In the early 2010s, billionaires, tech company bosses, and even politicians urged young people to learn programming as a guarantee of future employment and six-figure salaries. However, all of this advice did not take into account the emergence of AI and its impact on the IT industry, which is currently facing numerous layoffs.
The New York Times interviewed 150 software students in the United States and found that after graduation, they had to find jobs outside their specialty — mostly in sales or catering.
“The rhetoric was that if you just learned to program, worked hard, and got your degree, you could get a six-figure starting salary.” — recalls alumna Manasi Mishra, who grew up near Silicon Valley and remembers the calls on social media from tech executives to learn computer programming.
Fast food and sales instead of IT
Mishra built her first website in elementary school, took an advanced computer science course in high school, and majored in computer science in college. However, after graduation and a year of searching for internships, she still didn’t get any offers. Finally, in July, she started working as a salesperson at a tech company.
Zach Taylor, 25, entered the computer science department at the University of Oregon in 2019 — at a time when it seemed that there were more than enough jobs in the tech industry. By the time he graduated in 2023, he had applied for a total of 5,762 jobs, been invited to 13 interviews, and had not received a single full-time offer.
“It’s hard to find motivation to keep applying.” — The guy says.
This year, Taylor applied to McDonald’s to earn a living, but was rejected because of his “lack of experience.” He is currently receiving unemployment benefits.
And what about statistics?
According to the Computing Research Association, which annually collects data from about 200 universities, last year the number of IT students in the United States exceeded 170,000, which is twice as many as in 2014.
Meanwhile, a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that among college graduates aged 22 to 27, it is computer science and computer engineering students who face the highest unemployment rates — 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively. This is almost twice the unemployment rate of recent graduates in biology and arts.
Artificial intelligence again
The main problem for graduates is that tech companies are actively deploying AI-based coding assistants, which reduces the need to hire junior software engineers. The trend is evident in downtown San Francisco, where billboard ads featuring AI tools such as CodeRabbit promise to debug code faster and better than humans.
However, the problem may not affect students of the next generation, as many universities are introducing courses using AI coding tools — the latest skills that tech companies are now demanding. Microsoft, for example, recently announced that it will allocate $4 billion to fund AI training for students and employees. Almost at the same time, when it laid off 9,000 employees.
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