In 2024, 21% of all bachelor's degrees awarded were Computer Science from University of Maryland College Park.
It was 3% in 2011.
I don't agree with the article that AI is wrecking job prospects. I see it is as companies are just now trending towards running leaner vs hiring every good engineer available during ZIRP.
Nonetheless, it's gotta be tough out there for new grads.
Absolutely, and this trend didn't start with the current AI boom. It started getting tough for people around ~2017 (with some exceptions in between). Before that you could likely get a job right out of a boot camp. Supply now has far outweighed demand on the junior level.
Nothing new. Circa the great recession, most of my fellow grads at a top-5 engineering school could not get jobs. Out of my friends, most of whom had internships, co-ops, and top ~10% of class, it mostly took us 6 months or so to secure a job as all our co-ops/internships cut off hiring before graduation. Many people did stuff like drive forklifts or work at walmart for awhile. Another friend of mine with a dual engineering major summa-cum-laude worked sorting screws in a screw factory, a position normally occupied by people in that town with serious mental handicaps.
I suspect it is also universities realizing that (pure) computer science has low demand so they shifted their program to either focus it on more industry-geared education, or dumb-dumbed the grade-inflation (data backs this up) enough the masses had the confidence to do it.
I was told that a student can now get a CS degree without courses in OS, Compilers, Programming Languages, theory of computing etc.
The argument being that a vast majority of jobs do not ever use the above. That may have caused a flood of grads with a shaky knowledge of the basics.
The idea that software engineering is not really a science but more of a trade for which anyone could be trained without a formal degree has some shades of truth.
But in my experience, technology changes so fast that someone with a better grasp of the basics can evolve with the tech since they understand the fundamentals better. LLMs really separate those who can critique and correct its output, and those that blindly follow it, and the former will continue to have jobs.
>The argument being that a vast majority of jobs do not ever use the above.
Yikes. At that point, it's really not much of a "CS" degree. It's a trade program that teaches you how to use particular programming languages and frameworks.
Someone with that background is in a brittle position. They won't be able to pivot as easily to different technologies when things inevitably change. And they'll be ill-equipped to handle interesting open-ended projects where it's up to them to decide what approaches to use, how to bound problems, how to reason through trade-offs, and what lessons to take from prior work.
Your theory that universities broadly started inflating grades, but miraculously excepted computer science is pretty damn bold one that you've made baselessly.
> theory that universities broadly started inflating grades, but excepted computer science is pretty damn bold one that you've made baselessly
I'm saying that a source from more than a decade ago describing a general trend doesn't explain why recent CS graduates are facing a worse job market than folks five years ago did.
Grade inflation, per your source, has been happening for decades across the board. That does not tell us why "since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks" [1].
I haven't attempted to explain why new grads are facing a worse market than 10 years ago. I've offered two possible explanations for why more students might move into computer science.
A rational actor is going to be more likely to pursue something they think they can actually pass.
> I've offered two possible explanations for why more students might move into computer science
If grade inflation is happening to all degrees, that doesn't explain increased enrollment in CS. (I'm generally curious if part of the explanation is a reduction in CS education quality.)
>(I'm generally curious if part of the explanation is a reduction in CS education quality.)
Part of my explanation was a possible increase in quality of CS education for industry, as I mentioned, it is possible they geared it more towards industry than pure CS encouraging more students to go in.
>If grade inflation is happening to all degrees, that doesn't explain increased enrollment in CS.
It does because CS is (was?) a notoriously more difficult program. Since it is one of the highest paying degrees, making that difficulty of passing more accessible would naturally shift money oriented people more into CS.
This could be the next iteration of stealing talent to prevent others from owning the market. An actually intelligent investor could dominate by bucking the trend and hire lots of smart, eager junior candidates.
When other tech companies realize GenAI will never produce what they want, there will be a rush to re-hire developers.
Top talent all started as junior talent. Grab that pool so nobody else will have it.
On a related note, we had another popular thread in HN earlier this week - (AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972151 which is quite the opposite of this original post.
What's your argument supporting this? Ten years ago GenAI couldn't produce two coherent sentences. We've come a long way, what makes you think it won't go further?
That is what my company does except we basically hire out of high school. After the founders, 100% of our employees (including myself) were hired directly as high school interns, kept for years during college, and got offers after graduation.
I wrote about this a bit. I wish we could hire more. I am kind of shocked how few companies do it. There are a LOT of smart kids who would love a summer programming job.
The issue with hiring many juniors is, when there is another dev boom, all the juniors that were hired, now mids or seniors, are going to jump ship to whoever is going to pay them the most.
So, the company can either grow talent and then pay them market rate or hire at market rates from other companies that grew them. Hiring juniors, while good for the industry in the long run, doesn't really benefit an individual company.
It is game theory and it is still why senior developers make a lot of money despite there being an oversupply of juniors.
Also, a lot of companies are not attractive enough for seniors (low job security/ not good environment/ not exciting work/ etc), so they are forced to hire juniors
> This could be the next iteration of stealing talent to prevent others from owning the market. An actually intelligent investor could dominate by bucking the trend and hire lots of smart, eager junior candidates.
First, they'd have to identify them, which the interview process at most companies is terrible at.
How much of the glut of new compsci/sweng young people is the result of real market demands, vs social media personalities creating the appearance of a demand?
My observation is that, between 2019 and 2023, there were many creators shilling this, and probably quite good livings made off views and clicks. Could social media have amplified this, “fakely”?
How many people are just assuming the study is true or false based on what you already think is the case?
Better instead to use our collective brain power for something more productive. Such as digging into the various possible causal factors and understanding if the paper properly addresses and disentangles them.
The paper tries to directly address this by showing that job market for young software devs is much worse than other occupations that aren't as affected by AI. If it was broad economic decline or fear, you'd expect to it affect job types more broadly.
Perhaps you have it backwards, and the future is gloomy because AI is wrecking young american's job prospects.
Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person. The results of that are one of the largest contributors to the gloomy future (among other things).
The future is gloomy because the American economy has largely been in a state of "jobless recovery" since thr great recession. Stock prices are up thanks to corporate tax cuts, ZIRP, AI hype etc, but discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure.
> discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure
This is false.
Real disposable personal income is higher today than any time before March 2020 [1]. Covid stimulus first dramatically raised (March '20 to '21) and then lowered (March '21 to June '22) that figure. But we hit a local maximum in April '25, after which real DPI started falling, though nevertheless only to the level we saw in spring '21 and early '25, and no point before.
(Real median household figures are more laggy. But they show the same trend [2]. On a national level, these figures are up.)
If you see how real disposable personal income is defined, it basically just says how much personal income in total there is - if 90% of it was in the hands of 1% of the people, it does not tell you that. It does not tell you a median either - it's just how big the pool is. Household incomes are up, but is that inflation adjusted, and how does that compare to cost of living? The conclusion you are coming to is not supported by the data you provided alone.
> Household incomes are up, but is that inflation adjusted
Yes. That’s what the “real” part communicates in economics data.
> how does that compare to cost of living? The conclusion you are coming to is not supported by the data you provided alone
If aggregate real personal disposable incomes are up, and real median household incomes are up, for real median household disposable incomes to be down requires an extreme increase in lower income households’ costs of living compared with higher incomes households’. (No, rising wealth wouldn’t fix that disparity because we’re measuring income and consumption, the former which exempts capital gains.)
Inflation effects are unevenly spread across households [1]. But the slope of the effect, at least as of ‘21, was insufficient to shift the median negative. What it probably was sufficient to do, especially by 2024, is shift somewhere between the lower decile to maybe quartile’s real disposable household income negative since ~2025 to 2018, when we last moderated interest rates. But not since the GFC.
TL; DR While OP’s statement is true of some households, and probably most households in the lower decile to quarter, it’s not true in general. (Caveat: it may be true if we include recent Medicaid and poverty-related cuts.)
Disposable income is income after taxes. Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for.
> Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for
You’re correct. See the personal savings rate [1]. If we observe the distribution, the lower quartile to third of households have no material savings [2].
Speaking to your point about a jobless recovery… that’s not accurate.
The US had recovered to full pre-recession employment levels by 2017[1].
Unemployment is around 4% right now.
I can’t speak to discretionary income or why the market is high, and maybe there is some sort of structural “underemployment” going on, but people are working.
Uber and Doordash count as "jobs" in the employment rolls. That's fine for people like you and me who probably have full time jobs with benefits and look at employment numbers from the angle of "how does this affect the value of my index fund?" But for the people who have these jobs as their sole source of income and rely on forms of public assistance to make ends, the reality feels far more precarious.
> Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person.
I know we're talking broadly across all industries but I can only speak to what I know and am able to observe directly.
My opinion of the average software developer with a few years experience is not very high. Yet now that we have non-coders shipping features written with LLMs, and we're starting to observe the fallout from that, I'm getting closer to saying than an entry level coder is far better than an LLM (depending on how we evaluate "better").
There are also a lot of hidden costs associated with LLMs. For example, I'm spending a lot more time reviewing PRs than I used to. And we're taking a lot more time doing rework than we were before.
We can't yet say that LLMs have caused an increase in regressions, since we've been racing towards a major new version release, and so people are rushing in general and that skews the numbers. Over time, however, we'll have data on rate of bugs introduced before the widespread company adoption of LLMs vs after, controlled for crunch times as well.
If the average software developer only spends an average of 20% of their time actually writing code, then even if an LLM can offer an optimistic 50% productivity increase, then we're only optimizing for 10% best case scenario.
I think there is a lot of marketing-hype-driven ideology around "AI" right now that is leading a lot of people to buy into some of the overstated claims. This ideology may have companies genuinely slowing down their hiring of entry-levels at the moment, since some people are saying that an LLM is like having an incompetent intern. The business thinks "If you need to babysit a junior and you need to babysit an LLM, then why pay for the junior?" And we still need better data to determine if, on average, what a company pays for a junior is truly more expensive than delegating the work to an LLM + taking on the maintenance and review overhead. We don't have the answers yet. My personal bias has me thinking that on average a junior will provide higher returns although not necessarily immediately. The benefit of a junior is that they learn from mistakes and can adapt more readily to specific business requirements.
This is not to say that LLMs aren't valuable. I think the trade-off for entry-levels is that I would have killed to have something like Cursor when I was a a pre-teen teaching myself to code in the 90s. When you want to build something complicated and don't even know where to start, and LLM can get you some scaffolding and show you a basic strategy that you can build on. Then you go fix bugs and poke around and break stuff.. it's a great learning tool. So I expect that, over time, the talent of entry-levels will probably increase. In the short term, we need to get through this AI bubble and stabilize. Companies will learn where LLMs save costs and where they can still benefit from less-experienced coders. It will just take a bit of time.
Especially given how the gov stats for unemployment rate and CPI have been changed over the years.
Example, if you dig into who we technically consider unemployed in that number, you’ll laugh.
Let’s say after 6 months of emails and ghost listings you take a break, you’re now considered “not in the labor force” which is the same category as retirees and full-time students. So that “improves” the unemployment rate
Not a hot take, but I think we’ve been in a recession/massive slowdown for much longer than the gov data shows
Willing to bet hedge funds have their own calculations of these metrics they keep secret as a market edge
Odd Lots has done a lot of interviews with Fed members these past few days as they were in Jackson Hole and they all said that "now the data looks right" as they were talking to businesses everyone was saying they weren't hiring but the job numbers had remained high. One even said he'd expect to see even worse revisions in the coming months given the anecdotal data he's seeing in the wild.
So yeah, i'd say most of this AI stuff is bullshit, if it was really this good Sam Altman wouldn't be talking about building social networks.
The data in the study shows a strong trend going back to 2022. Whether the more recent data gets revised or not, you can see a strong negative effect on young workers.
That would be worth considering as a factor, but you wouldn't expect it to so disproportionately affect young workers. Also, they are showing the same trend with receptionists, translators and customer service representatives which wouldn't have had the tax effect.
computer job market is a huge misallocation of skills and resources, so no it's not that simple.
Given how much tech debt/backlog there is, there should be enough work for everyone, just paid less.
The fact that it isn't so just shows that there are bottlenecks elsewhere - HR, companies stuck in office only mode (so there's a high floor on salaries).
Currently all I see is a mix of very highly paid do it all types with rather lowly paid outsourced talent but no sensible middle and of course no way to realistically learn on the job - the bar to get in is very high.
"While anecdotal evidence has emerged showing AI's effects on certain professions, such as software coding, there has been little harder evidence that the technology was significantly weighing on the labor market."
Anecdotal evidence accompanied by repeated wild speculation about _other_ occupations, including ones with educational and certification requirements
"The Stanford economists first looked at areas where AI can automate many of the tasks workers perform, and therefore potentially replace them. Those include jobs such as software developers, receptionists, translators and customer service representatives."
Generally, none of those require professional certification or even a college degree; they are "unregulated"
"Head counts among customer service representatives a category that, unlike software development, generally doesn't require a college education followed a similar pattern."
The author assumes that software development requires a college degree
NB. Even if it is common to have one this is not the same as a legal requirement
AI has also introduced an extra cost for the self employed, in the form of ai fee charged for AI optimisation "GAIO",on top of seo fee's on top of hosting and development costs, which can easily be more than 5% of gross for a small business starting out.
> While we find employment declines for young workers
in occupations where AI primarily automates work, we find employment growth in occupations
in which AI use is most augmentative.
Maybe there is some hope if they can't fully automate the job with AI.
I'd love for someone who has read more of the background studies to comment on how Occupational AI Exposure is being measured. The methodology sounds reasonable but I don't know anything about how they're actually labeling tasks and how reliable that process is.
I have been thinking. Maybe there is just less demand for software? Or at least less willingness to invest in it. Thus less jobs. And reasons for this is varied. Whole AI is just coincidental.
I don’t know if it’s that simple. The 1800s to mid 1900s were rife with labor disputes and real blood was spilled before any gains were distributed down the chain, and even then labor gains only lasted a couple decades
I suspect for the already wealthy this will happen, but I think the average person will largely get handed an empty basket of promises and not much else
Farming mechanization and the loom automated so much that 97% of society used to be agrarian and now it's the opposite (only 3% are farmers in developed societies), and we are much better off despite the growing pains they had. Though, it does make me nervous how fast AI automation is hitting.
That's because most of the surplus agrarian workers found new jobs from factories and service sector in cities. Industrial society needed more people to work the factory lines, transport stuff, feed those city living workers and so on. I'm not sure this latest wave of automation will be similar, because it's not obvious what new occupations increasing AI use could create, at least not in large enough amounts.
I agree to a degree. I don't see the current crop of AIs doing that. However, this might happen eventually (when is basically impossible to predict) and there is some benefit in pondering what to do if it happens, before it actually happens.
The industrial revolution provided jobs before it took them away. The tractors that took jobs from farmhands had to be built in factories with millions of people.
I think AI is going to end up more like the late 20th century automation push. It's going to hollow out whole communities.
I'm only half way through the paper but it looks like from their numbers junior level software engineering employment has returned to 2021 levels and is declining towards perhaps 2019 levels. I can't help but wonder if they have made a mistake in controlling for the hiring boom around the pandemic shift to eCommerce. It looks like they tried to eliminate factors like that, but I'm not deep enough into the study yet.
"In January 2025, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the United States – the largest number ever recorded. In the ensuing months, however, more immigrants left the country or were deported than arrived. By June, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s" [1].
Foreign born went from 4.7% of the population, to an modern high of 15.8% and has slightly backed off to 15.4% in the last year. So we are within .4 of the high point.
I'm not saying we don't have a ton of immigration. But immigration generally booms when the job market is strong. We aren't currently seeing an anomaly; the job market is weak and immigration is down.
The absolute level remains historically, though not unprecedentedly, high. But that's part of a 50-year trend that I am sceptical explains a <5-year change specific to software development.
> Doesn't change the fact that H1-Bers have turned the US IT job market harmfully hyper-competitive for US citizens
Sure, maybe. I don't know. I don't think that explains why "since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks. In contrast, employment for workers in less exposed fields and more experienced workers in the same occupations has remained stable or continued to grow" [1].
Unless the ratio of H1Bs in these fields to recent-college graduates has exploded in the last 5 years, immigration is not a sufficient explanation for the effect.
all the tech companies are filled to the brim with h1b visa holders working around the clock for average pay. this has nothing to do with ai, and everything to do with importing workers that are desperate to be here, and so work like dogs.
fresh college grads are competing with foreign visa holders that have years of experience
They aren't just looking at tech jobs in the study but all job in the data set that they've coded as being AI exposed.
> We use two different approaches for measuring occupational exposure to AI. The first uses exposure
measures from Eloundou et al. (2024). Eloundou et al. (2024) estimate AI exposure by ONET
task using ChatGPT validated with human labeling. They then construct occupational exposure
measures by aggregating the task data to the 2018 SOC code level. We focus on the GPT-4 based
β exposure measures from their paper.
>The second primary approach we take uses data on generative AI usage from the Anthropic
Economic Index (Handa et al., 2025). This index reports the estimated share of queries pertaining
to each ONET task based on a sample of several million conversations with Claude, Anthropic’s
generative AI model. It then aggregates the data to the occupational level based on these task
shares. One feature of the Anthropic Economic Index is that for each task it also reports estimates
of the share of queries pertaining to that task that are “automative,” “augmentative,” or none of
the above. We use this information as an estimate of whether usage of AI for an occupation is
primarily complementary or substitutable with labor.14
Not sure why you're getting downvoted (maybe by h1bs). Big companies abusing h1b has been all over the news. Heck a Walmart manager was just arrested for taking kickbacks related to h1bs (from the country of his origin)...
Given a long enough timeframe, I think you're right. But I don't think that's a 'near future' state, but probably a 'in a few decades' state. More generally, I believe that eventually we'll reach a 'post-work society' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-work_society).
And that'll be interesting for humanity, as we derive at least some identity from the work we're doing.
Man, I wish I had your optimism. I can see us entering "post-work", but that's only because those who own the means of production no longer require us, and our resulting crises will be much lower on Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.
Well, at the moment both "growth" and "wealth" have been removed from a lot humanity, having been abstracted into a market that most people can barely, if at all, participate in, and that has nearly entirely moved away from "you're worth $x because you make x widgets". I can't image that will disappear.
I'm not convinced that the indicators they use for growth would stop increasing. As people are so quick to point out, most of these people's worth is in the market, and that stopped being a rational actor a long while ago.
I'm talking about the belief that somehow AI will eventually do all our jobs for us. I don't personally believe that LLMs will get anywhere close to that.
Yeah, I'm definitely agreeing with you on this. Which is why I think we're probably decades out from a post-work society. I do think it's inevitable, but in an optimistic kind of way.
My take is that an LLM is not ever going to lead to AGI, it's fundamentally the wrong paradigm to develop true intelligence.
Either way, I doubt that will happen in my lifetime and I don't spend any time worrying about it.
Interesting indeed. Depending on the country you're in, "post work" will mean your value to the current violent, ruling regime is 0 or negative, with predictable consequences.
Luckily for the regime, the killbots are already here, AI-powered, and under their control.
When AI takes all the jobs, it better start ordering junk from Amazon, have a Costco membership, order in Tacos on Tuesday and watch Instagram reels all day on its brand new iPhone because all the jobless people won’t be able to.
The articles title combined with the much more middle of the road sub title and then a final request that you give them money to figure out what the fuck is going on is all you need to know about the journalists integrity.
In 2024, 21% of all bachelor's degrees awarded were Computer Science from University of Maryland College Park.
It was 3% in 2011.
I don't agree with the article that AI is wrecking job prospects. I see it is as companies are just now trending towards running leaner vs hiring every good engineer available during ZIRP.
Nonetheless, it's gotta be tough out there for new grads.
https://www.usmd.edu/IRIS/DataJournal/Degrees/?report=Degree...