A lot of new CS grads have been noting that is really hard to get a job. I’ve personally been contacted by a couple people, including outside of Twitter, about the difficulty of finding a job…

A lot of new CS grads have been noting that is really hard to get a job. I’ve personally been contacted by a couple people, including outside of Twitter, about the difficulty of finding a job. I’m sure if you’re reading this that you’ve heard some stories, too.

Here I will attempt to provide some insights as to what is going on. Basically, a massive confluence of factors has contributed to it being harder to get a job in tech, both on the demand and supply side of the market. I will cover all of these factors below.

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It’s not just computer science majors either, but related majors have also surged in popularity. Basically, computer science majors have peaked in total and have near-peaked in proportion; when including CS-adjacent majors they are at an all-time peak in both totals and proportions; and humanities majors are at all-time proportional lows.

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It should be clear when we talk about why getting a tech job is harder, we are not talking about there being some sort of tech recession; the numbers do not back that narrative up. When we talk about getting a tech job being harder, we’re talking about a higher difficulty of finding tech jobs specifically for new CS grads, which is not something that can be observed in the BLS employment data. (Anecdotally, the market still seems good for experienced software developers.)

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People talk about AI in hiring like it is replacing engineers’ jobs. That is not happening right now, it simply is not and anyone saying that is bullshitting you. I also think it probably won’t happen for an incredibly long time (probably well after you retire, if ever), and I’ll explain why later.

  • MajorHavoc
    3·
    4 months ago

    Also worth highlighting:

    We’ve been through this hype cycle before with machine learning. Companies claimed to rely on super sophisticated machine learning and data science internally, when like 90%+ of these companies were at best exaggerating and at worst lying about not only impact but even the implementations themselves.

    Not only is AI not replacing you today, the fantastical bull case of AI achieving sentience and building everything for you is nowhere in sight. It is not. Nobody knows how to achieve this! Anyone who says they know is lying! ASI has been 3 months away for the last 3 years, always based on bullshit rumors about some cryptic message an OpenAI employee said which ended up being a nothingburger. People who say ASI or AGI is around the corner are lying to you. Recent (last 3-4 years) developments in LLMs are impressive as is, you don’t need to lie about it. [2]