergrad in the early 90’s, and ran into multiple students who had never even used a computer, but had heard from someone that there was a lot of money to be made in computers so they decided to make that their major.
Mind you, those students tended not to do terribly well and often changed major after the first two years — but this phenomenon certainly isn’t anything particularly new. Having been both a student and a University instructor (teaching primarily 3rd and 4th year Comp.Sci subjects) I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
By way of advice to any new or upcoming graduates who may be reading this from an old guy who has been around for a long time, used to be a University instructor, and is currently a development manager for a big software company — if you’re looking to get a leg-up on your competition while you look for work, start or contribute to an Open Source project that you are passionate about. Create software you love purely for the love of creating software.
It’s got my foot in the door for several jobs I’ve had — both directly (i.e.: “we want to use your software and are hiring you to help us integrate it as our expert”; IBM even once offered a re-badged version to their customers) and indirectly (one Director I worked under once told me the reason they hired me was because of my knowledge and passion talking about my OSS project). And now as a manager who has to do hiring myself it’s also something that I look for in candidates (mind you, I also look for people who use Linux at home — we use a LOT of Linux in our cloud environments, and one of my easiest filters is to take out candidates who show no curiosity or interest in software outside whatever came installed on their PC or what they had to work with at school).
I guess that anyone who managed to make the effort to join Lemmy is already on the right track.
My own experience (being probably around your age) is that "Software development being fashionable" and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.
I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as "a good career choice" as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).
Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn't fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world's, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn't a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.
Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn't that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don't do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.
I think that what we're seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people "at the coalface" are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI "coding" has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.
As for how you chose devs, I would say it's really just anchored on the eternal rule that "toolmakers make much better devs than tool users" - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who "solve their own problems" and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.
In case anyone is not aware:
Are you currently employed?
Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?
If the answer to both of those questions is 'no', then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!
You just aren't in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.
So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them...
( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )
... and you just give up?
You are not 'unemployed'.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
You are likely a 'discouraged worker', who is also 'not in the labor force'.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged
.........
Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and... you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?
Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely 'underemployed'.
But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs... you may also be 'overemployed'.
.........
But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.
In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers... did not make a living wage.
https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf
(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn't.)
You've also got measures like LISEP...
Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are 'functionally unemployed', by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So basically this is a way to try to measure 'doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job'.
.........
A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of 'did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?' would be 'are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?'
Something like that.
It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Washington in 2020, during the height of Covid.
After over 3000 handcrafted applications (and many more AI-written ones), I have never been offered a job in the field.
I know of multiple CS graduates who have killed themselves, and so many who are living with their parents and working service/retail.
I think the software engineering rush of the early 2000s will be looked back upon like the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
...the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)
I was in a similar boat. Graduated right around the housing crash. If my wife didnt work at the time, we would have been in a terrible spot. It look a good 6 months to get my first job. After that, I haven't had any issues popping into jobs.
Sounds like you got a raw deal. Our industry has many highs and lows when it comes to jobs and work available.
3000? That’s hyperbole right?
I have twenty years experience and it took me 300+ applications to get my current job.
Times are changing.
No I have a spreadsheet with 3200 lines of submitted applications, which includes both entry level positions and internships. Many with customized cover letters.
When you do the math its not even a strong pace, only about 3/day over 3 years. On a good day I was submitting 12-15.
I even applied to some famous ones, like the time Microsoft opened up 30 entry level positions and received 100,000 applications in 24 hours. It is rumored thet they realized they cannot process 100k apps, so they threw them all away and hired internally.
Whether they actually threw them out or not, that one always sticks with me. Submitting 100k apps is literally a lifetime of human work. All of that wasted effort is a form of social murder in my opinion.
It sounds like the same amount of effort that it would take to make a really good open source project, or contribute to an existing one.
I find it hard to believe you wouldn't get a job with something like that under your belt. Also 3000 applications is probably a bit shotgun rather than targeted and HR would be able to pick up on it
2020s was probably the worst time to graduate or even attend a 4-year university. they were starting to lock down, and they were laying people off and hiring freezing everywhere, that dint stop till maybe mid 2022, the effect was pretty devasting, i was still working a chain store and many people from IT to electrical engineer just got freshly laid off. and then the '23 massive tech layoffs began too i dont see this going to reverse for CS majors anythime soon, since CS has been having issues like since early 2010s of getting hired.
on students who were attending universities for the first time, or halfway through thier degree in the 2020s, i looked at reviews of my universities, most of them said they dint learn anything at all, so it puts them at disadvantage already, especially if its all only ONLINE courses. if you been in a regular course where the professors only uses powerpoint , you arnt learning anything a professor did this with BIOchem(for life science students, which is allegedly easier than the other biochem for scientists) and then when exam times came, they were almost as tough as my CC chem classes.
There was even a class action suit against UW for their negligence during covid. I guess the case is already settled, so I'm looking forward to my meager restitution check.
And I actually feel lucky that most of my serious classes were complete before Covid lockdown, bc the quality of education during covid was absolutely pathetic.
A degree in CS is valueless for actual working jobs. You need to write software and show that you know what you're doing. And if you can do that, you may not even need a job from anyone else. The time when companies would just overstaff and have paid interns is long over.
I'd be happy to review your resume and code samples and provide feedback if you want.
be willing to move
you’re offering salt in the middle of the Pacific
I fled from the Midwest because there were no good jobs outside of the oil and gas industry, and ended up in the Seattle area. Saving up and moving cost 2 years of my life, Im not sure I could do it again.
...and I did apply to some jobs on the west coast, although most of my apps were around Seattle.
But please tell me, where should I have went instead of Seattle?
What CS subfield? I think it really depends if you were able to specialize somewhat. At least systems programming and lower level coding seems to be somewhat in demand once you get into the field. Even given the current economy we aren't really getting much interest from students.
Over the years I have tried a handful of subfields.
I always felt particularly adept at assembly language programming, so I had a couple projects doing that, and applied to every relevent job I could find.
As a math nerd I enjoyed data science and machine learning, I had quite a few projects like a neutral network from scratch in Matlab, and many data analysis and computer vision projects in R. I was always aware this field is very competitive and my chances were low here.
I had a friend get a job in the biomedical field, so I tried to follow that, I have Python projects doing basic gene sequencing and analysis, even a really cool project that replicated evolution.
Another friend landed a government job, so I followed his advice and got some security certs.
I also had smaller projects and attempts at databases, finance programming, and video games.
As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:
No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don't mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the "good idea fairy" so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.
I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.
You know its bad when dude casually drops that he's a drug dealer and we all collectively shrug, like yeah sounds about right.
Hey, its a new legal industry. And selling drugs lets me sleep much better at night compared to having to pretend whatever new bullshit they are pushing is not terrible.
There are only two industries that call their customers 'users'...
We have all been conditioned by the media to think of drug dealers as bad people, but if you aren't violent and only selling to consenting adults there is nothing inherently wrong or evil about it, other than braking the law. You are providing a valuable service to your community, like every other job.
There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn't suck.
The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with "10 years experience" on their resume for twice what they're paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.
Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you're unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.
That's when you can really squeeze'm
Urgh, yeah it is just so bad. Most places don't even have a possible job above yours to even potentially move to. Where I was they literally sold us to a competitor (then unsold me as they forgot about a few contracts) and then just removed all the positions above us or related to our department. I lost 3 layers of bosses one day (not that anyone noticed much). And then expect people to just happily go on and on and on.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the "new" guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices, that automated the requirements in such a way that the only people who could get an interview would have had to lie on their applications. They where desperately trying to say they wanted to hire more people but no one was "qualified", meanwhile they froze pay for years (really showing that dood that was there for years how much they care).
You're dead on about the 5% of what you learned thing. I'm on like my 20th tech job and pretty much every one has been different. What I learned in school has applied to only the most basic aspects of any of those jobs. Everything else was learning as I go and just generally understanding how PCs and software work. I have done fairly well with upward mobility (currently about as high as I can go without taking another leadership position) but I had to bust my ass to do it and it was only because I always stood out because of that so I would be first choice. There were never enough promotions/mobility to go around to everyone that was deserving.
If you talk to people who went to different schools you quickly realize that its all different. I spent a lot of time learning antenna theory, Cisco networking and really out of date system admin, while on the other side of the nation my future co workers where learning soldering, cable terminology and text based HTML.
I was on the college board of governors and the thing I learned is that no one knows what computer science even is. Sad part is that it was the same for a lot of the subjects taught.
That was a ride and i love your last sentence.
Hey man I hear you, so how much gor a quarter?
cheapest I have in store is $20, the fanciest is $40. All in CAD of course.
My experience is so different to yours.
Work a lot with what I studied, need the algebra very often. I still have people randomly contacting me for interviews. People move a lot, it's rare to be in the same function for over 3 years.
0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.
This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.
I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.
Yep and the parents and adults pushing them we're often basing things on how it was FOR THEM. The job market changes constantly. I've got a worthless degree i deeply regret
Well, then "their" plan backfired, because the cost is still as high as ever for senior and lead engineers, it's just the enty level jobs that are ever rarer (and FAANG rarely hired entry level anyway).
When I started college I was in for biochem. Quickly realized there aren't many jobs and most pay pretty shit, so I switched to computer science. Did some research and found that while there are good paying jobs, good luck finding them. Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in, and I had a full ride that I didn't want to waste dropping out). Graduated and now I'm a mechanic and make more than I would have if I stuck with my original bio degree. I also love what I do for a living despite the possibility of making more doing something else. Some fault is absolutely on the students for failing to do their own research, hopefully they have all learned a valuable lesson about being gullible. Always do your own research, and pick from various sources! At 18 you should not sign on for massive amounts of debt because "somebody said I'd get a good paying job later if I spend all the money I don't have right now". Not saying young adults weren't fooled, but you cannot say 0% fault lies on the students. By that logic you should be a trump supporter because some boomer told u to be. The thing that differentiates and adult from a man-child is their ability to take responsibility for their own decisions. It's not like you were FORCED to go to school.
There is always free time to self educate. Being a programmer means constantly keeping up with the news, new technologies, and adapting to new standards to keep the code clean, maintainable, extendable, readable, and relatively fast.
The fairness meter at the bottom of the article is absurd. “Unfair left leaning” like yes, how dare the libtards use statistics to show how broken our economy is
If you are speaking of the needle position on the dial thingy, I believe it's just the default until you vote, not meant to indicate anything (though it's misleading). You have to vote to see actual results.
Brave goggles has a similar concept. Search "vaccines" with "from the right", get a bunch of disinformation antivaxxer crap.
Just call it what it is: "Unfair truth leaning", "Unfair fake leaning".
"Bullshit Discriminatory" and "Bullshit Tolerant"
This article is rated center/fair
In the 1970s companies started "Stack Ranking" all their employees and firing the bottom 10% in order to replace them or simply using their wages to pay CEOs more.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
Now the media will jump past all this to blame anything but the CEOs and failure of Government to reign in the wage gap via the force of law.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
.... There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.
One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.
Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.
That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.
The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.
they are using the right wing blaming strategy: blames the student for choosing a "useless" degree, and not having 'CONNECTIONS'/networking, these basically are a form of Nepotism to be honest, not many people can get connections like that, and its based on "knowing a person of a person with said company that is friendly with a HR manager" i guessed correctly in another forum(indeed) that its around half when they decide if they want to hire you.
Give it a minute. Pretty soon, they're going to need a lot of people to fix all the vibe-code that's currently being spewed out by AI. That'll be a monumental task.
Just found out someone in my team has been vibe-coding VBA in Excel that our team is now using. I asked who was going to maintain it and she didn’t know what I meant by maintenance.
Reminds me of web development in the Dotcom days, cleaning up Dreamweaver HTML garbage.
I almost forgot about Dreamweaver, those were the days.
Shades of dotcom days. Everyone hopped on the bandwagon. Most lured by the high salaries and gold-rush mentality. Nowadays, just having a CS degree isn't enough. You want portfolio pieces to set you apart. Start by having a damn portfolio. You can set one up for free on GH Pages or CloudFlare. Or pay a few bucks and set one up on Wordpress. If you can't figure out how, that CS degree was wasted.
You want stories that show you bring value. Show that you can build things beyond school projects. Even if you do school projects, document them and push them out. Show why they're cool and what you can do. Throw up screenshots, diagrams, or animations. No walls of text.
Also, learn to sell yourself. Not in the oily LinkedIn way. Just be out there. Contribute back. Educate others and have a voice. Blog, newsletter, social media, book, or video channel. They're dead-easy to set up and free so there's no gatekeepers to go through, other than your ideas.
If in a big city, go to Meetups or demo days. Meet people and ASK WHAT THEY DO. Help connect them to others. Anyone just sitting there cranking out resumes is going to get filtered by the LLM screener. Might as well pin up your resume above the urinal at the pub.
Finally: everyone can low-code or vibecode. Those are table stakes now. You want to do better.
Yeah, no. Once I saw this kind of bullshit was needed for programming jobs I just pivoted to IT and cybersec.
These days the pay is just as good, and chances to find a job are even better, the environment is much lower pressure and this gross techbro exploited/exploiting attitude that somehow programming is special and not just a modern day 9-5 factory job is non-existent. With dev jobs, the goal posts are ever shifting. No I'm not doing a portfolio, no I'm not doing your "take home assessment", no I'm not doing a live coding exercise for your £20k ass minimum wage job where "we measure work by effort, not time" and I'll somehow end up on call. I love programming, but not enough to let myself get fucked by corpos every which way.
You do have to deal with corpo boomers though, but if you're lucky they mostly realize they're just cogs that got lost and they better not make too much noise or they'll be let go.
I take it there are not going to be many autistic new devs in the coming decades over there, with such requirements.
As an undiagnosed autistic dev, I am starting to realize there are not many good non autistic devs. I wonder what is the reason.
Great advice. Also pick an open issue in an open source project, make a PR, have some public discussion of trade offs you considered, and get it merged. That’s an awesome differentiator. I’ve seen thousands of developer resumes without this. It shows you can work effectively and productively on good code and with a team.
I'd love to hear your experience around this and what sector or jobs this assisted, because more data is great.
But in my experience across 25+ jobs ranging from startups to fortune 500/250/100...I have never encountered a hiring process that would care about this.
I would love to be proven wrong though.
An unfortunate but completely predictable result of the debt manufacturing industry. Widespread and getting worse.
If businesses continue believing they can vibe code some intern into success while drop kicking talent to the curb to save a buck, those CS unemployment numbers will fall off like a lemming!
To the quote in the summary - might be because debugging dozens of layers of bullshit is hard. Anyway, debugging is about sitting for hours and reading logs and looking for weirdness, and looking at dumps, and what not. It's a very different skill from "being the next Zuckerberg". Also Zuckerberg is a psychologist most of all, his computing knowledge is not that unique. Network effect is more important than skill and knowledge here.
Well yeah, when the tech industry went through multiple waves of massive layoffs, that's going to be the case in the short term as things shake out.
It's finally happening, tech jobs are suffering the same unemployment that the trades had been suffering for years if not decades, only this time around it's probably self-inflicted by the AI bubble.
AI hasn't really taken much, if any tech jobs so far. If anything demand for building and using AI has taken up a good share of the job market in tech.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for "entry" level jobs because they simply won't pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It's also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the "grunt work", for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they'll get it done faster and more reliably. You'll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very few, if any, fresh graduates.
It's short term thinking that's going to fuck the industry in a generation when all the old school guys die or retire, the senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers move up to fill their roles and you don't have enough Jr engineers to become the seniors, leads and managers. They'll be trying to manage entire teams from overseas, trying to replace people with AI, which will never be a true replacement, and they'll suddenly see the value in hiring new graduates, but there won't be enough by then because they made the major useless. The few that exist will probably make bank straight out of school, though, as companies become desperate for them.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very few, if any, fresh graduates.
Again that thing with union pressure and outsourcing, the latter exists because the former in practice doesn't.
Everything would work better with unions. Unions-unions-unions.
Socialism was intended as a solution to a real problem. Some its parts turned out to be deadly poison, but that's about those making immobile hierarchies and using force. Unions and associations and artels, - all these are a system of tools solving some problems, and the best part about them is that they are not hurting market mechanisms, just adding better response times and organization to their sides.
Wrong. I personally saw entire departments wiped out because of the SAVINGS a. I promised.
Those jobs are gone even though a. I didn't fill them correctly. they shoe horn in a. I and keep just enough people to try to keep it bandaged and pretending.
The issue is that a. I is not living up to the hype, never will, and now companies are lefvwith egg onbyheir face and rather than admit it there pushing forward.
Its just another game part of trump and companies fake economy, and your buying it.
biotech is like this too, bio itself is such a saturated major in most uni, unless your going into health with good marks (you need grad school) , research side you likely wont find jobs if you arnt a good student going to grad school. biochem, o-chem, physics, gen chem, gen bio all will wreak havoc on your GPa.
the dotcom bust was much worse
the trades were only ever going to be hiring one demographic specifically, thats at least ive seen, almost all of them are fair complexion. never a poc has been a trade, and probably arent going to risk htier bodies get destroyed down the line. i do seem them in places like USPS and others though.
This isn't the first time this has happened, though.
That's what happens when everyone rushes to do the same qualification - you get too many people for that area of work. More graduates doesn't magically make more jobs - it just makes more people applying for the same amount of jobs.
And most of them are shit at their jobs because they just do it for money. No care for the skill.
When you like your profession, your job you still do for money. Otherwise you'd be playing with similar things at home to much more satisfaction.
So here I won't agree and say that tech needs unions. Union pressure would solve the problem of labor organization and on-job education, so that they wouldn't be shit at their jobs.
Skill and such things are practically important for scientists, maybe.
CS education is notoriously prone to boom-bust cycles.
Even in europe there is no workers union for IT. Atleast not that i know of. IG metal and Verdi didnt answer my email about that
Damn. Didn’t know about that at all. I’m genuinely glad the direction where I live (Germany) is the opposite, that way more people are needed and searched for than there is demand.
(I would have enough private projects without a job though lol.)
Nope,same story here,just not as extreme: https://www.heise.de/news/Wirtschaftsinstitut-IT-Fachkraefte-sind-in-Deutschland-deutlich-weniger-gefragt-10544518.html
Thing is: there’s lots of vacant jobs in IT because of the unwillingness of adequate pay in Germany. Either the employers don’t see the value in hiring motivated people or the motivated people are unwilling to work for peanuts.
Entry level in Berlin was like ~36k for IHK Fachinformatiker für system integration. As a result my last company started to hire in Eastern Europe because no one could afford to live on that even in one of the cheapest cities. And it wasn’t a small company by a long shot. Just greedy bastards
Entry level at my company is 55k, in a much smaller city, in a field that's not super competitive salary wise (i.e. not automotive industry), so I'd slap a huge YMMV on your comment.
Same issue here. My company is freezing any hiring this year. And next year won't be looking good either. And to add on top of that, most big companies are outsourcing to Eastern Europe short-term because it's cheaper, or directly to India, as was the case with Amazon Romania that laid off a bunch of its workforce and then hired back a few of them to make workshops for the people in India that are going to pick up their jobs to do the exact same thing.
Also the pay in the sector in Germany sucks ass. It's really bad
I'm halfway through my bachelor's CE, but really thinking about dropping and doing a trade instead.
Don’t. Just finish it and join an electrical union with your math skills. After you complete your degree. I went into electrical after getting laid off from a malware defense software oem. Get your degree. It carries you further than without it. You can always join the Electrician union nearest you right after you graduate. Check for their sign up times for the year.
I've never met anyone in the broadly tech fields (and I've been through quite a span of them) who regrets completing an even somewhat relevant degree. I've met, many, many people who lament not starting or finishing one (and many of these were very competent, capable people, good at their jobs).
It's expensive and difficult, sure was for me, but it is very useful (and the learning is fantastic too if you do it right).
I'm probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you're thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you'd definitely be better off doing a trade.
Good luck either way.
The most important aspect is motivation to improve and do cool shit. That can, also, be said about a lot of professions. The best thing you can do is to find what is most interesting to you and spend at least a few hours a week learning about it or engaging with it. It could be new features of a language you know, a programming methodology that is new to you, learning about/contributing to a FOSS project you like, or anything else.
School and work will almost definitely force you to engage with the parts of development you don't like, as well will give you an opportunity to engage with the parts of development you do like. It's on you to keep yourself engaged and improving in your skills.
CE is neat because most companies will treat you as if you had a CS or EE degree. Can always pivot to HW or FPGA
Yep. Been saying it for years because I was laid off over and over. Do not enter computer science.
Become an welder, electrician, etc. ANYTHING but a computer scientist
Me reading this as a computer scientist
Chat, are we cooked?
The trades will ALWAYS be in demand. No matter where society goes, as long as it doesn't collapse we will need running water, electricity, toilets, transportation, etc. I went to college for bio, switched to CS, graduated with business management degree and now I'm a mechanic. The hope is one day run my own garage perhaps, but untill then I love comfortably enough and know I can walk out tomorrow and find another job before I make it home.
Also consider a healthcare career. As a teenager, I wanted to do computer science/engineering, and sometimes I do wish I had stayed on that track. But now, as a nurse, I could get a job in any state in the US by tomorrow. I dare you to try to find a hospital that doesn't have open nursing positions. Even when the economy goes down, people still get sick. Even if society collapses, the knowledge/skills will be useful.
And if you don't want to change diapers or deal with blood, there are still options; I'm in psychiatry and rarely have to deal with either.
I set my mind on comp sci like 6 years ago because it was said to be one of the most in demand fields (maybe still is) and pays well (I was looking at SWE). Nowadays I have set my mind on a job that involves me working away in a server room. Hopefully that pans out.
3-5 years ago my answer would've been different. I could trip and find a job offer. I was getting job offers by email essentially without interviewing.
About a year ago that completely dried up. I can't even remember the last email I got that was more than recruiter spam. My friend who used to also trip into jobs (7 at peak) has been hunting for 3 months now with no luck.
But...servers and data centers and stuff, you're probably onto something. Wishing you the best.
I've been looking t fulltime for a long time now, and from what I've seen there are a tonne of jobs out there, it's just that are that many more qualified devs than their were just a few years ago.
The way I see it, the hiring bubble that exploded during the pandemic let a lot of people gain proficiency, then followed by the waves of layoffs and you've got a lot of talented folks looking.
I wanted to become a dev 12 years ago, when it was still cool.
Needless to say that I haven't, even if doctors I talked to refused to diagnose me with ADHD, my ASD and BAD and anxiety from many things kinda make it not a very good direction.
So - now I could probably become a dev, with the experience gained. But it's really not the time when this is a good choice LOL.
Industry vulnerable to lack of investor money does badly when there is no investor money
So, i've been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I'm glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it's not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
Correct, and the other problem is that if you live in a house with 6-8 other people, and don't even have anywhere to park a vehicle (as in, not even on the road outside) then it's never going to work. I imagine what it'd be like if I did a trade, but I couldn't get to work in the morning because another tenant decided to sleep-in and block my vehicle from leaving the drive. Just ridiculous.
and trades are usually only employing a specific demographic and they have
Also trades have boom and busts too
Plus the ones making really good money take a good amount of time to get there and really good money means starting your own business but either way, you won't escape long hard hours and weekends until probably at least your 40s, that's if you manage to scale up the business enough with numerous staffed work vehicles. Like a 22 year old software developer can be making what a master plumber does in their first year out of college. Not super common but the $130k+ a year plumber is the top small percent of the field too
The miners thing is insane; as if we dont still need fucking minerals.
Edit: and other heavy machinery operators
I've been saying that the market is oversaturated for YEARS now but this just enrages tech bros into insulting me personally. It's very strange.
I always tell me CS/CE/Info students that they should focus on non profits, government agencies, etc. where at least employment will be stable.
Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you're a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn't even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it's competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that
/s
That was a fantastic impression of reality. Well done.
I don't get why they would insult you, but I have been hunted and not had to find jobs since I finished school, sometimes they fight each other. But it may be not quite the same job, i'm a coder turned game designer
Industry surely has an impact.
just learn to code
There were recent CS grads in my coding boot camp 8 years ago.
Computer Science is not learning to code.
In fact, most high end University Computer Science departments do not at any point teach a coding language. Coding languages are taught, in Canada, at Community Colleges and such.
Computer Science is all about developing, perfecting, and discovering the algorithms that are then transcribed to computer code by the junior IT technicians (code junkies). Coders are a dime a dozen. It is the Computer Systems Designers, project architects, and project developers that make the big money.
A coder can only make good money if they have mastered a computer language that is not very common, like Kubernetes, [Kubernetes,] (https://kubernetes.io/) And you will not learn that from a 'Kubernetes-for-Dummies book borrowed from the library,
Thank you for pointing out that CS <> programming.
CS is mostly math, cryptography, signal processing, image processing, information theory, data analysis/storage/transformation, etc.
It's called an oversaturated market. And capitalist fucks replacing people with AI
I don't think this is even the big effect we'll be seeing from AI. think that'll occur over the next 12-24 months, as LLM operationalization occurs and matures the implementations.
This.
At my jobs, AI is just scratching the surface. But they're slowly implementing entire coding bot swarms, so a Product person can report a bug, it gets reviewed by an agent, assessed by an agent, fixed by an agent, and tested by another agent - then PR'd for a dev to review.
This hurts the junior level.
I was going to study computer science. Instead I got a general AA and got a helpdesk job. Then A+ and a better job and a Net+ and an even better job and I'm not well off by any means but my family has a roof over our heads and food on the table and what's more I am still employed and don't have student loans so it's looking more and more like that's the right call and the best way to get into tech.
Where I am and due to its greater practicality, nursing is more popular as a college course than compsci.
I once started as compsci, but instead got a job fixing PCs. Also self-learned basic carpentry and plumbing. Looking at raising livestock in the near future.
HERE AS well, nursing is popular because you can make bank as a travelling NURSE, over being staffed a hospital. im guessing thats what a guy i met as aco-worker in retail once mentioned, i thought he was kidding at first.
only if you have the personality, and tolerates belligerent patients, or work with human waste products from time to time. i suspect the nursing shortages you hear, and the abuse is mostly from rural areas and red states that have a massive shortage of health professionals including MDs.
I lookd into CLS which is in line with my cmb degree, but its a very competitive for not being a grad degree program, its a grad certification require grad level clinical/lab classes, apparently universities in the usa that have the cls program is quite few, so they all try to come to the west coast, only 9 schools teach this program so you can see the competiveness of the program in the west coast. when indeed forum was around they had whole sections dedicated to cls.
Nursing is huuuuge. My nurse friend with a doctorate just landed a $250k base job with 10 weeks paid vacation and a slew of other benefits. Wild.
Plumbing is huge too. If I ever need one, they're booked out like 3+ months unless you want to pay an emergency fee which is like double or triple.
I, too, am raising some livestock. We'll see where it goes. But at least to me it feels more connected and real.
If anyone is interested in APL programming send me your resume.
Looking for good software engineers; curious folks.
APL, now thats something I havent heard about in a while.
Similar issues at work with COBOL. Sure I know it but im literally working to get everything out of it.
Not directly related, but do you use an actual APL keyboard or use something with an APL input method, like emacs?
I actually do have apl printed Keycaps because they’re cool :D
Given enough time most people develop a memory. There are different methods of entry, separate layers, backtick input, other macros.
You can try it here https://tryapl.org/
They have some shortcuts in lieu of a full keymap.
Oh that's cool. That's one of those languages I saw myself working in when I was younger - it's a powerful language for mathematical stuff, and not terribly difficult.
Felt more like creating circuitry to do software stuff rather than programming.
Hell. I'll echo that but for senor operations types. Your who im looking for if you can function in 3+ different operating systems, understand (and can implement) dnssec, and design gitops workflows. Bonus points if you can explain SMTP to me.
I was laid off from my charger oem. Now I work at a grocery store till I find a new job. Needed the cheap insurance plus its union. This won’t last for long.
Kinda glad I took the community college IT/infra route when I went back to school a little bit ago, but still scared for the future lol.
Hearing advice on how to get into software dev made me I realise really don't have enough passion for it. And given that its hyper competitive historically speaking, decided to move the adjacent job (that being a data analyst). Enjoying it so far. Now I just use my programming skills to just make cute little projects on my laptop, and of course a little bit for the data analyst stuff but.
Always need a good DA!
I'm glad I never took it. Been employed in the field for thirty years.
The one and only time I took compsci at a junior college just taught the basics of Office
Ha, yeah, I started at a community college, for an associates in IT, and it was mostly Cisco, Visual Basic, and MS SQL. Went to a 4 years school for a BS, and it was more about logic and different programming paradigms. Then at grad school, it was mostly theoretical stuff and algorithm analysis.
Let me guess AI
If you had spent the 20 seconds it took to write this comment to actually start reading the article you'd find out the true reason and that AI is not even mentioned.
However, as major companies like Amazon and Google have laid off thousands of workers to boost profits, the major has lost some of its appeal in the job market
Do you know why those two companies which the article called out very early on went through those layoffs?
...Pivoting to AI
Requirements for a job in Computer Science are, in order of importance, first, a demonstrated talent. Second, a demonstrated skill level. Third, demonstrated knowledge.
Just like being a top-tier pianist, all the knowledge, raining, schooling, and education in the world matters nothing if you do not first have the talent.
But you do not need talent to get into a Computer Science course, nor to graduate from one. You just need the knowledge and the marks.
That is why there are so many uneducated, untalented Computer Science graduates out there.
This is the thing the teachers and educators in Computer Science never tell you.
My experience has been that computer science is a huge umbrella term to normies. Many people, including hiring managers seem to thing computer science is more of a trade education where people come out knowing everything about excel, windows, PowerPoint, file conversions, obscure knowledge of ancient software, expertise in setting up enterprise printers, etc
I was developing software for a position I was in, and everyone was shocked I was a developer... (It was a devops job where everyone basically edited yaml or json files all day long..)
It's the same with the term AI - everyone uses it today but very few, including most reporters in the media, really understands it or apply it properly.
Laughs in AI
This person thinks what we have is AI and that it is actually good. Funny
Shut up and get me my burger.
I only have one thing to say to all the incredibly smug tech workers of the last 10-15 years.
Lol.
You know what? Lmao, even.
