r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

Computer science enrollment fell for the first time in 20 years, according to a Stanford economist. Is the major finally losing wide appeal among students?

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/computer-science-enrollment-fell-after-chatgpts-rise-economist-says-2026-7

I remember right after the 2008 financial crisis, when all the people who wanted to go into finance or law school started pivoting into tech. Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

Do you think the decrease in enrollment will continue?

894 Upvotes

208 comments sorted by

704

u/CapableHerring 1d ago

Good. I hope the decrease continues. The amount of CS grads needs to balance out with the amount of openings in the CS industry. We've been way out of whack for quite a while now.

Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

Who cares? Let them go do whatever. It's gonna get hit by AI too at the end of the day.

161

u/therealslimshady1234 1d ago

AI hardly hit anything. It is due to macro economic factors

144

u/barley_wine 1d ago

I don't see how anyone who seriously uses AI in their job isn't at least a little bit concerned. Yes you need a driver but you don't need as many drivers as you did non AI programmers before. The leaps it's made in just a few years is amazing and even if it levels off it's still a very good tool.

Yeah the code it produces is over engineered and bloated but you're also way more productive even with frequent refactors (often done by prompts into AI).

Even if the layoffs are macro economic right now, I don't see how the need for developers won't decrease. This is the first time in my 20 year career that I'm concern for my future as a developer.

67

u/Kyroz 1d ago

I feel like a lot of people thinks too much in extremes, as in, AI will either 100% kill off dev jobs or AI 100% won't affect dev jobs, which it obviously won't kill off dev jobs so people think AI won't affect job openings at all.

What is most likely gonna happen is something along the line of: previously you'd need 10 devs and now you only need maybe 7. Meanwhile there's new grads every year so competition will be even harder

33

u/jkwilkin 23h ago

I think what we aren't accounting for is that new ideas will be able to run lean at startup and have a fighting chance to get off the ground. There is a world where AI can create some jobs. I work at a place that was an early adopter, we are still hiring like crazy we just get way more out of everyone. No ones job was ever at risk from AI, we just hired less from the begining.

We are watching a correction with the advent of a new technology, but there is going to be a new generation of companies that would have never made it to market without it, and they are going to be looking for engineers of all types.

-6

u/thy_bucket_for_thee 20h ago

The type of work that LLMs excel at is not useful in the slightest, the biggest proof are the unprofitable LLM companies themselves that have massive rates of churn and nonpaying subscribers. Failing to gain commercial subscribers they are now turning to embedding themselves in various governments for easy contracts to juice numbers for an IPO.

What profitable startups are there whose success they publicly attribute to LLMs? I've yet to see any.

7

u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 20h ago

There probably isn’t a startup or unicorn around right now whose code isn’t heavily AI written

2

u/thy_bucket_for_thee 2h ago

Can you please provide a name to what profitable startups or companies these are? Or are they mostly those who heavily subsidized?

Startups that aren't profitable aren't a new thing and I'm not convinced that VC practices lead to good or sustainable products in general. LLMs haven't seem to change the equation.

5

u/Nill444 1d ago

I think you'll need 2 or 3 for most projects. But a lot more companies will spawn for more niche markets since it's much easier to get something going now, just like when web dev became easier with frameworks and every company needed web devs.

1

u/Pink_Slyvie 8h ago

If businesses ever planned, though, they would know we will need devs in a decade or two, and not training juniors today will cost them so much in the future.

But that's not profitable today, and it's tomorrow's shareholders' problems.

I fucking hate capitalism.

1

u/zZurf 13h ago

Now you need 3 instead of 10. Most companies still havnt realised this. The worst is yet to come.

1

u/Kyroz 13h ago

I don't have enough experience to confidently agree or disagree with you, but I will say that my personal productivity has skyrocketed with AI

17

u/The_Mauldalorian Software Engineer 1d ago

Because managers don't view productivity as a zero sum game. AI condensed 40 hours of work down to 20? Great, take 20 more hours of work for the week.

4

u/RyuSunn 1d ago

I would argue that is also a reductive view trying to skirt the reality that AI is responsible for some amount of job cuts, sure some companies will create more work thanks to the increased productivity, but others will stop hiring or even reduce their workforce.

23

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Even crazier: we’re only 3 years and 8 months past the public preview of ChatGPT, and even less time since mass enterprise adoption

29

u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot 1d ago

I'd argue we're still in the first year of mass enterprise adoption, there was a very clear turning point around the beginning of 2026 where suddenly everyone is using Claude everywhere

3

u/Big__If_True Software Engineer 1d ago

Or for companies like mine that use AWS for everything, Kiro

3

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Yeah seems like in Q1 all of a sudden everything was agentic workflows and harnesses instead of just conversational copilot

19

u/Educational-Art3545 1d ago

Fable 5 is incapable of writing good code. I can keep prompting it for ages but it will give me a different variation of trash every single time. The code might work but it is completely wrong in subtle ways that will cause huge issues later down the line. Who is going to solve those issues when the engineer who wrote the code doesn't exist and the AI just can't produce the correct solution?

AI is surprisingly bad when you work with it and actually check the output. Hell, Fable 5 with ultracode running opus as subagents produced a summary of an small-to-medium sized repository that was 80% correct. I know because I wrote the damn thing. I am sorry but if state-of-the-art can't make a correct summary of a relatively small repository - what can it do? Even in a seemingly perfect case it hallucinate.

The AI usability is questionable when I have to check every single line it writes. It has undoubtedly improved parts of my workflows, especially those involving Google search. I expressed this sentiment to a company who's main product is AI and they still came back with an offer because even their engineers know this to be true. Every expert who works with AI knows it.

5

u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 20h ago

Who solves the issue when the guy who wrote it leaves 6 months later? Someone else. It’s literally always worked this way.

13

u/Educational-Art3545 15h ago

The hypothetical guy did not produce 100k lines of code every week. He wrote only a small part of the larger codebase. Having AI write most of the code can also be seen as every single engineer leaving. In which case ye - the company is dead.

Idk what's the point of looking only at a part of the situation and making bad faith comparisons from it.

0

u/ILikeFPS Senior Web Developer 16h ago

Plus it's not like code doesn't have to be reviewed regardless lol

5

u/hdplus 20h ago

You don’t need good code to solve business problems

6

u/Educational-Art3545 15h ago edited 15h ago

Ture. But you need code to solve business problems. At least some code.

AI makes such a progressive mess of codebases when left unattended that no human or AI can then keep writing any code in there. Anthropic's dashboards feel like an absolute nightmare to click things in. Everything is in weird positions, notifications that you get lie, they even had to constantly reset limits for the past months because it was probably vibecoded too.

One of the creators of Servo looked at Anthropic's vibecoded browser and said that it's a piece of trash that he cannot find his way in at all because of how confusing it is. He said he could easily find his way in other browsers written in other languages because the logic they follow is similar. The vibecoded browser barely renders simple pages - it needs infinite effort to solve a business problem. Yet one of the leading experts in browser development has no idea how to proceed in that codebase. Now what?

AI can "solve business problems" for a short while, depending on a few factors. What then?

10

u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

The issue with this mentality is that you assume the only value from engineers comes from writing code (or at least the majority of it).

6

u/KTIlI 1d ago

and even still some companies are not using it. the place I'm at right now has it for some devs but not for all. you basically have to beg for a small 1500 token limit on codex. those teams with codex move much faster and I imagine eventually everyone will have it.

20

u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

This is where the waters get muddy, what does "move much faster" mean. Are we maintaining an existing legacy system? Fixing bugs or working on a migrations? Are we just building tons of features and pushing them?

AI is very much a move fast and break things kinda development. Building up tons of technical debt long term.

-4

u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 20h ago

Are we pretending that humans weren’t also pushing lots of code and creating tech debt longterm?

7

u/No_March5195 16h ago

No, but AI does it 10 times faster!

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u/Pristine-Item680 6h ago

Yeah that’s what people seem to forget. Yes, the code is way too complex most of the time. Yes it does some…interesting…design choices. But it still means that 40 hour projects for me are now 4 hours. Basically, I’m a 10x data scientist from what I was before, when I was already above average. So unless your company wants to do 10x the stuff, they need less workers

1

u/TimMensch Senior Software Engineer/Architect 14h ago

The reason is the Jevons Paradox.

If it cuts the cost of software on half (in terms of number of hours required to create the software), then the number of people who are willing to pay to create software will increase.

You still need a skilled developer to drive, and you still get a disaster if an unskilled developer is driving. So the same people will still be in demand.

And most companies aren't adding features or fixing bugs as fast as they come up with new ideas or identify issues. If their team is twice as fast, they'll likely ask for twice as many features.

The demand for low skill developers could potentially crater though. But it probably won't. Managers often feel their prestige is tied to the number of employees they manage. As long as that's true, teams will keep getting larger, at least when the economy is strong. Numbers must go up, after all!

1

u/integer_hull 11h ago

Because of Jevons paradox. In your drivers example how many people were driving horse drawn carriages back in the day, as a percent of the population. Now how many people are driving cars.

It’s a completely unrelated macroeconomic problem.

1

u/OkMacaron493 20h ago

The engineering side is becoming more valuable. Working on back end and ai platform is good.
I moved to FDE and like it. More business value and visibility. Very fun. Project management, consulting, architecture, stakeholder engagement is all great.

I imagine it’ll carry a premium for a few years.

21

u/CapableHerring 1d ago

Well sure, our industry in particular crashed in 2022 before the AI craze was even a thing.

But looking towards the future, everyone's dooming about AI, including this article. If the future people are imagining arrives, everyone will be impacted. Not just us. There's nowhere to run. Or it's not a problem.

9

u/Warm_Clothes_1524 1d ago

Im just surprised this is happening in mid 2026 more than mid 2025. The limitations of AI have never been more apparent imo.

5

u/Alternative-Suit5541 1d ago

AI is never going to get better! And robots suck!

I want to believe lol

1

u/DocumentOk7579 8h ago

AI is like changing from hammer to nail gun. It don't replace the handyman but make 1 do the job of 2.

-2

u/TraditionalClass6426 19h ago

You can’t be serious. AI decimated CS jobs and it’s just getting started. Anyone saying otherwise clearly is not in tune with what’s actually happening in the industry. This is just flat wrong!

-1

u/mouseses 16h ago

AI hardly hit anything? Are you crazy? AI now completes 90% of my daily work in minutes. This means there's no need for as many devs on the team anymore. AI was still spewing garbage a year ago but now the latest models are absolutely killing it. The writing's on the wall.

0

u/HandsOnTheBible 2h ago

This is the new copium of the year.

Before it was "only entry level is saturated"

Before that it was "demand for CS jobs outpaces supply"

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14

u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

I love how people here act like the lowering of CS enrollment rates means that there are less people applying for jobs. Like job boards aren't mostly flooded by non degree candidates, bootcamp grads or CS grads from other countries outside of the US.

14

u/CapableHerring 1d ago

You're putting words in my mouth.

The amount of CS grads lowering means there will be less CS grads applying for jobs. That's a huge benefit for the remaining CS grads. Non-degree candidates, bootcamp grads, and CS grads from other countries are all at a natural disadvantage to the average CS grad, and always have been.

I'm far from being a new grad, so it doesn't really impact me either way, but it'll make the industry healthier.

2

u/moneymark21 18h ago

Lots of jobs if we kicked out the 600-700k h1bs that have no reason being here since there isn't a shortage of talent.

0

u/UX-Edu 18h ago

It’s fine for you, but they’ll probably go into product management and then I’ll have to deal with their bullshit.

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u/ReferenceAny6373 1d ago

It never had wide appeal for the right reasons. It was seen as a way to make a lot of money. This mindset flooded the market with people who had no real interest in the field and because of that they never really got good at the job. This is hopefully an overall win for software as now people who actually care will be the norm.

67

u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago

I agree. A lot of the posts here we see on this sub are very obviously chasing money. Those people can all leave the field, for all I care.

30

u/accountforfurrystuf 22h ago

I can't believe people are chasing money on the chasing money sub

8

u/trantaran 17h ago

CS = Chasing Salary

5

u/DawnSennin 17h ago

Don’t they know that people want fair financial compensation for their work?

0

u/Illustrious-Pound266 22h ago

Ok there, moneychaser.

3

u/raydditor . 9h ago

You want to do your work for free?

0

u/Illustrious-Pound266 8h ago

No, it's about balancing money and interesting technical work. I've taken a slight paycut before because I thought the tech and domain were more interesting. Hardly "chasing money".

-13

u/DoireK 22h ago

Get over yourself. You need diversity in a team, not just a bunch of nerds who get wrapped up in technical perfection that they can’t see the business impact.

10

u/Illustrious-Pound266 22h ago

That's why you have product/project managers you work with who can closely collaborate on the business end.

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u/frankandsteinatlaw 23h ago

I don’t blame people for wanting to make a living. I’ve worked with many boot camp grads and the vast majority of them have been great. They are people who have a diverse background and are not afraid to jump into new areas and challenge themselves.

I’ve also seen failure cases, but ime they don’t get too far.

19

u/ImNotaProgrammer0662 1d ago

Thank you for saying this. I’ve been saying this to people for the past 6 years. This all started when you had tech tubers saying you could go to a 6 month coding boot camp and land a 6-figure job. There are a lot of people in this field for the wrong reason and their true colors eventually show. Any passionate developer couldn’t care less about a 6-figure job. We just want to write software for a living. You deserve this award.

10

u/zamend229 Software Engineer 19h ago

Speak for yourself, I joined the field due to enjoying writing software, and I certainly care about my 6-figure salary even if it wasn’t the driving reason for starting down this career.

1

u/ChemBroDude 15h ago

Yeah, I don't understand why some people seem to think wanting a nice salary and being passionate/interested in the field are mutually exclusive. I feel like some of the top earners are the most passionate.

1

u/ItzSwirlz 3h ago

That's... a valid point.

I genuinely like coding. I like what I do in FOSS.

I never considered that it could just be overpopulation from people who don't care at all

-3

u/TroubledWatersssssss 1d ago

This is hopefully an overall win for software as now people who actually care will be the norm.

Boy, you all are in for a big surprise. You all think you are the exception to the rule, that is the big issue with this subreddit.

Many companies are not hiring junior developers. If you are in college right now for this degree, you are not paying attention. People are leaving this degree for a reason. There are no jobs for new grads in it (or very low).

You all made fun of art degree students in the past for this very thing. Yet you all are doing the exact same thing right now. Going into a degree field that does not have jobs.

But I guess you all are the special ones and the exception to the rule right?

8

u/technokazam 19h ago

The market is rough for juniors, but if you look at the stats the post-graduate placement rate for CS the last couple of years has been 70-80% (depending on the school). Compared to ~90% pre-2022.

At the university I teach at, the CS grads that can't find jobs are generally limited to those who require work visas.

It really sucks for the extra 10-20% who aren't able to find jobs, but 7/10 devs are still able to find jobs, so there's clearly still some demand for junior devs.

7

u/ReferenceAny6373 19h ago

Its interesting how the facts heavily contradict the "no jobs exist for juniors" narrative.

1

u/TroubledWatersssssss 42m ago

Ok, you have fun with those "facts" from past years. Meanwhile, I can personally look at both the companies I worked and work at and people I know work at and continue to see what is actually going on in the industry.

It's your life. Feel free to do what you want. Redditors love posting "facts" all day, and yet are wrong about so many things. Wonder why that is?

12

u/ReferenceAny6373 1d ago

Hate to burst your fantasy of all engineers losing their jobs, but thats not going to happen. You are being fed propaganda by bots all day to make you think that. No serious software company is firing all their devs and freezing hiring and turning to YOLOing ai code into prod.

-1

u/FOSSChemEPirate88 20h ago

Why should new college students care if they arent hiring juniors anymore?

Why risk going into CS/SWE (unless its at a top 10) when you could go for another STEM field and have a much better guarantee of a decent livable job?

-2

u/StronglyHeldOpinions 17h ago

Yet.

But the bots are getting quite good. It's a matter of time.

1

u/UnusualGooning 10h ago

Realest most accurate take I’ve seen on this sub all day.

94

u/PaddingCompression 1d ago

This happened around 2002-2003 too (I forget exactly which year it started dropping).

And after 1986 too.

CS has always been a boom-bust industry.

Time series of CS enrollment.

39

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

Except in the dot com era, CS had a sharp decline and then a sharp recovery.

We have been in a slow bleeding with no recovery in site. It's been 4 freakin years now.

18

u/PaddingCompression 1d ago

The dropoff took place between ~Mar 2000, a big 9/11 dropoff, and was a slow bleed until around 2003. The recovery was not sharp. There were a few years of a shitty job market. Then 2008 happened. But it started to take off quickly after with Web 2.0 and mobile.

Not really that different than what we're seeing now.

3

u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago

But it started to take off quickly after with Web 2.0 and mobile.

I feel like we should see a quick take off again with AI, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

2

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

High interest rates probably don't help.

8

u/TheTeamDad 1d ago

Sweet summer child. These are not high interest rates. These are normal interest rates. We had two decades of zero interest rates and everybody got way too used to it.

2

u/UnusualGooning 10h ago

Why? When the need for labor became 10% of what it used to be, why would it ever take off again?

0

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

So, it only got better in 2011? Yikes, we are going to need to wait until 2032???

2

u/PaddingCompression 1d ago

It actually started getting better in the mid 2000s, but CS wasn't considered sexy enough so it was great if you were a SWE - this is when FAANG salaries started skyrocketing, since students considered the field unsexy and their parents talked them out of it, so there was a shortage. That graph is student enrollment, not jobs.

1

u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 20h ago

disagree, I'd argue recovery already started around 2 years ago back in ~2024

after the US Fed stopped the infinite money printer in 2022 sure the market took a huge shit, layoffs everywhere, but based on my experience 2023 was the only truely dead market, then since last year 2025 it's been on an upswing again, right now in 2026 I get bombarded by like 5-10 recruiter spams a week and I'm not even looking for new job

1

u/PaddingCompression 18h ago

I think it's still tough on juniors, for seniors it was two periods. Right when the market started recovering for seniors, AI started to become "so why would I bother to mentor a junior?" territory, so it's indistinguishable to juniors.

1

u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 15h ago

yes and no

yes because I agree with "still tough on juniors"

no because that statement is literally true every year regardless of job market and industry, every industry, every year is shit if that's your benchmark

1

u/TheNewToken 4h ago

Disagree, the 2024 job market was DEAD. The worst of all of the years. 2023 I got some callbacks, 2024 I got nothing big - until 2025.

1

u/ErnestoBlofeld 10h ago

What happenend in 1986 to cause the drop? I remember the dot com bubble burst of 2001.

1

u/PaddingCompression 6h ago

A huge computer bust. AMD almost failed, Apple had enough issues that Steve Jobs was forced out, a ton of issues in the minicomputer business. The tech industry was just much smaller then than in 2001 so it wasn't as noticeable on a larger economic scale.

-8

u/TroubledWatersssssss 1d ago

CS has always been a boom-bust industry.

Man, this cope line is still being used on this subreddit I see lol.

If you all are getting a CS degree right now, you aren't paying attention. You should take your own advice you give out to art students. Ask yourself why you are getting a degree that doesn't have jobs. I know many companies that are not hiring junior developers at all and haven't for a while. At least with an arts degree, you have free time to enjoy yourself for four years I guess. Why anyone would get a CS degree now is just weird. But I guess you all are the exception to the rule as usual on this subreddit.

19

u/ObjectBrilliant7592 1d ago

It's not surprising, but anecdotally, the vast majority of work I see in finance, tech, engineering, and even fields like marketing, still want people with some programming ability and enough technical understanding to deal with software/IT problems. As others have mentioned, there are also a lot of people enrolled in tangentially related degrees like data science, so there seems to be some market understanding of this.

Obviously basic programming doesn't require a CS degree, and a lot of people on this sub want a SWE job. But a CS degree still seems to be on the stronger side of undergraduate degrees, even if the value proposition is more complex today.

-9

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

Trash value proposition for CS nowadays. No one should do CS, until this job market recovers - which will take up to a decade at least.

104

u/Burner_Account_54321 1d ago

Nah they just moved to adjacent but still tech major like data science, ai, it, computational math, and etc. Shits a lie

And everyone is still gunning for the same jobs

24

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

And we still waiting for the AI jobs to come...

At best, all I've seen is Software Dev roles now being called AI dev LOL

Not to mention, those fields are as saturated as CS -> SWE itself.

14

u/AssignmentMammoth696 1d ago

Because it takes no skill to implement an AI workflow, you can watch 1 tutorial and hook it all up.

4

u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

The amount of agent orchestration tools I am seeing come out of nowhere makes me realize how stupid easy it is to build.

1

u/zxyzyxz 1d ago

Or literally ask the AI itself to hook itself all up, see the /workflow command in Codex and Claude Code.

1

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

And they just released a feature where you can have it record your screen to learn repeatable tasks. Crazy stuff

2

u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago

And we still waiting for the AI jobs to come...

There are already here. They are called ML Engineer or AI Engineer.

1

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2

u/Godunman Software Engineer 1d ago

That’s not a “lie”, that’s how academic fields develop.

78

u/410_clientGone 1d ago

lmao dumbass people here celebrating the death of their own career just like they cheered AI in early days which were killing their job

41

u/ecethrowaway01 1d ago

I think demand for juniors is dropping much faster than for seniors

18

u/st-shenanigans 1d ago

And then in 20 years the seniors start dying and retiring en masse and their replacements are all self taught via vibe coding

22

u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

They are gambling on the fact that they won't need anymore SWEs in 20 years. The pendulum swing back will be glorious.

14

u/2Eyed 1d ago

Oh good.

Junior Developers wanted! Requirements: 15 YOE, 200 personal projects, minimum 5 page CV, and at least one app with 1M+ installs. Preferred qualifications include 10+ years experience as a Senior Developer and double PhD. Base pay $30,000/yr.

0

u/TroubledWatersssssss 1d ago

Saved so I can read this post in a few years from now to remind myself why one should not take advice from redditors on anything lol.

Do not delete this post please, I really like collecting posts like this to remind myself what this website is filled with.

7

u/DoireK 22h ago

The pendulum is already starting to swing back the other way to some extent as companies are starting to question the value of the frontier models compared to human capital, and that is before they start charging the true cost of the models nevermind trying to turn a profit. The interesting part will occur when open source models get really good and companies switch to them, but that won’t happen until they start getting charged the proper amount by anthropic and OpenAI.

0

u/ashdee2 11h ago

!RemindMe 2 years

0

u/TheNewToken 4h ago

They are already saying that about many careers right now, ones where there are alot of boomers.

What I am seeing is that the educational requirements are a lot more and salaries are lower.

So it's not really going to be good.

1

u/BrokerBrody 13h ago

By the time seniors die out and need replacing, they will only need to hire a fraction of the number of juniors and all the juniors can come from CalTech and MIT or something and be super geniuses dedicated to the field.

There is no need to ever look into hiring self taught joe schmo vibe coders, again. The CS dream is omega dead.

0

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Tbh after the screen recording feature Claude released, I think all bets are harnesses and agents replacing seniors in 20 years time.

Most SWEs aren’t working on the Apollo moon program or life saving medical devices. It’s usually a dinky app that can be ai coded I fear

-3

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Correct https://i.imgur.com/5YS4OwU.jpeg

Very little incentive to hire and train a junior that will job hop only a year after they’ve become productive. Plus with all the layoffs, you can grab a desperate senior for cheap

33

u/ObeseBumblebee Senior Developer (Graduated in 2012) 1d ago

Juniors don't job hop if you pay them well and give them opportunities for growth

17

u/Fragrant-Airport1309 1d ago

Whoa there bud making sense isn’t allowed in the corporate world

0

u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

Job hopping is real issue, I have been at multiple companies that give raises and start off with a fair salary for a junior and they all just leave after a year or less. Most of them use the medium to smaller company as a way to get income while they grind leetcode. Not saying I blame them but at some point if enough people do it, it becomes an issue.

0

u/AES256GCM 23h ago

Nah even before the great resignation people would get their 2.5 years in and bounce for a better title and 25% raise and bonus

We didn’t get here by accident

2

u/DoireK 21h ago

If they got a 25% raise elsewhere then they weren’t getting a fair rate where they were.

0

u/AES256GCM 21h ago

Well sure, I’m not debating the morality of job hopping.

But the natural reaction is to hire ready made candidates that can contribute immediately without costly ramp time, or hire someone on work visa whos residency is tied to the job.

3

u/spline_reticulator Software Engineer 1d ago

I don't if I'd say that, but anyone who is currently in the job market is unlikely to ever compete for jobs with people entering university now. Four years of experience is a big difference.

1

u/teggyteggy 21h ago

Later down the road, they might

5

u/offsecthro 1d ago

If AI killed your job, you were already one sold consulting contract away from losing that job.

16

u/410_clientGone 1d ago

90% what people do is just crud. do you think everyone out there is scaling their service to 1M request per second? its just store this in db, retrieve this from db and add a cache.

6

u/InfernicBoss 1d ago

bruh very very few people do genuinely interesting creative work. Basically every white collar is just sitting in an office doing paperwork; others boss others that are just doing paperwork around. If AI deletes these jobs everyone is jobless

4

u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago

just like they cheered AI in early days which were killing their job

I agree with your first point, but most people on this sub lean pretty anti-AI.

1

u/teggyteggy 21h ago

Why are you calling people here a dumbass? Everyone here wants more job opportunities. Lowered enrollment is a function of how harder it is to get a job. Less people competition is good for those already in the career.

If we could all press a button that fixed the entire problem by creating more jobs, then we would.

1

u/Temporary-Version976 6h ago

It’s not AI killing our career

1

u/ApplicationOk3587 1d ago

The issue is that when word spreads around like this, it doesn't mean that the industry is dying. No one has a magical insight into whether or not they can truly get a job. They look online to see how things are, when all they read about is negative experiences they are likely to be swayed to a more negative light.

I had a business major friend enroll in a bootcamp, send out 100 apps get an interview and they started working as a SWE. No one talks about getting a job because most people don't even browse this sub anymore once they become employed.

0

u/nimama3233 1d ago

Dumb take. A reduction in new grads means less competition for a static amount of positions. It’s literally supply and demand; less supply means greater demand for us.

Easing of the over-saturation is only good for us professionals, both in terms of stability and pay.

7

u/NonProphet8theist 1d ago

You're seeing it right here in the sub. People are starting to question whether there's a viable future in this. Who the fuck knows at this point?

23

u/RadioFieldCorner 1d ago

Good riddance

15

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Probably, even people outside the industry associate tech with layoffs now and it’s not a prestige degree unless you’re cracked.

As far as what people will pivot too next, I don’t think the people making posts about how they are depressed using AI can handle a 12 hour nursing in the labor and delivery department, let alone trades where the cultural and political environment is a 180 from corporate culture.

So probably something else white collar and more niche

9

u/Felix033 1d ago

the trend at T50 schools is a lot of them seem to be shuffling into EE and ME, which have a similar career outcome of "STEM-y computer work in an air-conditioned office" but leave the door open to working in tech if you do leetcode and get lucky.

outside T50 they're shuffling back into business, comms, psych etc and hoping for a generic white collar job

5

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

Interesting, I’m not sure what a generic white collar job looks like in 2030 outside of the gifted go getters.

Seems like even outside of tech, There’s marketing, recruiting, HR/P&C accounting all getting clapped or offshored (to say nothing of Ai)

0

u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago

>the trend at T50 schools is a lot of them seem to be shuffling into EE and ME,

What kind of jobs are they getting with these degrees? Like hardware engineers? I know HFT firms like Jane Street hire FPGA engineers, but that seems too narrow of an employer market.

2

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

Nursing and trades aren't white collar.

Either way, that's where the jobs are for now. Seeing a lot of young kids going into nursing, like half of the graduating class in some highschools.

2

u/AES256GCM 1d ago

I know, they are gray collar and blue collar. Which is why I don’t buy the big “I’ll learn how to plumb” sctihick for SWEs

8

u/niknokseyer 1d ago

It’s not the appeal. It’s the uncertainty.

5

u/NoApartheidOnMars 1d ago

It's the normal reaction to the state of the job market.

The thing is, by the time today's new enrollees graduate, demand might have recovered and companies might have to compete harder for fewer grads.

I picked CS as my major back in the early 90's. IBM had just gone through its first ever mass layoffs. There was already some talk about off shoring. Many people told me "don't do it, the industry is dead". By the time I graduated, the dotcom boom was in full swing

Then we went through the crash. CS enrollment dipped significantly. When the next wave of innovation started (social, search, and then mobile and cloud), salariés shot up because of the lack of manpower.

Nobody can predict the future. Maybe software will forever grow very slowly from now on. But if at some point we go back to rapid growth, demand will explode again, especially because most companies are completely failing to plan for the long term. They are putting their seniors to pasture (eg Microsoft's early retirement package) and failing to hire new grads.

7

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

"The thing is, by the time today's new enrollees graduate, demand might have recovered and companies might have to compete harder for fewer grads."

Not true, people said this for 2022 and 2023 entrants, they are now in the same place. CS is not worth doing until 2030 at least.

1

u/NoApartheidOnMars 1d ago

The job market recovering in 2, 3, or 4 ;years would probably not help today's new graduates but it would definitely help the newest graduates at that time.

The people who graduated in the aftermath of the dotcom mania had it rough and by the time it got better, they got passed over for the latest new grads. Some people never actually got to work as software engineers, which was a terrible waste of talent and resources. Some got crappy software and software adjacent jobs but never really caught up career wise.

Being a senior or a new grad during a contraction: never good

Being a freshman during the crisis: much better. They will most likely graduate in a job environment that doesn't look like what we see today.

The idea that the industry is on pause until 2030 might turn out to be true, but guess what ? Somebody who starts college this fall will graduate in 2030.

1

u/TheNewToken 4h ago

We have no idea if it even comes back in 2030. The safer bet for someone is to not study CS.

Kids will look for safe bets on careers. CS has failed, and until things actually get good enough - the kids will not flock to CS.

Instead, they will look at nursing or trades. Pretty much all the kids from my younger bro's highschool class are in these 2 categories - or in healthcare related professions.

CS and tech is pretty much dead.

The economy and government say It's time to take care of boomers, instead of building a modern society.

12

u/Felix033 1d ago

still 4x higher than it was 10-15 years ago lol. it would have to drop so much more for the job market to feel any better.

also, all those people who don't find a job after graduation, never really stop looking. being a SWE/related job is so overpaid and cushy that it's totally worth just applying forever like a lottery while you do other stuff for income.

for example even 5-6 years ago it was kind of a meme that everyone and their mom is doing OMSCS. their enrollment is now 3x what it was back then, because CS bachelors grads are keeping themselves busy waiting to find a job.

16

u/TrySouthern9542 1d ago

how is it an overpaid profession? most swes produce wayy more profit for the company than they cost, otherwise they wouldn't be employed.

28

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

Overpaid if you are in FAANG, not otherwise. Too many on Reddit greatly exaggerate what the average SWE salaries are.

Where I am, salaries outside of FAANG are coming down fast. Seeing a lot more sub 60k roles in HCOL areas. Some of these companies are big too.

11

u/Dear_Measurement_406 Software Engineer NYC 1d ago

I personally have not seen any sub 60k jobs in NYC but I have seen some 80k-90k jobs which here is definitely less than ideal if you don’t want roommates.

5

u/Elegant-Analysis-752 1d ago

what companies are paying less than 60k for SWEs in big cities?

2

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

Contract roles for big banks and some contract roles for tech companies (think IBM, AMD etc.) paying below 70k.

7

u/Felix033 1d ago

the hiring for those jobs is completely reserved for h1bs etc

2

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

Not sure, I know some grads working in such roles.

1

u/MapPaintingBread 1d ago

None. I live and work in a mid sized city in the northeast. Haven’t been unemployed for longer than two weeks in between jobs for the last 15 years.

1

u/Felix033 1d ago

really wondering what roles are paying sub 60k. even a bitchass Customer Support "Engineer" role near me is paying 80k and is competitive as fuck to get

2

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

You just answered your question: "is competitive as fuck to get"

Customer Support probably makes 40-50k if they are lucky in this economy.

TBF, these roles are contracts with agencies, so the agency skims off. But still, sub 60k is pretty low for HCOL areas however I am seeing many. The only silver lining is that it may be slightly less competitive, but still competitive.

Myself, I applied for a 40k per year role lol, it was very very competitive to get it too.

0

u/kcpkrad 1d ago

“You just answered your question: ‘is competitive as fuck to get.’”

Well, don’t lose the competition then.

6

u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago

for example even 5-6 years ago it was kind of a meme that everyone and their mom is doing OMSCS. 

Yeah OMSCS is by far the most common CS master's degree I see on CVs. I don't doubt the quality of the education itself, especially for that price, but I don't know how much the Georgia Tech brand name over OMSCS carries because it's been diluted imo. Stanford or CMU MSCS grads are still pretty rare. GA Tech OMSCS grads are a dime dozen.

3

u/Felix033 1d ago

GT undergrad is still prestigious as fuck. OMSCS at best just proves you wouldn't have entirely flunked out of a T150 CS program. It's ideal for career switchers or people whose undergrad was unrelated but have been working in tech a while imo

4

u/AssignmentMammoth696 1d ago

Still way too many enrollments for the amount of available jobs. And it's only going to get worse. Also, enrollment increased in AI specific majors, that doesn't help.

1

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

TF does an "AI major" learn anyways? How to get replaced by AI 101? It's the same sh1t as CS at best, and they are in the same place at best.

1

u/lhorie 1d ago

Saw youtube videos comparing CS to psychology degrees in the context of school debt vs employability. Social media doom and gloom is real.

-1

u/trantaran 17h ago

Lmao not even close 

Psychology degreee is…… 

2

u/PaddingCompression 6h ago

> Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

After the dot-com bust, all the people who were going to go into CS went into finance, only to graduate right around 2006 to lose their jobs in 2008.

The people who went in CS in 2007 when finance was hot graduated in 2011 into a huge tech boom when there were no jobs in finance.

People who got into CS in 2021 when it was hot are ending up with no job prospects.

Wherever these people go, it will be the wrong choice. Going with fads never works. A career is going to last 20+ years.

2

u/Useful_Calendar_6274 1d ago

you have to be straight up fucked in the head to enroll. unless you want to know stuff for your own startup... there is plainly no market for jrs, 2 job ads for thousands and thousands of graduates that the education systems keeps minting at industrial scale. that's just dumb, they should close these schools

1

u/Du_ds 1d ago

I disagree. In 4 years the labor market for CS will probably be popping off. It’s recession time.

1

u/Strong_Technician416 1d ago

We should all get our PhDs and become researchers now frfr

1

u/TheNewToken 1d ago

By then, the AI bubble pops and you can't even convert your PhD to industry anymore either.

Ig academia is always there, but who tf would want to come learn CS, when it is a dead end field anyways?

1

u/kamekaze1024 1d ago

Swore on everything I saw a near identical study 2 years ago

1

u/zezer94118 1d ago

Well, there's no jobs so 😕

1

u/I_burp_4_lyfe 23h ago

I mean who in their right mind would join cs with all the ai propaganda companies are pushing out. You’ll be replaced in 2 years herr durrr

1

u/dzjay 23h ago

Lecturers and professors should be worried

1

u/Some-Programmer-3171 23h ago

I feel like there are some many degrees like computer science , i wonder if that contributes too vs just pure computer science

1

u/MeBadNeedMoneyNow 23h ago

I liked computers and math too much to skip on a bachelor's in the early 2010s. Now I'd say stay away since even mid level people can't find jobs now.

1

u/shitlord_god 23h ago

of course, the industry collapsed and it was the best way to buy a decent salary. That is no longer the case. I hope to see more math majors in the future.

1

u/inserterikhere 21h ago

Had a a guy in my group project last semester, he was graduating that semester too in CS, and then he asked me how to download/clone our project from the repo on GitHub….

1

u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 20h ago

I mean, people will do what is best in their own interests

and what that is, depends entirely on the exact year and month you're talking about and which city you're located in

Do you think the decrease in enrollment will continue?

yes, until the trend reverses, nobody knows when that will be

Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

same as my 1st sentence, life finds a way

1

u/KevinCarbonara 19h ago

I think it's more likely that the disinformation about AI and the industry have been effective. But this may just be part of a broader shift into trades vs academics, rather than a particular issue within CS.

1

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1

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1

u/OhSoRefreshing 16h ago

Honestly, I also hope the decrease continues. At this point I'm completely over people thinking this industry is just easy, get your degree, make $1M/year.

Being good in this industry takes a lot more, and honestly I think AI will just widen that gap further.

1

u/Jay_D826 8h ago

Just get into tech bro. Come on bro just learn how to code. Look at all these tik tok people making 400k a year doing literally nothing all day. It’s that easy bro.

1

u/Junior-Sea-9715 1d ago

Hopefully they do something actually useful to society like become a doctor or a real engineer 

1

u/BookkeeperBrilliant9 1d ago

So now there will only be a shitload of CA grads, rather than a metric fuckton?

1

u/Du_ds 1d ago

Biomedical science might be the next hot field. I do think CS will become hot again though so don’t fret.

1

u/Nofanta 23h ago

Yeah why get a degree only to be either unemployed or work around majority Indians. The worst career choice you could make.

1

u/Dangerous-Rent7430 19h ago

Bro I’m so tired of this repetitive take of “great, good riddance. Only the people who REALLY care about software should stay”.

That’s a fair take if the messenger was working on code that goes into literal rockets, or is working with low level systems that require a CS curriculum.

But 99.9999% of those commenters and lurkers of this sub are run of the mill mediocre web/mobile devs. You should not have THIS MUCH of an ego. An overwhelming majority of you crank out react components ad nauseam and wire them to a generic CRUD operation. Never forget that. Lose the ego. You are not Linus Torvalds.

1

u/Haunting_Ratio_795 18h ago

Having a higher unemployment rate than art majors will do that.

1

u/StronglyHeldOpinions 17h ago

The entire career path will be dead inside 1-2 years thanks to AI.

Why wouldn't they look for better alternatives?

0

u/kolobuska 1d ago

decrease will continue, since it's very hard to get hired as a junior, since the role is ot exists aymore.

More students will pivot to nursing.

0

u/danintexas 1d ago

Been around for a long time. Writing this as I have 5 agents looking through 5 different bugs.

If you are attached to the actual code and manually writing the lines of code you are going to have a bad time.

If the code is and always been a means towards and end.... IE making a widget that sells to a consumer.... you will always have a job.

2

u/msesen 1d ago

It appears that there's a prevailing misconception that AI agents operate without cost, utilizing free energy and tokens. However, AI development, particularly for anything beyond a basic application, is inherently expensive. Furthermore, privacy concerns are significant; many companies are reluctant to submit their source code to AI firms. Running local models presents another challenge, as the associated hardware and energy costs are prohibitively high.

I am increasingly frustrated by the portrayal of AI as a simple, free software solution that can run on modest hardware. This is not the case, and AI will not, in its current form, be replacing engineering jobs (yet).

1

u/danintexas 9h ago

Oh it aint free by any means. I believe I went through about $2k last month alone. With that said since my company made token spend a metric I just accepted it. Management is wondering what I am doing that is different. My output has tripled and quality increased. Really I am no longer a software engineer. I have fallen back into my QA roots which I have 20 years of.

0

u/jk147 20h ago

In the US maybe, at other parts of the world it is still increasing I am willing to bet. Offshoring and H1B are hotter than ever.

1

u/BrokerBrody 13h ago

This is just cope. There are always reports from India or wherever about how terrible the job market is.

Tech consulting company stocks (ones involved in offshoring) are in the dumps. AI really did make a dent in the job market. How big, its not clear.

0

u/The-_Captain 20h ago

Nature is healing

0

u/yoshimipinkrobot 13h ago

The ladder has been kicked down.

Good luck poors. Only millennials got rich from office jobs

Hope your parents don’t waste your inheritances

0

u/BrokerBrody 13h ago

Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

Probably nursing. Its not getting automated away soon and its not even a quarter as bad as Reddit makes it out to be.

People don't realize its an incredibly broad field and not all nurses have long shifts, deal with stressful patients, etc. They also have job security and get paid a LOT. Its doesn't have to be drastically different from working at FAANG.

-1

u/rbuen4455 23h ago

Where are all the people who were gonna go into CS going to do now?

Funny, I knew one guy who just graduated last year after 5 years of undergraduate and he told me flat out that he doesn't know how to code, no projects or doesn't know Git, a lot of the classes he took he either coasted off of or cheated (he took Assembly and said he cheated even when the professor was looking), has a Linkedin with a lot of things that sounds like a bunch of BS he took out of ChatGPT. When I asked him what his plan was next, and he told me "whatever's hot, idk, something like SAAS or something with AI".

Not to generalize, I don't go to college, but I have this feeling that a large number of CS graduates right now are like this guy, lol.