www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/computer-science-majors-job-market-7ad443bf?mod=hp_lead_pos7
Computer-Science Majors Graduate Into a World of Fewer Opportunities
SocietyThat's been happening continuously for the last 30 years. It's a cycle. They offshore, offshore proves themselves incompetent since the competent ones are already here on H1bs, they have to panic-hire domestic devs to fix - or often straight up rewrite - the garbage offshore gave, and then the cycle starts again.
The CEO cycle :
Founder builds a successful company, retires to become a board member
CEO 1 comes in and says "boy we're spending a lot of money" and cuts costs. Stock price goes up and CEO 1 moves on to another company with more pay
CEO 2 comes in and eventually realizes that things are shit due to the cost cutting so he spends a shitload of money trying to fix everything by undoing most but not all of what CEO 1 did. Things improve somewhat and CEO 2 moves on to another company with more pay.
CEO 3 comes in and says, "boy we're spending a lot of money" and cuts costs. Stock price goes up and CEO 3 moves on to another company with more pay
The cycle repeats, the company gradually becoming more shitty with each successive iteration, until it gets bought by another company.
The cycle then repeats at THAT company.
AKA every CEO has ~2 to 5 years to show the board how different they are from the one that left and/or got canned, which usually leads to an inversion of the business strategy.
It's like script punch-ups. Whether or not they add anything of value is beside the point; it's all about getting your name in as someone who made a change.
The median CEO is replaced in about 18 months. The myths of leadership capabilities are buried with stories of outliers, and survivorship bias is rampant.
You left off the private equity track.
Company does well and has a good reputation. Gets bought by private equity and looted. Company loses reputation and private equity dumps the husk.
This is the flaw behind a company going public.
I'm hoping this cycle starts affecting cloud vs. on-premise, because I'm getting pretty tired of these slow cloud apps. Things used to be fast and responsive.
It's not the cloud that's making it slow, it's the incompetent junior developers side loading every page that you'll never visit because the senior devs who know better were laid off. Welcome to the era of dead sea tech
Html? What's that? I code in react
Or use kubernetes for a site that’s visited by very few people.
Exactly. They load all the data in react before displaying a web page (thats how react works as a one page app) but that slows down the page considerably. I.e. unrelated but you go to search something and alot of sites pull from their entire catalog to look (super slow and inefficient, probably coded by interns)
I can guarantee you that moving the shitty code out of the cloud and into a data centre would not make things fast and responsive.
On premise vs cloud is not why your apps are slow. It’s because they’re bloated with data and analytics trackers, poor development practices, and a focus on flash rather than user experience.
The cycle then repeats at THAT company.
And when they get bailed out by the government the cycle repeats itself at a national level.
The question remains, who can bail out a whole country?
Sounds like the two party system of government
until it gets bought by another company.
Wouldn't that cycle eventually devolve into in some sort of mega giga-corporation sucking all the other corporations in (causing stagnation and a lack of recourse for improvements)?
Yes, if you aren’t being facetious for effect.
If you want a good example look at microsoft gaming division.
I’m honestly surprised their business practices aren’t drawing anti trust legislation already, since it’s the equivalent of slash and burn lumber harvesting
This happens in so many places. My wife is watching its second iteration at her job. It didn't work last time, it's going way way way worse this time.
I was in the middle of it before I left IT. I was supporting shitty etl software and the company hired me to manage it since the offshore company that made it was milking us for 150k a year with moderate support.
I tried telling them they wouldn't fully train me on the features, they didn't listen. I tried telling them they should move to something that can be easily supported and they didn't listen. They just wanted to keep running a super complicated design system with literally 3 different types of databases instead of forcing the other sites to adopt the same thing.
It was a fucking nightmare. The day before I left my new boss was like, "What would it take you to stay?" I told him I wanted to be moved off that software. He said he meant a raise for me not moving me. I told him there's no amount of money that I would have stayed for. That company purposely kept me in the dark so they could keep milking my employer. Fuck that. I'm not signing up to fail.
I am glad for you that you got out, but I sort of wish that there was a nice r/MaliciousCompliance in your journey!
One of the best things I ever heard from my consultant buddy:
“Professionals are expensive. But amateurs will end up costing you way more in the long run. Always choose the professional.”
This time they think AI is the end all be all answer, it’s not.
If working with offshore devs has taught me one thing, it's being specific with technical specs.
If working with offshore devs has taught me one thing, no matter how specific you are they’ll mess it up
Totally agree.
My colleague came up with a phrase to describe this phenomenon: ,“whenever you attempt to idiot proof something, they always invent a better idiot”.
Usually so specific that you'd waste less time just coding it yourself.
That cycle is happening again at my company. We decided to hire an indian team for an important portion and it was a disaster and now it’s so tightly integrated into our app, we are now cursed
Having lived through this cycle fully it is so true. At least the offshore trash heaps give domestic devs work to do in the future...
The biggest issue is communication. Often the people offshore writing the code don't understand the context and are never able to fully align to the goals. Thus you run into situations where you have 100k lines of nothing that half does what is needed.
Can confirm. The offshore requirement is “can you fluently speak/read/write English” followed by “have you ever encountered a python script.” There’s going to be a massive pendulum swing and it’s extra stupid long term when you consider all the stalled progress companies will have with AI integration. Sure build a bunch of crap products that are going to (not) be the foundation for years to come 🙄
The offshore requirement is “can you fluently speak/read/write English” followed by “have you ever encountered a python script.”
Question to which their answers are lies and the staffing firm then repeats said lies. The fluency one, especially, is a huge problem.
Oh that one's easy: ask them a question you KNOW is wrong. E.g. "Do you have anyone with 10 years of experience in <thing that came out a year ago>?"
Competent consultants will call you out on your BS. Incompetent ones who just want to do the needful will tell you "yes".
I worked for a company that was rebooting its satellite offices because the quality of offshore was so bad. We got the offices up and running. A few years later, our company was sold and we were offshoring everything again. I saw the writing on the wall and bounced before the layoffs.
So if offshore were competent there wouldn’t be a single dev job in the US probably. Makes me wonder at the pure luck of that state of affairs for me to even have a job
For real, it will reset again in a few years and devs will be in more demand than ever before.
Offshore talent works harder and is less entitled and the pay is usually 25% as much … are you speaking out of your butt ?
They can be very good (Eastern Europe) but those wages are approaching Europe if not the US. Poland will surpass the UK in standard of living by 2030 according to reports.
India continues to be not very good. You get what you pay for.
South america is decent too , it depends on the individual from my experience. Can’t generalize like that.
Grinding away very hard without actually understanding what you're doing is not helpful. I never said offshore weren't hard workers but it's not 1975 anymore, coders aren't just blindly converting reams of prewritten algorithms from math to code.
“Without actually understanding what you are doing”? Where are you getting this from? Most international workers speak english well and understand enough to get hired . Once again, is this purely anecdotal?
This is why HALO INFINITE released in the state it was released in.
There’s an added danger here. There will be advancements in code generation making either programmers much more productive or fully replacing roles in the future with AI, leading to less programming jobs in the future impacting everyone in the industry including staff overseas.
I see this happening within a 10 year or less window, but there will still be a need to maintain older systems, enhance them as needed, etc.
I saw the idea of code generation fail in the 80’s and 90’s, but AI may make it more attainable. There are also no code solutions allowing users to built their own small systems without being trained programmers.
I worked in the industry from 1980-2017 and saw a lot of these kinds of attempts bubbling up and was shocked to see a tool my last company use in 2016 to scan all our code, pick out security flaws and suggest redesigning some sections.
There will be advancements in code generation making either programmers much more productive or fully replacing roles in the future with AI, leading to less programming jobs in the future impacting everyone in the industry including staff overseas.
People said the same thing about high-level languages replacing Assembly. Comparing the size of the programming field today to the 1970s kind of says it all. Programmers will just have to learn a new language, this time the language of ML prompts.
Software engineers "Programmers" today are already more efficient and write better programs then years ago because we have better tools. AI will be another tool, but wont replace software engineers. It could be that Software Engineers run AI to do all of the coding, but there is no way management will be running the AI themselves. Unless of course software engineers are rebranded as management of AI. Bottom line, you need people who understand how the technology works in order to create software.
AI can pretty much bridge the divide between utter incompetence and lack of skill.
People don’t want to hear it but others are catching up.
Yes and no. Offshoring has been a thing for a long time, but recently there’s been a lot of re-shoring happening. Either back to the US, to South America, or Europe. In many cases companies are learning how disruptive the “round the clock” development initiative is, how language and cultural barriers create headaches for managers already stretched thin, and how it’s not really “cheap” anymore. I worked with a lot of companies when consulting where we advised on nearshoring or reshoring. We also cut heavily our own India delivery centers.
Not just Asia, also Eastern Europe
But the eastern european ones are actually good.
Sure but one could argue that American companies should hire American talent because it’s better for the over all economy
You could argue that, but you would probably be wrong. Higher costs, higher prices.
yeah but the company has to balance it well.
People talk and once US side folks realize that those across the atlantic are getting 8 weeks off, 1 year for parental leave and they can be just fired willy nilly, things get a bit testy. After a certain income level, more money doesnt give the same satisfaction, but additional time off etc definately does.
My company is spread out and it only is cause we need FTS coverage for support. Every core developer is in one of the two HQ cities, support spread all around, but in the last year or two I have noticed a lot of IT/Infra roles being off shored
white good, brown bad
Also the fact that everyone is doing these coding boot camps and there is a massive influx of coders and want to be swe.
It’s not just bootcamps there are several universities where half the student body is CS now. There are too many CS grads being made. People would not shut up about telling people to learn how to code and guess what they did!
Less than 6% of all bachelors degree graduates in 2022 were in CIS related majors.
There where too many CS/IT/SWE people 10 years ago and there are too many now. and with automation coming for our necks it's only going to be worse.
Yeah I started about 10 years ago and it was actually hard to get a job then, they wanted a degree for $12 an hour unboxing computers like a rung below helpdesk. I always get downvotes sometimes I have to shutter an entire account but its never been as good as Reddit says it is.
No that's just for-profit-education doing for-profit stuff. Their grads are worthless and everyone who is hiring knows that.
Right but aren't they still applying for the same jobs? I agree whole heartedly there are people that are good at coding and those that tried to speed through it because rhey heard they could work at FAANG
They are, but their applications are pretty much insta trashed these days, and that's been true for a while now. There's just so many CS grads hitting the market that there's no reason to gamble on fresh bootcamp grads. So sure, they're applying, but they really are not a factor in why there's fewer opportunities.
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13d
What old is new again
At tech firms they own in India or Bangladesh
I've seen this one before.
I feel like this is more because of the current state of the economy (a lot of layoffs for jobs that aren’t being replaced by “AI”) rather than any broad, long term changes. AI is not nearly good enough to actually replace anyone, yet. After the economy recovers and interest rates drop , things should get better again.
Yeah, this is reminding me of 2009. That's when I graduated, and it took a year for me to get a job.
It’s weird though. I work in one of the tech sectors that went though layoffs and I can only report that AI has taken over zero jobs in my sector.
AI is the excuse they are firing people to increase short term profitability and are hoping AI will be ready when the chickens come home to roost. Business today is all about that short term and nobody gives a shit about the long game anymore it’s sad.
Probably yes.
The other folks I know were all in the last half of their careers , so literally it seems like they sorted by salary and cutoff the top of the below VP tier.
I dunno... been years since I've seen a req for a junior.
I suppose it depends on which tech stack it’s for Colleges need to really push for internships and actual job experience for devs. In class time is almost worthless after a certain point
More projects and less theory. I was very fortunate that that's how my professors did it. More than one literally only gave exams because it was a requirement of the university management and the exams were both open book and low-weight as a result.
My degree was 90% practical and employers gave zero fucks because all recruiters care about is work experience.
Oh same here on both counts. Getting that first job is hard and I worked for one of the worst companies in the industry. What the project and practical content gives over a theory-focused course is stuff that helps in the interview process.
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13d
That’s good as an intro class for students not in a computer science major. If she’s a CS major, that school needs to have its accreditation evaluated.
I was taking IT and my coding class consisted of mind maps, coding, and programming in an environment where you had characters and objects and you’d animate them by writing code and placing them in the world.
This was a year ago. Doubt much has changed since then. Coding classes are hard.
The last four years started with a pandemic and a bunch of uncertainty followed by interest rates making money no longer free.
Tech companies hire a lot of their interns so they never get to the point of posting the junior jobs.
Tech wages were growing so fast that people stopped hiring juniors. We had fresh out of school people being hired as senior just to compete on the market. Once they were in the company their job responsibilities were much closer to a junior, but the title and the paycheck said senior.
Probably need a level realignment at some point, but nobody wants to have their fake title demoted. As a hiring manager I would squint real hard at any job experience with senior dev on it.
AI is not nearly good enough to actually replace anyone, yet.
Having seen some of the stuff fresh grads put out, and remembering my own earliest contributions, there is a risk to juniors. Unfortunately all seniors start as juniors and if you don't hire juniors you won't have seniors and the ones available will just keep ratcheting up their salary demands.
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12d
but that's also changing with more and more standardize solutions being "good enough"
That's what the sales pitch of the _AAS companies are and yet all they've done is create new roles dedicated simply to customizing and managing them. Companies simply don't want "off the shelf" solutions, they all think they're special snowflakes that need something if not wholly bespoke at least customized beyond the simple options page.
Unless you actually like making computers go beep boop you probably shouldn't get into SWE today.
It's actually the opposite. If you like making computers go beep boop be a hobbyist. Making computers go beep boop is the smallest part of modern software engineering. The engineering part - i.e. solving problems at a conceptual level by talking with stakeholders - is the far bigger part of the job. Software is just tool and material used to implement the solutions. If you can't do the engineering, if you can't design, then SWE is not for you no matter how much you like and how good you are at making computers go beep boop.
Can you copy paste article since it’s behind paywall and I’m on my phone and too lazy to circumvent
12ft.io still works on a phone
There are AI tools making devs and testers more productive. I predict we will see a large number of software start ups, as we do with nearly every period of tech lay-offs, with AI production-multipliers making them competitive or profitable much faster.
Very few jobs are being "replaced by AI", if any.
The younger workers who know how to work AI replace the older workers who didn't bother/want to learn how to leverage that tool.
AI is not nearly good enough to actually replace anyone
Are you seriously trying to claim that no one's job has ever been replaced by AI? How are the people on this sub so far out of touch? You claiming things online doesn't make it so. I've already seen it happen in real life where I work currently. I'll say it once again, this sub is hilarious
What jobs have you seen that have been replaced? The lack of accuracy in current models makes replacing people actually fairly risky on any large scale, especially in software development
Tier 1 HD agents. You can chat with a bot to file a ticket. There are also AI avatar kiosks popping up, which I believe are run by this 3rd party. Hell they're even using AI for drug discovery. I love the downvotes here, unfortunately for redditors the downvotes won't save your job or have any impact on reality.
Hell they're even using AI for drug discovery.
Different problem, different problem space. About the only thing that the models used in drug discovery have in common with LLMs is that they are both lumped together in the AI bucket. Plus drug discovery has been making use deep leaning since around 2010 and even then you still need a lot of work to go from a candidate molecule, to synthesis, through the rest of the discovery pipeline.
The down votes are not because of what you're saying, but how you're saying it. I would hazard to guess.
This sub, like many others, seems extremely hostile to AI. The quote I'm replying to is honestly ridiculous and out of touch. I'm not losing sleep over downvotes or your tone policing, so don't worry.
My tone policing? My man you could be slinging slurs and I wouldn't care. Been on the Internet for a bit. At the end of the day are you just venting or trying to get a point across? If it's the former, alright.
I personally believe AI is an excellent multiplier for the human race and will eventually push us forward into a new era. Just a piece of the puzzle.
My entire department of 600+ was laid off working in medical records for a VA contractor. Including myself. Yes, it is happening.
Things have always been shit for computer science grads. You're basically dead to the industry until you have work experience.
Yup, I graduated with SoftEng honours in 2003 and found it reeeeeeaalllly tough to break into the industry, even with a year's internship placement under my belt.
That was a reasonably bad market, though, just like now.
It took me years to finally find a company willing to take a shot at someone who didn't have years of experience. The longer it took, the harder it became to explain why I wasn't in my field for all of that time. Finally had a company take a chance with me thanks to a friend in a higher position. I don't find it that difficult to get in a new company now that I'm established and doing work with Salesforce, but that initial roadblock that you have to break through is just becoming increasingly more difficult.
I graduated around then with my BS in CompSci and got offered a programming job making 6.25/hour 🫠
Yeah, in the UK but at the time I was getting offered jobs at around £12.5k a year which was just above minimum wage at the time.
That's not true at all... there was absolutely a time when new grads were snapped up as quickly as they could get degrees. Granted the more well known schools had a better time, but 15 years ago there was far more demand than supply.
Right now the problem is that supply has more than caught up with demand. And unlike other more mature industries, there's no big cohort of old folks retiring from the industry to make new space. For every new lawyer, one old one retires. For every 1 computer science retiree, there are 10 new graduates.
Then dodging outsourcing/offshoring bullets from the rest of your career.
Only until you're a senior, then you have way more job security stateside. I'm a Principal Engineer and I had to change emails to stop recruiters pounding on my door.
Probably depends on where you work. I was very experienced DBA at a US auto company and had to train my offshore replacement. I quit before I got whacked.
Yep. You either gotta apply to metric ton of jobs or find someone (like an employee or internship) who can open the door for ya and save ya all that hassle.
Yeah, getting your first foot in the door is always the hardest. It was the same for me when I graduated.
Always been shit? Then why was my company paying $200k TC to new grads and treating interns like gods (free housing + sponsored outing once a week + other perks)?
For the top 1% of grads who make it into FAANG or fintech, yeah, things are rosy. But for the majority, it isn't.
Except I've never worked at FAANG or fintech. So your assumption is already false.
You don't seem to understand what a shit job market actually looks like. Go take a look at theatre / acting / liberal arts academia, where even the best of the best get paid peanuts for years and years. That's what a shit job market is, not the opportunities for CS grads.
Why would these companies bother spending all that money on trying to woo the 1% if they can just spend an order of magnitude less money to hire, say, the 95th percentile? According to you, the 95th percentile is cheap as hell!
Because that 1% has proven to be a massive force multiplier that the 95 percentile cannot hit, the kind that is far more likely going to hit staff in 8 years and lead a bunch of projects to $$$
If you think every new grad in FAANG / fintech is gonna hit staff in 8 years, you've clearly never met these people. I have met plenty of idiots who got jobs at FAANG straight out of school (I know they're idiots because I studied with them for 4 years). Functionally speaking, it's impossible to tell if someone is at the top 1% or not simply based on the interview, and it's stupid to purely only focus on the top 1% when your interview process can't even distinguish between 99th percentile vs 95th percentile.
If you're trying to find those insane rockstars, it would be far smarter to hire 2-3 95th percentile ppl for cheap than try to gamble that the 1 person you splashed money on is gonna be a rockstar. Because you're much more likely to find a rockstar from that 2-3 95th percentile hires you made than going all in on a single person.
You know why that doesn't happen? Because the 95th percentile isn't cheap, they're expensive too. This idea that only the top 1% get everything and everyone else gets nothing is nonsense.
In a sense they do what you say though. The point of internships is literally to hire a bunch of people for cheap, identify who's actually decent and then only rehire the decent people.
You have never met an intern at FAANG / fintech if you think they're cheap. They're not, the amount of money the company spent on them in a single summer is probably more than a median first year grad earns in a year. Why on earth would they do this if 95th percentile employees were cheap as hell?
The majority of these company's new grad hires are also not returning interns so they hire plenty of non-interns regardless.
See, if you actually talked with the recruiting / HR departments about the point of these internships, it's not to filter out the people who aren't top 1%. For one thing, the bar in general is set way lower than the 99th percentile and they can't fill their headcount entirely with 1%.
Rather, internships make it more likely so that good new grads join your program, either by pressuring the interns to take the return offer before ever interviewing with another company, or create hype about the company when the interns go back to campus so that other smart grads also apply.
You people need to start understanding that just because you personally might have struggled to find a job after school, it doesn't mean it was typical or common. All the employment metrics showed the complete opposite. Do you really think these companies would blow this much money on new grads if the market for new grads wasn't good?
Tbh staff is really hard to hit in that timeline at faag-tier companies- the people who do are also many times not the same ones who stand out most in university so it's a tossup.
But yeah pretty much this.. many companies are still willing to hire 200 interns since they get the students that look highest potential early + enough time to determine if they're good without having to hire them full-tims. (firing takes a while and probably ends up being just as much spent on severance etc. as an intern costs)
And so many companies are just doing this the past year and only giving offers to former interns, which makes it much tougher if you don't go to decently ranked school and get in early now.
CS is headed the way of finance imo, bimodal salary range for those who get a CS job, with more people than before ending up in an unrelated/only somewhat related profession. And much less likely to get in without going to college for cs. Not the end of the world, but I don't see 2021 coming back
Like almost every other white collar industry?
Best career in the world, I love it. The cs subreddit is full of stressed out undergrads thinking ai is gonna take their job rn tho its worth a subscription too, new one everyday
This is the best time to be a student though. The slump will soon be over, and then you have about 10 years of good market to pay off your house and your student loans before you burn out and switch careers to selling underwear in the street
People (especially the morons on /r/singularity) think programming is all we do as SWEs. It's not. It's like 30% of the work, and sometimes you won't do any programming for a string of weeks.
It's incredible how few people understand this. They think SWE == code monkey 24/7.
I am still waiting to see an offshored eng department that actually delivers innovation and speed at the level of onshore. This is always a great idea ‘on paper’, but have yet to see it work for innovative companies.
For non tech companies or slowly dieing ‘maintenance mode’ companies it can be a decent option.
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13d
Your failing is still thinking being a software engineer as primarily being about code. That's a junior's mindset. Yes, if you're still a code-monkey then your "Old So I Want Better Pay" mindset is going to push prospective employers away. By this point in your career you should be primarily about design and architecture with code simply being how you implement those things.
Yep, as a Senior SWE myself that parent comment to me kind of reads as someone who either: is a non-developer parroting a narrative they heard elsewhere or someone who is actually quite mediocre at their job for that level of experience and can't see the forest for the trees. The actual code writing part is probably easier than its ever historically been, sure, but being able to produce code faster/cheaper does not necessarily mean lower demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).
The idea that developers are fungible code monkeys is not something you will encounter at any place you'd want to work anyhow. A junior is a fraction of the cost of a senior because they have both a fraction of the output and you literally can't hire x juniors to replace a senior, they lack the foresight and expertise to see the bigger picture of what code needs to be written to solve the problem without creating a bunch of other problems in the process.
I think the big thing is that grads need to find opportunities outside of big tech now. Even something like an HVAC company needs programmers for logic controllers. Lots of companies need programmers, or even highly competent IT people that can take on positions that benefit from solid theoretical CS foundations (even though I know a lot of my CS friends specifically tried to avoid IT), but it won't be as glamorous and it might not pay as well depending on the industry. Anything that can get your foot in the door in a CS or IT oriented position will give you related experience to put on your resume and that gives you relevant things to talk about in job interviews.
I graduated recently as a mature student and am with an environmental science company currently. And they still pay stupidly well because it's a difficult skillset for them to find and retain, so I was still able to negotiate a good compensation compared to the local COL given my prior experience/career.
If you can make good products and ship you will always be in demand.
Work is just like "group" work in college, you got one person or maaayyybeee two shipping and the others just latched on.
If you are a shipper, no worries. If you are a latcher, be worried.
Latchers love physical offices and the appearance of work lacks in shipping.
Shippers dig freedom to work where they have margin/space to produce and ship.
Learn C and work on Linux kernel projects. Generalists are not needed. Specialist will always be needed. If you can fix things in ovn/ovs I’ll hire you today at 200 K.
I think if you specialize you need to be willing to relocate. Especially since those remote jobs are getting scarce.
I’m a specialist and you aren’t wrong but don’t give out our secret lol
Our other secret is that it's harder to become deeply knowledgeable on one particular subfield than it is to know a little bit about a lot of them. So we can let the secret out, it's not like we'll be overwhelmed with competition.
Yea fair enough.
The secret: get gud.
Always has been.
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12d
True I have been doing this since grade school….
Yes, but there a lot less opportunities of employment as a specialist, and if everyone was to do that, it would also drive wages lower.
The way I look at it is that if you're an expert in your field already, it makes it easier for you to do something adjacent (like going from a network engineer to a cloud or security engineer). If you've already proven that you're an expert in your field and have all the knowledge/depth that comes with it, people will know that you can handle whatever new information is required for the new job.
I'd rather hire someone who is an expert in one thing versus someone who is okay in a variety of things. Getting to an actual expert level of knowledge is not easy.
Until the thing you specialized in for 10 years becomes irrelevant due to changing environments and you have nothing.
You still have your brain. You can specialize in something else and use knowledge transfer to give yourself an advantage.
as far as specializing in writing bare-metal kernel mode drivers you will be fine in 10 years. You are literally at the very bottom of the stack, every other direction is a nice walk downhill
How many positions do you have?
That's not true at all.
One look at a job posting website and you'll find literally thousands of job postings.
So why are so many grads unemployed?
It's very simple, many companies post jobs but don't really want to hire anyone unless they find some star talent, like, recently fired long-time senior Google employee or senior Microsoft staff ect ect.
For graduate work, these companies would much rather outsource, so they aren't responsible for these people. It's usually vastly cheaper too. For every grad student, especially in CS, there's 5 CS seniors with lots of experience who are willing to work for pennies until they catch a break and get offered a contract from a nice company.
It isn't just CS that has moved to largely temp work, basically every industry is shifting this way, and some have been doing it for YEARS and literally couldn't function without doing this. Warehouse work is such a monumental offender.
That's not true at all.
One look at a job posting website and you'll find literally thousands of job postings.
There are not thousands of new grad/entry-level job postings
Honestly outside of Tech hubs there are not even thousands of IT job postings. Its never been as good as Reddit likes to say it is and there are now too many people after those jobs. I am on a lot of personal finance and career subs and even tho the Job market has been trash for over a couple years now people are still telling desperate people they will make 6 figures and be set for life majoring in IT anything.
For real bro, that guy is clueless.
yeah its so bad now that I wanna say there were only like 750 jobs made total last year for the whole US. Like that is not the land of plenty these people are promising.
Postings vs openings are different. New grad openings are frequently mapped to a single or a handful of postings at many companies.
My team has a single req open- we have headcount for three.
A lot of these are also recruited at universities. Rarely do companies start looking at online applications because they get all their candidates at on campus job fairs.
For starters, graduate jobs and entry level jobs aren't the same thing, especially in CS.
And yes, there literally is.
Yes I understand that distinction between new grad/entry level. This article is focused on new grad roles. And there are not thousands of new grad roles. I'm a new grad and I'm checking jobs daily.
One look at a job posting website and you'll find literally thousands of job postings.
There's the reasons you list for why those aren't as good as they seem.
But one is simply that every one of those postings gets thousands of applications. You can be GREAT and not even get a call back. The top 10% of candidates don't even get a call back. They will maybe interview 10 people for that spot. So you have to have a great resume. And great in that it has to pass the initial AI screen that throws most out before anyone sees them. Then the screen of the random person who is tired of looking at resumes. So there's a lot of luck too.
So even if you are good, you're trying to be one out of 1000 (or more) on each and every job you apply to.
Why? Are we not using computers any longer? Is it more that it's exactly like it was 20 years ago where when you first graduate, unless you have 'connections' you have to find a support gig and be a grunt for a while, gain skills and experience and move on or up? Everyone I know in the field did this; it's the recent (last decade) grads that seem to think this is only the case for them.
Because there are far more people trying to get into the field than ever before
CS used to be so high in demand that you could get hired straight out of university with no connections or networking, just a decent GPA. Now it's much harder for new grads to break in with no work experience or network
I would recommend just about anyone who wants to go into CS now to take a serious look into skilled trades.
Yeah like its different for those of us who are older and are not able to physically handle the trades anymore but if I was a young kid today fuck college go straight to the Union or hell even be a police officer. Police basically cannot get fired and in 10 years you will be making 6 figures too. There is nothing stopping you from going back to school again later but you can pay it cash and not be stuck in the shitty cycle of debt + entry level jobs that can't pay bills for 5 or 6 years after college just for the industry to totally implode and your dues be worth jack shit. Several dudes I knew in college went back in their 30s and had lots of money saved up from the oilfield. If you wanna do any sort of IT work these days I tell kids to go get any full time job they can and just go to an online school that way you are not really screwed like full time students are when the degree doesn't pay off.
If you are into programming and don't mind getting your hands a little dirty (although far cleaner than any major trades) I suggest looking into industrial automation. Starting with /r/PLC and go from there. Good programmers (basic things like commenting and making proper variable names) who know what an XIC and OTE is are hard to find.
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13d
I have been doing PLC programming for almost 20 years.
It is a very jack of all trades profession. You need to know programming, electrical and mechanical design, IT, and a few other skills to be a well rounded programmer.
There are many paths to this power. From electrician to electrical engineer, from process engineering to automation design.
And PLC programming is fairly easy. If you can understand if-then statements and know an AND from an OR then you can learn how to make an XIC OTE.
This meme sums up the job well. https://www.reddit.com/r/PLC/comments/14q2h1h/when_people_ask_you_what_you_do_for_a_living/
My son just graduated high school and I tried so hard to get him to go into a trade but he just wouldn't do it. I work in IT and do ok but if I were young again in the current environment I'd definitely go Carpenter, Electrician, Plumber, etc.
Have him look into industrial automation. Code mixed with hands on work.
Put an end to outsourcing to unskilled, incompetent, offshore hacks.
Easy, H1B need ended, offshoring the jobs. Needs to be counted as H1B, fixed. Its time to force companies to train and hire domestically. If that hurts the billionaires wallets, we don't care.
AI Summary:
- Computer Science Graduates: The main article discusses the challenges faced by computer science majors graduating into a market with fewer job opportunities. Despite the popularity of the major, the tech industry’s shift in focus and the increase in graduates have made job hunting more competitive.
- Industry Shifts: There’s a significant shift in the tech industry towards artificial intelligence, which has altered the demand for traditional coding roles. Job postings for software development roles have decreased by 30% from pre-pandemic levels.
- Job Market Realities: New graduates are advised to adjust their expectations regarding job locations, salaries, and the types of firms they might work for. The article also highlights the experiences of several students navigating the current job market.
The competition is fierceful
shit happens in a cycle, today is dearth, tomorrow jobs will come back
I’m finishing my CS major in a year, dreading actually finding a job
Almost as if supply has overtaken demand or something huh?
I’m into CS in the best time, when dot matrix printer is still a thing !
More applicants than jobs available…
Instead of offshoring, my company is pretty much turning everyone they can into a developer.
I was hired as a product owner for finance software. Buisness major, project management experience, no dev experience, on purpose to uh... manage projects.
Now they found they don't have enough devs (they decided instead to hire a whole different group of PMs and make all of us who used to do it devs for some reason? More complicated then that but thats the cliff notes) so theyre trying to make me and others lile me into devs by having us watch Plural Sight vids and calling it "training."
I'm just like... wow... you realize its jist easier for me to find another job and get paid more for project management? (Not saying Id make more as a top level dev, just my current skillset/experience vs becoming an entry level dev). So on my downtime I'm applying.
They should learn to code! oh wait…
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Honestly I am in IT and actually feel like there is a real commupance here. Like when all the journalists and oil people were getting laid off I remember there being a million jeering IT Redittors harassing them with "LEARN TO CODE". Now that the shoe is on the other foot these people are learning how cruel that actually was.
As a CS grad, anybody who clowns on someone’s major choice is an idiot.
The only people who said that were journalists shitting on coal miners losing their jobs. Then journalists lost their jobs and people said it back to them in retaliation. Compsci majors aren’t writing think pieces in the WSJ or whatever
You think CS is fucked? That’s nothing against other industries that are going to be deleted by AI. White collar is being deleted.
US tech salaries are too high the imbalance in pay is so lopsided, a company can fire a US developer and hire 2-5 developers in Europe or Asia and still save money.
Those international developers are probably as productive as US developers on a like for like basis. The education system is not better in the USA, the productivity is not better in the USA.
What cause the surge in developer salaries was the supply and demand economics of BigTech companies buying up all the HR resources and then smaller companies having to compete for the same developer pool. The renumeration sky rocketed and the perks were silly.
The only difference between US and international developers is timezone and social benefits of non-Us employees. Normally health insurance, holidays, office hours, out of hours support calls, employee rights and unionizatuon are better protected in Europe and Asia. The only reason more jobs have not been transferred overseas is because of bad PR and companies learning how to ramp up international teams.
In Spain, the jobs market is picking up. Salaries are up by about 50% year on year. Spain is good because most devs speak fluent English and the productivity level is high. Same with Ireland, Germany, Holland and Sweden. The European Market is healthy for developers.
There will be work for us in the future, AI will not change that.
Normally health insurance, holidays, office hours, out of hours support calls, employee rights and unionizatuon are better protected in Europe and Asia
Might wanna rethink that with respect to Asia.
I'm from India but a US Resident now. I quit a fortune 500 company cause my manager was in India and there was just too much cultural difference and expectations.
The manager only cared about his ass and advancing his career, I can say that cause what I was doing in that one year and what I observed others were doing for 5+ years in same team, was something I would have given to an intern or a junior hire. For that I was getting paid 200k a year.
What a bunch of horse shit. WSJ as always producing the worst opinion pieces
Fuck all rich people
Here's the wallstreet journal gas lighting everyone to dance around the fact that tech firms are firing their stateside engineering staff and offshoring development and maintenance to Asia.