Until very recently, studying computer science — or some variation thereof — was considered among the best bets an incoming college freshman could make.
Now, as the New York Times reports based on interviews with experts and recent CS graduates alike, those who did are struggling to find work in fast food, nevermind as entry-level coders, amid massive tech industry layoffs — 592 per day, according to the Tech Layoff Tracker from the Trueup jobs platform — and rampant use of AI coding tools.
Born near Silicon Valley, 21-year-old Manasi Mishra said she was told from a young age that "if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary."
A precocious programmer herself, Mishra told the NYT that she made her first website as an elementary schooler and took advanced CS courses in high school before pursuing a degree in the field at Purdue. None of that seemed to prepare her for the AI shockwave that accompanied her graduation this past spring.
Instead of fighting off offers, the young programmer left college jobless — and in a now-viral TikTok video, admitted that she was interviewing at Chipotle, the fast-casual burrito chain, for a job she ultimately did not get.
In a NYT survey of more than 150 current college students and recent grads seeking to break into the tech industry, the youthful respondents shared similar stories of desperation and hopelessness. With an AI sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, these would-be tech workers are now forced to contend with a tech job market sucked dry by AI.
While some told the newspaper that they felt "gaslit" by the tech industry with its promises of massive "learn to code" investment returns, others said their primary emotion was one of depression when surveying the "soul-crushing" lack of prospects ahead of them.
It's not hard to see why: recent statistics from the New York Federal Reserve found that CS grads have a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, up from the 5.8 average for all recent grads. (Computer engineering majors, meanwhile, fare even worse, with their unemployment rate at a whopping 7.5 percent).
One such recent graduate, 25-year-old Zach Taylor, told the NYT that when he started his CS program at Oregon State University in 2019, job prospects seemed endless. By the time he graduated in 2023, in the midst of the first wave of AI-influenced tech layoffs, that rosy outlook was but a distant memory.
Despite getting an internship at a software firm last year, Taylor wasn't hired full-time. In the two years since his graduation, he has, by his count, applied to 5,762 jobs — and only gotten interviews from 13, none of which led anywhere.
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