As best as I can remember lot of "AI-exposed" majors also happen to be majors that are also exposed to the investment cycles that happened to turn around the release of ChatGPT.
Computer science--the only major discussed in depth in my quick read of the article--is hugely tied to venture capital spending as a career prospect, and it's extremely well documented how the pandemic boom busted right around this time.
All that to say AI has likely contributed to an extent to the decline of entry level hiring in certain sectors, but this still seems closer to millennials graduating into the financial crisis than anything
I remember when i graduated in 2013 with no job prospects my friend who was majoring in computer science and still had a year left already had three job offers from companies who contacted him. How times have changed.
CompSci is a lot less useful on its own. Pair it with subject matter knowledge and you're going to be fine.
AI hasn't killed entry level Dev jobs as much as offshoring has. A US coder costs 3 to 5 as much as one offshore. Even Canada isn't a big enough bargain anymore.
Yep, I got my MBA in ‘13 and was told to start making apps after graduation as it still seemed to be lucrative career that didn’t have a MD or DDS attached with the debt associated.
Now in my early 40s, I have zero interest in going back to school.
The idea that trades are just going to handle the onslaught of layoffs of white collar work just doesn’t work. I also don’t see the housing market staying gangbusters which we’ve had significant slowdown in the past year and half. People just CANNOT afford it. Interest rates are a bandaid on the cause.
Then there’s the power and energy that all these AI solutions end up using, not a great outlook I’m afraid.
>Computer science.....is hugely tied to venture capital spending as a career prospect, and it's extremely well documented how the pandemic boom busted right around this time.
May I add something else? Having spent a career in Higher Education spanning 15+ years, I have something to add: How most higher ed institutions update degrees is a long, manual and complex process. It goes through a myriad of reviews and approvals, which can be delayed or denied for any reason. Computer Science is a field that has been caught in the middle. Business schools and increasingly engineering (not necessarily CS) have developed a new working relationship with the colleges and universities. Largely autonomous, they can push new degrees or radical modifications to curriculum in months not years.
CS has become radically outdated. Before I departed Higher Ed., I was involved in a curriculum review (what's called cyclical review) and CS programs at a well-known, well-regarded university hadn't been materially updated since 1998 with revisions each in '02, '06, '12. '18 and '24. But, broadly speaking, the degree was the same dating back 20-ish years, and maybe longer. Students in a join BBA/BSC program could avail themselves of innovative courses - blockchain, AI (ML, GNN, LLM), Fintech, MedTech, EdTech courses - but they were hosted by the business school. CS faculty were being paid outside of their collective agreement to teach courses on contract that they couldn't get approved via the normal channels.
In part, the structure of how Higher Education works is the driver of this. I left HE because I couldn't stand watching it anymore. Institutions have manual cyclical review and accreditation processes. 500+ page documents collated by hand, and projects get done not because the workflows exist to support it, but in spite of it.
The business of education is something we don't talk about enough.
part of this for CS specifically is also that CS as a academic subject has only limited overlap with software development and is more concerned with the theoretical underbelly of computation and its limits.
You've hit on a big issue. Higher Education has begun to eliminate the "undeclared" degree (which you may think isn't germane to your point, but bear with me). The emphasis is on moving people into programs that align with interest, so people with biotechnology -> biology; software/technology -> computer science. In the past, students could undeclare, take courses in a range of programs and then figure out a path. Now we're forcing early declaration, which is making it hard to pivot. "This 18 year old wants to work with technology so let's put them into an academic field like CS" which is a trap.
I think we need to transform how we work with young learners.
If college wasn't so much money nowadays kids could take more time to figure out their major and not be as stressed about the financial impact of potentially needing another semester or two to graduate if they wait too long to declare their major or change their minds and pivot too late into college. If doing another semester or two was cheaper kids could also do that and fit in more minors or double majors to have a more diverse academic background.
That’s the other thing. Now even in Canada, engineering degrees or business degrees for domestic students are between $70,000 and $100,000 at some schools.
When you eliminate undeclared, you create artificial demand, i.e. a student in CS wants to take a CS program. They may have wanted to take an IT program or software development program, but how its tracked for purposes for reporting is: "Student A applied for CS. Student is in CS; therefore demand = met." Rather than polling or planning, it's ex post facto.
It's a real problem. It's like having the only restaurant in town and serving either a burger or salmon. People may want other things, but because 50% of the people get a burger and 50% get salmon, you're saying: "we have met the demands of 100% of our learners" is materially incorrect. It's just what options they have, rather than what they want or need.
it‘s really an issue with education overall. software development could be a 3-4 year vocational training type thing.
instead we are training people in ways meant to prepare for research at a university.
But there are other "entry level" jobs like call center agent, translator, interpreter, etc. that have highly defined job descriptions. These things are being actively replaced by AI and even a future economic recovery will never change the fact that these jobs will disappear.
Nobody majors in call center agent, so I'm not sure it's relevant to a discussion about college majors that are "exposed" to AI risk.
Translator and interpreter I can see more, though that strikes me as more of "What I had to do with my language degree" rather than "What I enrolled in my language degree for." I'm not sure what the data would bear out, but those two also strike me as quite a bit more niche in the first place than things like engineering
> Nobody majors in call center agent, so I'm not sure it's relevant to a discussion about college majors that are "exposed" to AI risk.
Respectfully, working in IT, systems engineering, etc you can not and will not find a job without experience, in fact experience is often more valuable than a degree. Call center agent/help desk was that traditional entry level position to start climbing that ladder, the only real alternative was knowing someone/being a co-op, or being a field engineer (and usually that still required evidence that you knew the systems well enough to be trusted in the field). You work there, learn how systems work, build basic troubleshooting skills, and once you have 5 or so years you move into a position where you do more actual engineering work.
Because it's the job that many people with a college degree began their careers with, in an experience-based industry, to build experience.
You often couldn't get those jobs without a degree. Without those jobs, people cannot get experience for more senior roles. Meaning, you may be an electrical engineer or a systems engineer, but you start your career in help desk. If AI replaces help desk positions, you never get experience you need to progress with your career.
I think there's a big distinction there between call center jobs broadly and specialized IT help desk kinds of jobs.
When I think call center agent, I think the person you call to change your insurance or provide basic Google-level support for when you need to return a busted iPhone. Not the tier three support who can actually dig into the logs and session replay when your company's SaaS vendor is bugging out.
The former are very much not jobs requiring a college degree and (I think) represent a large share of what people mean by "call center agent" informally. And even the latter...I mean I only have anecdotal experience to go on, but at the orgs I've seen it is still very much the case that the basic, entry level ticket triage people do not need more than a high school degree and can learn what an API is on the job to get promoted up
Up until recently, I worked as a senior product R&D engineer for the largest terrestrial network on earth, which employed over 180,000 people, around 80% of which were engineers. Generally in that industry, "tier 3" isn't call center anymore, you're usually talking to someone who is actually involved with operations or actual product engineering, at least in the telecom space. Tier 1 is call center, tier 2 is operations team OR a specialized product support desk, tier 3 would be product engineering or operations.
Our tier 1 call centers (we had scores of them) required everyone to have a degree. Even though they essentially followed pre-written LOQs (lines of questioning) that came down from more senior engineers, or our vendors. Those are the exact types of jobs being eliminated by AI because it can also follow those same LOQs, check the various systems a human was needed to inspect and interpolate information from. Those same representatives also handled sales and retention.
The company I worked at before that, in medical information systems, also required all tier 1 to have degrees. That said, they didn't promote much (Korean company, only Korean nationals got promoted, not westerners, yes it was very unambiguously racist).
I think there's a lot more low level help desk roles that require degrees than you think there are.
I still question the proportion of "call center" jobs that are the ones you describe rather than the ones I describe--the broader narrative of vanishing call center jobs for years has been off shoring rather than AI, and obviously the broad majority of offshore candidates do not have US college degrees--but will concede there are more of what you mean by this than I'd thought and that it's probably a bigger part of what the plain language definition of "call center agent" is than my own
I have no language degree. In fact, I have no degree at all, and I am still 4 courses away from a computer programming related diploma (what Americans call associate's degree) from college (what Americans call community college). However, I worked as an interpreter for 8 years with nothing more than a high school diploma, got fired and found out just how brutal the market is and how hard it would be for me to get another job as an interpreter. But getting a job in tech will be just as difficult once I graduate.
Right, so to your point, Interpreter is often a job that just requires proficiency rather than a degree in a language.
It is thus not necessarily relevant to talking about the impact of AI upon the value of a given college degree, which is what the linked article is about and I am replying to
But that's okay, I worked temporarily for a call center contracted by big insurance companies and they require certs like that and you get paid a few bucks more an hour.
You have foundation skills you can grow with here, a 2nd language is valuable, you just may have to adjust the way you look at tackling the job market.
What I'm saying is, its not too late to get the cert as you have experience.
Yeah, so your experience an an interpreter is not applicable to the discussion because it didn’t require a degree and this article is about people graduating from college with degrees.
I can count on one hand the number of call center employees that have been understandable let alone even able to help in the last decade. The handful of advanced AI customer support systems I’ve interacted with, while not bulletproof, have been a far better experience than most call center agents.
Unless AI gets a hell of a lot better, the real winners in the AI race won't be big companies, they will be the small startups. I would even say venture capitalists are going to start losing out here.
The ability for 2 developers with some business skills to start a business suddenly becomes WAY more viable, as they can use AI to handle a huge swath of startup business activities that once were just time consuming and/or required a lot more knowledge and hence a few expensive startup business people to get you off the ground, and then you need a venture capitalist to fund those hires and then you've wasted a year looking for that when you could have been making your product.
While you can't just run blindly with it, you can get pretty good information and at least get yourself versed on what you will need to be doing. Those hundreds of hours all go into the product and not needing dedicated people until MUCH later. When the company is worth a lot more and venture capitalists either get removed from the equation or sold a much small piece of the pie.
I think the opposite could be true as well. VCs are still arguably best positioned to capture the gains for the first major scaling point after the one you describe: basically the point where "real" revenue, accounting, and development teams become unavoidable.
In that scenario, it's firms investing in Seed through, say, series A or B companies that lose out. But the ones that can ride a company from, say, ten million to a hundred million in revenue get to invest in companies with simpler operations and cap tables
For sure. But each round means you make far less, and they're looking for home runs, not just a printing machine, they want the next FANG, and you also now have a halfway decent idea of where it is going before investing, which probably means you know it's not a FANG but maybe a 10x. Good but not what makes them the real money long term.
Do most early stage investors look to ride a Stripe or an Uber the whole way up though? Sure, that's the a16z or Y Combinator playbook, but I think beyond the huge brand names there are a lot of firms whose stated goal is capturing the 10x of a company running from 10m to a 100m or a 100m to a 1b valuation. Could be wrong, but I think there are funds that can't survive the full gestational cycle from seed to unicorn
There are investors that focus on every stage and size, but there has been quite a lot of inflation in VC funding in the past decade or 2. $5-10M used to be a pretty big series A, now you see a lot of seed rounds at that size. And companies used to go public much sooner because they had topped out on VC funding but now there are mature private companies raising multiple hundreds of millions in private capital.
If you have an early stage business that isn’t in the current hottest area, you probably have a harder time if you need $1M vs if you need $20M (assuming you aren’t well connected already.)
I've just watched a few people go through the process and it takes like a year to get the money. If you've done it before, not as big of a deal, if you haven't done it, you need to learn all the steps, all the requirements and then start putting together pitches and adjusting them as you go from VC to VC looking for one for your product. If you were to do it in the last year and it had the word AI in it's name, no problem. But if you were trying to create some software for washing clothing better... good luck. You're going from VC to VC pitching and repitching everything.
THOSE are the people who can just skip the VC stage or angle investor stage and go work on their project full time or part time or on weekends until it's viable.
Which just means a whole slew of new companies can give it a shot now, that probably would never make it otherwise.
I think that is where AI will really shine, at least in it's current iteration.
I think that would be a great outcome if true, but it remains to be seen. Early stage companies like that typically have pretty minimal needs for the kind of administrative work that AI currently seems to be able to replace or make more efficient, but if it allows entrepreneurs to get further along before they need outside funding then great.
I don't think I have seen much discussion about the job market in terms of investment spending, but that is a interesting way of looking at it. A lot of capital that would have gone towards new businesses or projects are simply going into purchasing GPUs and building data centers. The amount of startups or jobs being created is negligible compared to the size of capital spending.
Basically, the market is choosing to primarily invest in one area and the economy is suffering from that imbalance. Whether or not AI can perform the work of people is not yet the issue, but whether or not investors are investing in AI capital over human OPEX is.
Adding the cuts in government research spending and tariffs have turned this turned into a perfect storm.
A lot of technical sectors are cyclical. Biotech (esp if you had a newly granted advanced degree like I did) in 2011-2015 was pretty bad in my area. This is a common feature of employment for technical jobs—particular if new companies aren’t expanding/being created by vc investment (and facilitated by lower interest rates) there aren’t a lot of places for new grads to go.
Right, my understanding is that in the US especially AI investment in sucking the oxygen out of the room while higher interest rates have made some of these tech firms more risk averse.
The net result is scaling back.
That's in conjunction with AI and offshoring.
AI is certainly a factor here but it is not the key factor.
Even if ChatGPT had never been released and LLMs in general were stuck at their 2019 levels of development, the higher interest rate environment that began in 2022 to combat post-pandemic inflation would have crushed tech employment.
Big Tech overhired during the pandemic because debt was practically free and everyone was stuck at home using Big Tech’s services, and investors didn’t care about profits, they cared about growth. Interest rates were low for 15 years. Without the pandemic, rates would have begun rising in 2020 and there’d have been a tech industry recession back then. Once rates go up, investors demand to see profits and that means cost-cutting and layoffs.
Also, the reason tech workers were so highly paid in the 2000s and 2010s was… there weren’t enough skilled workers to meet demand. In response to that shortage, the general perception was that going into tech guaranteed a high-paying stable job-for-life — except, this led an entire generation to disproportionately major in CS and related programs, or make a career change with a coding bootcamp, which meant there was no longer a shortage. A glut of workers in any industry is going to put downward pressure on wages. There’s just a finite demand for the services of tech workers. This was a gold rush where supply exceeded demand.
AI is part of this story. But ChatGPT was released within months of interest rate hikes and the emergence of a glut of Gen Z young adults seeking to enter the workforce via the tech industry.
Some of them were always going to have to serve coffee and stock shelves while they figured out how to do something else.
I agree, theres probably a bigger macro story here : the end of the zero-rate / VC boom and tighter financial conditions and weaker tech investment all hit entry-level hiring. The AI may have amplified this adjustment that was underway already
I've been working as an electrician since I finished my bachelor's in 2023. I have a bachelor's and master's in computer science. I finished my master's in May. Currently interviewing for a federal job with the DoD and if I don't get that then I'm just staying as an electrician and moving to Alaska in like 4-5 years. But they asked me for references so I think I might actually get this one. I've put out 2000 applications and only got 10 interviews.
Good luck! The DoD went through a huge period of instability at the start of this administration, but it is usually able to weather funding issues easier. If the job is an internal, direct with the DoD and not a contractor you should be golden.
I know plenty of people who did the electrician route through Alaska too, and that is good money but it’s really hard work. Hopefully the DoD one works out for you.
It's internal. Part of the Army Fellows Program which is basically a 2 year internship that you get converted to competitive service at the end and goes from GS-7 to GS-12.
I just want Alaska cause of the nature and freezing cold. It's actually a pay cut compared to where I currently am. My current union hall is like $71/hr adjusted for cost of living and Alaska is $46/hr when adjusted. But the scenery of Alaska is a bit better than the miles of cornfields in the Midwest.
Having lived in Alaska and now back in the Midwest I will say that Alaska was the most beautiful place I ever lived. I never took a bad photograph there, it was impossible with the scenery it had.
But living there made me feel like I was bipolar. All summer it was run, run, run where I barely slept and was doing things like bike riding at 3am because even in Anchorage when the sun was technically down it was light enough to do stuff like that.
And all winter I was in such depths of depression that I was barely functional. I only managed to do laundry and bathe myself because going to work was the one thing keeping me sane. I’d go home and just stare at the wall until past midnight I was so depressed and messed up. It was the one time of my life I was actively suicidal and making plans to hurt myself every winter.
Some people thrive there. I thought I would be fine since I was used to winters, but the lack of light just destroyed me. I remember one day the sun came out during the winter and me and a bunch of coworker just went outside and had a snowball fight with no coats or gloves on, we were just that giddy that it wasn’t an overcast day.
Just saying that if you do Alaska, keep an exit plan. I’d love to go up there to visit again and see the sights, but I don’t think I could be paid enough to move there again. Not without having a better therapist on call because my brain could just not handle it there.
Yeah lack of light and the mental health issues associated with it is definitely a concern. I'm used to working night shift where I get little light, but I imagine Alaska is an entirely different ballgame.
I love the cold. If it's above freezing, then it's too hot. I worked in Vail, Colorado (8000ft with the ski resorts) back in the winter of 2023 cause I was remodeling the resorts and homes up there, and I've been craving for that type of weather since. Without the median home price of 1.5 million for that area of course.
I've been looking up there for awhile. I actually talked with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab that's a part of the Army Corp of Engineers like 2 years ago cause I was wanting to move to Alaska. They have offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks but are headquartered in New Hampshire. They go out to places like Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Antarctica, etc., and research how the cold affects the infrastructure, polar science, and other stuff. Them and the Air Force bases in Alaska may be where I try to transfer in like 5 years. In the meantime I'm planning vacations.
just wondering, are you single? asking cause everything i’ve read is that trying to find a mate in alaska is horrible. A state twice the size of texas with a population half the size of san antonio seems difficult
I am lol. I haven't tried dating in 6 years. I don't really care about relationships and I prefer being alone. I was in a relationship and engaged for 5 years prior.
Alaska dating has always been "the odds are good, but the goods are odd"
I graduated a while ago back in 2011 I worked in education for the past four years and I've been working part time at UPS. I saw the coming cuts in education here in Texas coming and planned on going full time at UPS eventually but that comes with seniority.
I got laid off via a Zoom Call back in July, along with like 30 other people, from my educationnon profit. I'm lucky to be at a big UPS center were full time jobs become available quick and double shifts are common.
Finding a job is an actual skill you need to learn and then practice and work on. Once you have THAT skill and you're good at it? You can do whatever you want, because finding another job, and a better paying job is much easier. When you can get reliable call backs, you can suddenly demand more up front and be confident about asking for it. When you're working, you can say no to things because if they do let you go.. You can find something else with these skills.
If you're just tossing out 2000 resumes, something is way off on your approach and you're just shot gunning the whole process.
Agreed. Finding a job is networking and professional connections. I've never submitted a resume for a job until the company asked me to as part of the formal hiring process.
Networking and professional connections is annoying and sounds daunting but it's not. Some of it is just about finding out who the CTO is of a company and then sending them a letter saying hey I noticed on your product and/or website this major issue, you should resolve it, it's hurting business. And once you get started, toss in your resume.
Tossing it into an HR blackhole is a waste of time. Tossing it onto the desk of the hiring manager.. better. Getting it on the desk someone many managers higher up? That is where things are good, because they pass it down the chain and say "Hey call this guy up." Now you've gone from a pretty good shot to a guaranteed call back at the very least.
These are the same fields that took a huge hit after the 08 meltdown. Economy goes to shit and the tech companies start shedding jobs. I've been in the tech industry since 2001, been laid off 3 times in that period. When money gets cheap and the economy is roaring (without an orange fool trying to grift everybody), the jobs in the tech industry will come back. To look at the economic situation of the US today and blame it all on AI is ignoring the 900 lb orange idiot in the corner breaking everything. AI is having an impact and it'd be silly to say it doesn't, but is it to blame for shitty job market in IT now? Nah, not from my past experiences in the field.
I graduated in 2022 with an Econ bachelors degree and moved across the country. I wasn’t able to find something in my field and pivoted to Marketing. I absolutely hated it and feel like I wasted 4 years of my career doing Marketing. I now work in insurance and have a part time retail job to bring in some extra cash. I work 7 days a week and still feel like I’m struggling financially
I graduated in 2009 and never got to use my Business degree. Literally can't do anything with it unless I got my masters and went into a specific career like accounting or finance etc.
Ended up in sales and been doing it since, mostly. Can't complain, I have a awesome and chill job now thats AI proof. But man I feel for these new grads. Been there.
You don’t need a masters to work in either finance or accounting. You don’t even need a bachelors in finance or accounting to work in finance. Just saying, if you’re still interested, you can find an in without more schooling
Even graduating from college in 2016 with a marketing degree, I still find myself down back into the retail aligned job with the same place I worked during my college days. Granted, it's not a big conglomerate of a store, but even if there's "job security", it doesn't mean anything when even those jobs don't wanna hire the help necessary to not strain those of us who either choose or are stuck at these positions.
I had to claw my way into white-collar work after college. I graduated in 2024. Hundreds of apps, nothing, not even an interview. I also finished top of my class at a good state school.
I ended up grinding in a 100% commission sales job just to get something professional on my resume. It was exhausting. But the second they promoted me to a sales leader position, I started applying for normal jobs. I landed a good one just recently, thankfully.
I’m still lucky, though. Most people my age, and the majority of those I graduated with, are having a really tough time. The ladder has been pulled up.
It was the same for me 25 years earlier. 2001 was a rough time to graduate. I ended up doing Americorps VISTA with a non-profit just to get out of retail.
Yep. Exactly what I and my friends are going through now. The debate now is whether it’s even worth it to go back to school. More debt and less time spent making money. At a certain point it seems better just to stick to a low paying job and contribute everything you can to ETFs. At least maybe later on in life you can enjoy it.
I studied history and political science then worked in investment banking. Lost my job and now I work in finance for an F50 company. My wage is in poverty levels tho 🤪
Nice. I don’t have the money and don’t want to risk taking on more debt in case it doesn’t work out again. Maybe I can try to find a sales job that pays better, but I don’t know if I have the personality for it.
Even without wanting to go, going to grad school pays more than my actual job. It’s like a dissonance realized in real life. They tell you to go to college and get a degree and do well. Did all that. After I lost my first job, I was unemployed for seven months. I was able to get a job at a nice company and pays poverty levels. Like manager at McDonald’s. The hourly rate for the PhD programs I’m applying to pays more. It’s a fucking joke. So in the most literal sense, getting a PhD pays more.
I think this exposes a larger issue with our employment and education system. For the longest time when this happened to millennials there was a gotcha moment where people would say it was your major and you should have studied something more in demand.
But now that even the “good” majors are getting a taste of what happens to most of the majors it’s beginning to become apparent that college is a bad ROI unless employers buy in as well.
Somewhere along the way employees started valuing a narrower and narrower set of skills until they stopped valuing entry level work at all.
And people will argue that employment is still high for a college grad…well yeah they had to get a job in retail or food service to pay their loans back.
They also end up in my call center making as much as me which never got a degree. I'm not saying college isn't a good thing. Learning is never bad but it sucks spending all that money to just get screamed at professionally .
People graduating from college overwhelmingly are “under employed” for a few years. This has been happening for decades. Just bigger scale and new genre of problem this decade.
I graduated 2014 and delivered sandwiches after. I knew I was fucked and graduation day was quite sad because I knew I was headed back to my childhood bedroom. It would take me 4-5 years to get my first full time salaried gig.
It really depends where you graduated from and with what degree. I am still hiring as are many other firms I know, but for genuinely useful degrees from schools with great reputations. Accounting, Finance, Engineering, Data Science etc are still starting in the 65-75K range straight out of college. No switch that to a less selective college university where everyone gets in and they're basically a diploma mill and a generic "business" degree... yeah, nobody's hiring those for competitive roles.
Engineering is a little different from science. She should be okay.
The job prospects for engineering/applied Science are far different from pure sciences. She definitely doesn't need a master's degree if engineering is her current
Computer science students/majors in restaurant and retail roles?!? That explains a lot. (I’m a prof that teaches a wide range of majors. The people-skills trends are pretty obvious.)
Yo I'ma be real dawg. I got hired to work as a programmer for a small established company and I'm getting that experience. I feel like I'm the fish out of water for the guy who graduated college with a cs degree in game design & development in the year of our AI Lords 2026
For computer science, I wonder how many of these graduates can't find jobs because they did not develop the knowledge and skill required for a job due to an over reliance on LLMs during school?
LLMs can solve essentially all homework and project assignments for CS majors. It is very likely that a significant portion of students are leaning on them to do assignments and not picking up the knowledge required to be a useful employee.
There is a whole can of worms that I am not discussing related to what should be taught to CS majors in college.
I think there's two parts. Yes we're seeing an issue with over reliance on LLMs. Just within interviews at my own company I'm seeing new grads who can't write loops properly. On the other hand, AI knowledge is basically a necessity in our work now. The expectations grew so that engineers need both the fundamentals and the ability to use AI critically, so there's a lot more to learn overall.
We're in a position now where juniors have less skills than required and we're asking for more, not less. AI knowledge is additive to software engineering knowledge.
I do think that inevitably my career will be replaced entirely though but that's not today's picture. Transitional phases like this are always the hardest, all throughout history.
...and many if the junior employees who do get jobs end up overrelying on LLMs at work and gain less experience because of it. This is a huge chicken and egg problem thats been created and very few are working on solving it, or even care at the current time.
My experience graduating in this cohort, however, is that we were prohibited from using coding agents in school and were never really taught much about them. It was usually high-level "oh, yeah, those are changing the industry quickly". So I graduated into an industry without entry level jobs and a whole new tooling set to learn.
Lazy devs have always existed. Unfortunately, they can be both lazy and prolific now, leading to a bunch of slop output and them not learning. But you can certainly learn and use coding agents at the same time.
There is incredible potential for using LLMs as tutors for learning new material or understanding complex code bases, but that also makes them a double edged sword. Like a lot of technology, whether it helps or hurts depends on how you use it.
Absolutely. I've intentionally used them to explore areas of system design that I wasn't that strong in by the time I graduated. As you say, it's how you use them.
It’s also compounded by the fact that CS is kind of a flooded field now in terms of raw employee supply coming out of or already out of school. Even where there is still demand for new hires, employers know they can ask for more in skill and offer less in compensation because they can have their pick of the litter. Combine that with AI during school and early career periods having observably detrimental effects on actual skills development and it really does paint a bleak picture overall.
Studying CS nowadays is silly to me, it’s too broad and LLMs can do what you’re studying but better. If you want to be a developer wouldn’t it be better to study a specific field (like accounting) and then work in accounting firms as cs dev where you can deploy solutions for a work environment you intricately understand? Getting a CS degree nowadays is like someone telling me they’re getting a “business” degree. Way too broad.
What LLMs produce for code is analogous to what they produce for art/images. It is impressive and can be very good, but they don't produce amazing things on their own and slop is common. An artist who knows what they are doing will create images/art using LLMs that is much better than what is produced by someone who doesn't have that experience and knowledge. The same is true for software.
Many compsci grads were barely surviving even before AI. Few were legitimately passionate about coding and companies don't want to hire those scraping by. Though CS is less about coding and more about the science but that's another issue.
I have a degree that never got used to obtaining a job but it certainly helped get me through life. I hope it works out that way for these kids and think it likely will.
I wish they’d hire them at my job to make Gemini do what they told me Gemini could do in the training. Because right now all Gemini does is tell me all the things it can’t do when I ask it to do things.
My nephews are both in college, and I told my brother unless they studying medicine they're probably just wasting time an money and would be better off learning a skilled trade like plumbing, electrician, HVAC, anything requiring hands on skills.
When I was growing up I was always told I could be anything I wanted to be, and for the most part that was true. Today, entire generations are limited and sandboxed into careers.
The skilled trades are struggling too, though. Apprenticeships are harder to come by, and there will be a glut of young people doing exactly the same. Ask a retired tradesperson how their body feels, and if they have the medical coverage to support the years of damage hard labor wrought--they don't.
I have nothing but respect for the trades, but it is not sunshine and roses.
There are, but people vastly overestimate what trades are paying because they've heard of a linesman somewhere working massive amounts of overtime and traveling all over the country making 150K-200K... that is not the reality. The vast majority are sub 100K jobs... which is fine, but the idea that college is not worth it is vastly overstated.
College is still worth it for a much smaller group of people. Yes, they are making more money, but there are a large group of college graduates that can’t find decent employment.
Medicine is a huge gamble. You need to get into med school, get through med school, get a residency and get through residency. There are simply not enough residency slots for every med school grad. Without residency an MD is worse than worthless.
That's a lot of failure points and residency is already extremely competitive and only getting more competitive.
In college you should pick a major that works without getting into med school. Only try for med school if you can count on connections to get a residency.
Lots of careers in medicine, doctor is just one path.
I was just spit balling with my brother about career paths for those in school right now and what options these kids actually have.
Ultimately, it's not my decision, but I think we can all agree these are confusing and difficult times and we all want what's best for those we care about. There was a time just being educated with any degree got you a good return on your effort, money , and time. Those days are long gone.
School isn't worth it unless it's a targeted degree like medicine. I still remember my accounting profs swearing AI wouldn't hit accounting, but it absolutely has and dried up entry level work. Also the degree is worthless without about 5 years experience behind it, generally
Easiest way to fix this is to reduce mass immigration. But nobody wants to have that conversation. They’d rather screw over Americans by suppressing wages and opportunities in favor of billionaire interests.
BarryDamonCabineer | 17 hours ago
As best as I can remember lot of "AI-exposed" majors also happen to be majors that are also exposed to the investment cycles that happened to turn around the release of ChatGPT.
Computer science--the only major discussed in depth in my quick read of the article--is hugely tied to venture capital spending as a career prospect, and it's extremely well documented how the pandemic boom busted right around this time.
All that to say AI has likely contributed to an extent to the decline of entry level hiring in certain sectors, but this still seems closer to millennials graduating into the financial crisis than anything
EconomicStatecraft | 16 hours ago
I remember when i graduated in 2013 with no job prospects my friend who was majoring in computer science and still had a year left already had three job offers from companies who contacted him. How times have changed.
FlyingBishop | 9 hours ago
In 2009 there were no CS job offers.
MrFrode | 9 hours ago
CompSci is a lot less useful on its own. Pair it with subject matter knowledge and you're going to be fine.
AI hasn't killed entry level Dev jobs as much as offshoring has. A US coder costs 3 to 5 as much as one offshore. Even Canada isn't a big enough bargain anymore.
Healthy-Bison459 | 10 hours ago
Yep, I got my MBA in ‘13 and was told to start making apps after graduation as it still seemed to be lucrative career that didn’t have a MD or DDS attached with the debt associated.
Now in my early 40s, I have zero interest in going back to school.
The idea that trades are just going to handle the onslaught of layoffs of white collar work just doesn’t work. I also don’t see the housing market staying gangbusters which we’ve had significant slowdown in the past year and half. People just CANNOT afford it. Interest rates are a bandaid on the cause.
Then there’s the power and energy that all these AI solutions end up using, not a great outlook I’m afraid.
H3rbert_K0rnfeld | 3 hours ago
The AI data center and also the normal data warehouses are powered by onsite generators using natural gas that happens to be selling at all time low.
dodgertodger | 16 hours ago
>Computer science.....is hugely tied to venture capital spending as a career prospect, and it's extremely well documented how the pandemic boom busted right around this time.
May I add something else? Having spent a career in Higher Education spanning 15+ years, I have something to add: How most higher ed institutions update degrees is a long, manual and complex process. It goes through a myriad of reviews and approvals, which can be delayed or denied for any reason. Computer Science is a field that has been caught in the middle. Business schools and increasingly engineering (not necessarily CS) have developed a new working relationship with the colleges and universities. Largely autonomous, they can push new degrees or radical modifications to curriculum in months not years.
CS has become radically outdated. Before I departed Higher Ed., I was involved in a curriculum review (what's called cyclical review) and CS programs at a well-known, well-regarded university hadn't been materially updated since 1998 with revisions each in '02, '06, '12. '18 and '24. But, broadly speaking, the degree was the same dating back 20-ish years, and maybe longer. Students in a join BBA/BSC program could avail themselves of innovative courses - blockchain, AI (ML, GNN, LLM), Fintech, MedTech, EdTech courses - but they were hosted by the business school. CS faculty were being paid outside of their collective agreement to teach courses on contract that they couldn't get approved via the normal channels.
In part, the structure of how Higher Education works is the driver of this. I left HE because I couldn't stand watching it anymore. Institutions have manual cyclical review and accreditation processes. 500+ page documents collated by hand, and projects get done not because the workflows exist to support it, but in spite of it.
The business of education is something we don't talk about enough.
hobo_stew | 16 hours ago
part of this for CS specifically is also that CS as a academic subject has only limited overlap with software development and is more concerned with the theoretical underbelly of computation and its limits.
dodgertodger | 15 hours ago
You've hit on a big issue. Higher Education has begun to eliminate the "undeclared" degree (which you may think isn't germane to your point, but bear with me). The emphasis is on moving people into programs that align with interest, so people with biotechnology -> biology; software/technology -> computer science. In the past, students could undeclare, take courses in a range of programs and then figure out a path. Now we're forcing early declaration, which is making it hard to pivot. "This 18 year old wants to work with technology so let's put them into an academic field like CS" which is a trap.
I think we need to transform how we work with young learners.
Alt4816 | 13 hours ago
If college wasn't so much money nowadays kids could take more time to figure out their major and not be as stressed about the financial impact of potentially needing another semester or two to graduate if they wait too long to declare their major or change their minds and pivot too late into college. If doing another semester or two was cheaper kids could also do that and fit in more minors or double majors to have a more diverse academic background.
dodgertodger | 13 hours ago
That’s the other thing. Now even in Canada, engineering degrees or business degrees for domestic students are between $70,000 and $100,000 at some schools.
dodgertodger | 14 hours ago
Edit: To add
When you eliminate undeclared, you create artificial demand, i.e. a student in CS wants to take a CS program. They may have wanted to take an IT program or software development program, but how its tracked for purposes for reporting is: "Student A applied for CS. Student is in CS; therefore demand = met." Rather than polling or planning, it's ex post facto.
It's a real problem. It's like having the only restaurant in town and serving either a burger or salmon. People may want other things, but because 50% of the people get a burger and 50% get salmon, you're saying: "we have met the demands of 100% of our learners" is materially incorrect. It's just what options they have, rather than what they want or need.
hobo_stew | 24 minutes ago
it‘s really an issue with education overall. software development could be a 3-4 year vocational training type thing.
instead we are training people in ways meant to prepare for research at a university.
random20190826 | 17 hours ago
But there are other "entry level" jobs like call center agent, translator, interpreter, etc. that have highly defined job descriptions. These things are being actively replaced by AI and even a future economic recovery will never change the fact that these jobs will disappear.
BarryDamonCabineer | 17 hours ago
Nobody majors in call center agent, so I'm not sure it's relevant to a discussion about college majors that are "exposed" to AI risk.
Translator and interpreter I can see more, though that strikes me as more of "What I had to do with my language degree" rather than "What I enrolled in my language degree for." I'm not sure what the data would bear out, but those two also strike me as quite a bit more niche in the first place than things like engineering
dogs_gt_cats | 15 hours ago
> Nobody majors in call center agent, so I'm not sure it's relevant to a discussion about college majors that are "exposed" to AI risk.
Respectfully, working in IT, systems engineering, etc you can not and will not find a job without experience, in fact experience is often more valuable than a degree. Call center agent/help desk was that traditional entry level position to start climbing that ladder, the only real alternative was knowing someone/being a co-op, or being a field engineer (and usually that still required evidence that you knew the systems well enough to be trusted in the field). You work there, learn how systems work, build basic troubleshooting skills, and once you have 5 or so years you move into a position where you do more actual engineering work.
BarryDamonCabineer | 15 hours ago
Right, so I'm not sure how it's a job that's relevant to discussions about the value of a college degree
dogs_gt_cats | 14 hours ago
Because it's the job that many people with a college degree began their careers with, in an experience-based industry, to build experience.
You often couldn't get those jobs without a degree. Without those jobs, people cannot get experience for more senior roles. Meaning, you may be an electrical engineer or a systems engineer, but you start your career in help desk. If AI replaces help desk positions, you never get experience you need to progress with your career.
BarryDamonCabineer | 14 hours ago
I think there's a big distinction there between call center jobs broadly and specialized IT help desk kinds of jobs.
When I think call center agent, I think the person you call to change your insurance or provide basic Google-level support for when you need to return a busted iPhone. Not the tier three support who can actually dig into the logs and session replay when your company's SaaS vendor is bugging out.
The former are very much not jobs requiring a college degree and (I think) represent a large share of what people mean by "call center agent" informally. And even the latter...I mean I only have anecdotal experience to go on, but at the orgs I've seen it is still very much the case that the basic, entry level ticket triage people do not need more than a high school degree and can learn what an API is on the job to get promoted up
dogs_gt_cats | 14 hours ago
Up until recently, I worked as a senior product R&D engineer for the largest terrestrial network on earth, which employed over 180,000 people, around 80% of which were engineers. Generally in that industry, "tier 3" isn't call center anymore, you're usually talking to someone who is actually involved with operations or actual product engineering, at least in the telecom space. Tier 1 is call center, tier 2 is operations team OR a specialized product support desk, tier 3 would be product engineering or operations.
Our tier 1 call centers (we had scores of them) required everyone to have a degree. Even though they essentially followed pre-written LOQs (lines of questioning) that came down from more senior engineers, or our vendors. Those are the exact types of jobs being eliminated by AI because it can also follow those same LOQs, check the various systems a human was needed to inspect and interpolate information from. Those same representatives also handled sales and retention.
The company I worked at before that, in medical information systems, also required all tier 1 to have degrees. That said, they didn't promote much (Korean company, only Korean nationals got promoted, not westerners, yes it was very unambiguously racist).
I think there's a lot more low level help desk roles that require degrees than you think there are.
BarryDamonCabineer | 12 hours ago
I still question the proportion of "call center" jobs that are the ones you describe rather than the ones I describe--the broader narrative of vanishing call center jobs for years has been off shoring rather than AI, and obviously the broad majority of offshore candidates do not have US college degrees--but will concede there are more of what you mean by this than I'd thought and that it's probably a bigger part of what the plain language definition of "call center agent" is than my own
random20190826 | 17 hours ago
I have no language degree. In fact, I have no degree at all, and I am still 4 courses away from a computer programming related diploma (what Americans call associate's degree) from college (what Americans call community college). However, I worked as an interpreter for 8 years with nothing more than a high school diploma, got fired and found out just how brutal the market is and how hard it would be for me to get another job as an interpreter. But getting a job in tech will be just as difficult once I graduate.
BarryDamonCabineer | 17 hours ago
Right, so to your point, Interpreter is often a job that just requires proficiency rather than a degree in a language.
It is thus not necessarily relevant to talking about the impact of AI upon the value of a given college degree, which is what the linked article is about and I am replying to
AdPuzzleheaded1495 | 17 hours ago
You can become certified at different levels for an interpreter and use that to help your job prospects a bit.
And that doesn't require a degree from my experience in the US, so your experience may vary.
random20190826 | 17 hours ago
I guess that was one more aspect--I had no certifications and was hired anyway. I had never been regulated by a professional body, etc.
AdPuzzleheaded1495 | 17 hours ago
But that's okay, I worked temporarily for a call center contracted by big insurance companies and they require certs like that and you get paid a few bucks more an hour.
You have foundation skills you can grow with here, a 2nd language is valuable, you just may have to adjust the way you look at tackling the job market.
What I'm saying is, its not too late to get the cert as you have experience.
Setting-Conscious | 16 hours ago
Yeah, so your experience an an interpreter is not applicable to the discussion because it didn’t require a degree and this article is about people graduating from college with degrees.
chabacanito | 15 hours ago
There's degrees in translation, it's not a language degree.
MrFrode | 9 hours ago
> Nobody majors in call center agent
Communications majors.
doubagilga | 17 hours ago
Much like blacksmith, hatter, and weaver.
KennyMoose32 | 17 hours ago
Yeah I always think of the guys who had to light the lamps at night before electricity. One day their job was just…..gone
bjnono001 | 17 hours ago
Elevator operators
Magnetized_Fart | 15 hours ago
those are actually making a come back because people keep pissing n shitting in elevators
shoulda-known-better | 17 hours ago
All those things absolutely still happen..... Just most on industrial scales not individuals with a craft
doubagilga | 11 hours ago
Precisely. And people screamed the loom would ruin them and broke them with hammers and resisted industrialization.
shoulda-known-better | 11 hours ago
The industrialization of it did ruin it for the skilled craftsman... Just not the industry
Cantseetheline_Russ | 17 hours ago
Not upset about the call center agents losing their jobs at all.
OddlyFactual1512 | 16 hours ago
So, you like attempting to get a machine to handle your issue?
Cantseetheline_Russ | 16 hours ago
I can count on one hand the number of call center employees that have been understandable let alone even able to help in the last decade. The handful of advanced AI customer support systems I’ve interacted with, while not bulletproof, have been a far better experience than most call center agents.
fartlorain | 15 hours ago
Yes, easily lol. My experiences recently have been so much better than humans
Dazzling-Rub-8550 | 16 hours ago
I’ve encountered some terrible agents. I’m not sure the machines could be worse.
User-no-relation | 15 hours ago
it's pretty well documented how tech way over hired through covid and then got rid of people starting in 2022
pkennedy | 17 hours ago
Unless AI gets a hell of a lot better, the real winners in the AI race won't be big companies, they will be the small startups. I would even say venture capitalists are going to start losing out here.
The ability for 2 developers with some business skills to start a business suddenly becomes WAY more viable, as they can use AI to handle a huge swath of startup business activities that once were just time consuming and/or required a lot more knowledge and hence a few expensive startup business people to get you off the ground, and then you need a venture capitalist to fund those hires and then you've wasted a year looking for that when you could have been making your product.
While you can't just run blindly with it, you can get pretty good information and at least get yourself versed on what you will need to be doing. Those hundreds of hours all go into the product and not needing dedicated people until MUCH later. When the company is worth a lot more and venture capitalists either get removed from the equation or sold a much small piece of the pie.
BarryDamonCabineer | 17 hours ago
This is a really interesting idea.
I think the opposite could be true as well. VCs are still arguably best positioned to capture the gains for the first major scaling point after the one you describe: basically the point where "real" revenue, accounting, and development teams become unavoidable.
In that scenario, it's firms investing in Seed through, say, series A or B companies that lose out. But the ones that can ride a company from, say, ten million to a hundred million in revenue get to invest in companies with simpler operations and cap tables
pkennedy | 17 hours ago
For sure. But each round means you make far less, and they're looking for home runs, not just a printing machine, they want the next FANG, and you also now have a halfway decent idea of where it is going before investing, which probably means you know it's not a FANG but maybe a 10x. Good but not what makes them the real money long term.
BarryDamonCabineer | 16 hours ago
Do most early stage investors look to ride a Stripe or an Uber the whole way up though? Sure, that's the a16z or Y Combinator playbook, but I think beyond the huge brand names there are a lot of firms whose stated goal is capturing the 10x of a company running from 10m to a 100m or a 100m to a 1b valuation. Could be wrong, but I think there are funds that can't survive the full gestational cycle from seed to unicorn
LastNightOsiris | 16 hours ago
There are investors that focus on every stage and size, but there has been quite a lot of inflation in VC funding in the past decade or 2. $5-10M used to be a pretty big series A, now you see a lot of seed rounds at that size. And companies used to go public much sooner because they had topped out on VC funding but now there are mature private companies raising multiple hundreds of millions in private capital.
If you have an early stage business that isn’t in the current hottest area, you probably have a harder time if you need $1M vs if you need $20M (assuming you aren’t well connected already.)
pkennedy | 15 hours ago
I've just watched a few people go through the process and it takes like a year to get the money. If you've done it before, not as big of a deal, if you haven't done it, you need to learn all the steps, all the requirements and then start putting together pitches and adjusting them as you go from VC to VC looking for one for your product. If you were to do it in the last year and it had the word AI in it's name, no problem. But if you were trying to create some software for washing clothing better... good luck. You're going from VC to VC pitching and repitching everything.
THOSE are the people who can just skip the VC stage or angle investor stage and go work on their project full time or part time or on weekends until it's viable.
Which just means a whole slew of new companies can give it a shot now, that probably would never make it otherwise.
I think that is where AI will really shine, at least in it's current iteration.
LastNightOsiris | 15 hours ago
I think that would be a great outcome if true, but it remains to be seen. Early stage companies like that typically have pretty minimal needs for the kind of administrative work that AI currently seems to be able to replace or make more efficient, but if it allows entrepreneurs to get further along before they need outside funding then great.
Large-Definition-940 | 14 hours ago
I don't think I have seen much discussion about the job market in terms of investment spending, but that is a interesting way of looking at it. A lot of capital that would have gone towards new businesses or projects are simply going into purchasing GPUs and building data centers. The amount of startups or jobs being created is negligible compared to the size of capital spending.
Basically, the market is choosing to primarily invest in one area and the economy is suffering from that imbalance. Whether or not AI can perform the work of people is not yet the issue, but whether or not investors are investing in AI capital over human OPEX is.
Adding the cuts in government research spending and tariffs have turned this turned into a perfect storm.
CollaWars | 17 hours ago
A lot of these jobs are corporate jobs are dependent on interest rates as well
Celestrael | 11 hours ago
I had a masters degree and was working at Best Buy.
You’ve never been promised a job in your field.
I didn’t land my big corporate job until I was 34.
YoohooCthulhu | 17 hours ago
A lot of technical sectors are cyclical. Biotech (esp if you had a newly granted advanced degree like I did) in 2011-2015 was pretty bad in my area. This is a common feature of employment for technical jobs—particular if new companies aren’t expanding/being created by vc investment (and facilitated by lower interest rates) there aren’t a lot of places for new grads to go.
Earthwarm_Revolt | 15 hours ago
I was excited for cultivated meat for its huge environmental up side but the investment capital got vacuumed out of the industry so it languishes.
OK_x86 | 10 hours ago
Right, my understanding is that in the US especially AI investment in sucking the oxygen out of the room while higher interest rates have made some of these tech firms more risk averse.
The net result is scaling back.
That's in conjunction with AI and offshoring.
AI is certainly a factor here but it is not the key factor.
zerg1980 | 8 hours ago
Even if ChatGPT had never been released and LLMs in general were stuck at their 2019 levels of development, the higher interest rate environment that began in 2022 to combat post-pandemic inflation would have crushed tech employment.
Big Tech overhired during the pandemic because debt was practically free and everyone was stuck at home using Big Tech’s services, and investors didn’t care about profits, they cared about growth. Interest rates were low for 15 years. Without the pandemic, rates would have begun rising in 2020 and there’d have been a tech industry recession back then. Once rates go up, investors demand to see profits and that means cost-cutting and layoffs.
Also, the reason tech workers were so highly paid in the 2000s and 2010s was… there weren’t enough skilled workers to meet demand. In response to that shortage, the general perception was that going into tech guaranteed a high-paying stable job-for-life — except, this led an entire generation to disproportionately major in CS and related programs, or make a career change with a coding bootcamp, which meant there was no longer a shortage. A glut of workers in any industry is going to put downward pressure on wages. There’s just a finite demand for the services of tech workers. This was a gold rush where supply exceeded demand.
AI is part of this story. But ChatGPT was released within months of interest rate hikes and the emergence of a glut of Gen Z young adults seeking to enter the workforce via the tech industry.
Some of them were always going to have to serve coffee and stock shelves while they figured out how to do something else.
Low_Ability4450 | 3 hours ago
I agree, theres probably a bigger macro story here : the end of the zero-rate / VC boom and tighter financial conditions and weaker tech investment all hit entry-level hiring. The AI may have amplified this adjustment that was underway already
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | 17 hours ago
I've been working as an electrician since I finished my bachelor's in 2023. I have a bachelor's and master's in computer science. I finished my master's in May. Currently interviewing for a federal job with the DoD and if I don't get that then I'm just staying as an electrician and moving to Alaska in like 4-5 years. But they asked me for references so I think I might actually get this one. I've put out 2000 applications and only got 10 interviews.
jaderust | 17 hours ago
Good luck! The DoD went through a huge period of instability at the start of this administration, but it is usually able to weather funding issues easier. If the job is an internal, direct with the DoD and not a contractor you should be golden.
I know plenty of people who did the electrician route through Alaska too, and that is good money but it’s really hard work. Hopefully the DoD one works out for you.
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | 17 hours ago
It's internal. Part of the Army Fellows Program which is basically a 2 year internship that you get converted to competitive service at the end and goes from GS-7 to GS-12.
I just want Alaska cause of the nature and freezing cold. It's actually a pay cut compared to where I currently am. My current union hall is like $71/hr adjusted for cost of living and Alaska is $46/hr when adjusted. But the scenery of Alaska is a bit better than the miles of cornfields in the Midwest.
jaderust | 17 hours ago
Having lived in Alaska and now back in the Midwest I will say that Alaska was the most beautiful place I ever lived. I never took a bad photograph there, it was impossible with the scenery it had.
But living there made me feel like I was bipolar. All summer it was run, run, run where I barely slept and was doing things like bike riding at 3am because even in Anchorage when the sun was technically down it was light enough to do stuff like that.
And all winter I was in such depths of depression that I was barely functional. I only managed to do laundry and bathe myself because going to work was the one thing keeping me sane. I’d go home and just stare at the wall until past midnight I was so depressed and messed up. It was the one time of my life I was actively suicidal and making plans to hurt myself every winter.
Some people thrive there. I thought I would be fine since I was used to winters, but the lack of light just destroyed me. I remember one day the sun came out during the winter and me and a bunch of coworker just went outside and had a snowball fight with no coats or gloves on, we were just that giddy that it wasn’t an overcast day.
Just saying that if you do Alaska, keep an exit plan. I’d love to go up there to visit again and see the sights, but I don’t think I could be paid enough to move there again. Not without having a better therapist on call because my brain could just not handle it there.
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | 17 hours ago
Yeah lack of light and the mental health issues associated with it is definitely a concern. I'm used to working night shift where I get little light, but I imagine Alaska is an entirely different ballgame.
I love the cold. If it's above freezing, then it's too hot. I worked in Vail, Colorado (8000ft with the ski resorts) back in the winter of 2023 cause I was remodeling the resorts and homes up there, and I've been craving for that type of weather since. Without the median home price of 1.5 million for that area of course.
I've been looking up there for awhile. I actually talked with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab that's a part of the Army Corp of Engineers like 2 years ago cause I was wanting to move to Alaska. They have offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks but are headquartered in New Hampshire. They go out to places like Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Antarctica, etc., and research how the cold affects the infrastructure, polar science, and other stuff. Them and the Air Force bases in Alaska may be where I try to transfer in like 5 years. In the meantime I'm planning vacations.
MyFeetLookLikeHands | 17 hours ago
just wondering, are you single? asking cause everything i’ve read is that trying to find a mate in alaska is horrible. A state twice the size of texas with a population half the size of san antonio seems difficult
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | 17 hours ago
I am lol. I haven't tried dating in 6 years. I don't really care about relationships and I prefer being alone. I was in a relationship and engaged for 5 years prior.
Alaska dating has always been "the odds are good, but the goods are odd"
MyFeetLookLikeHands | 16 hours ago
probably a lot more walrus bacon up that way too 😂 good luck mate!
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | 16 hours ago
Lots of nature enthusiast women wanting to move to Alaska and work seasonal jobs so if I did want something, I'm sure there's options lol.
HellisTheCPA | 16 hours ago
Ok but what is worse for dating, Alaska or the UP?
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | 16 hours ago
UP? I can only assume you're talking about the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. Otherwise I have no idea. I've been in Indiana for a bit now.
HellisTheCPA | 12 hours ago
Haha yes I'm from the Midwest, but have gone up there for skiing (IYKYK)
People are lovely, but a very different vibe than the rest of the US, imo.
_THEWATERB0Y_ | 14 hours ago
The DoD has a $1T budget. It doesn’t have any funding issues lol.
ElTamaulipas | 17 hours ago
I graduated a while ago back in 2011 I worked in education for the past four years and I've been working part time at UPS. I saw the coming cuts in education here in Texas coming and planned on going full time at UPS eventually but that comes with seniority.
I got laid off via a Zoom Call back in July, along with like 30 other people, from my educationnon profit. I'm lucky to be at a big UPS center were full time jobs become available quick and double shifts are common.
MyFeetLookLikeHands | 17 hours ago
i think i saw your post in another sub, didn’t you have to go more into a math focused role than a software related one?
MrDrSirWalrusBacon | 17 hours ago
Yeah this is an analyst role. I prefer working with data over developing software.
pkennedy | 17 hours ago
Finding a job is an actual skill you need to learn and then practice and work on. Once you have THAT skill and you're good at it? You can do whatever you want, because finding another job, and a better paying job is much easier. When you can get reliable call backs, you can suddenly demand more up front and be confident about asking for it. When you're working, you can say no to things because if they do let you go.. You can find something else with these skills.
If you're just tossing out 2000 resumes, something is way off on your approach and you're just shot gunning the whole process.
Cantseetheline_Russ | 17 hours ago
Agreed. Finding a job is networking and professional connections. I've never submitted a resume for a job until the company asked me to as part of the formal hiring process.
pkennedy | 17 hours ago
Networking and professional connections is annoying and sounds daunting but it's not. Some of it is just about finding out who the CTO is of a company and then sending them a letter saying hey I noticed on your product and/or website this major issue, you should resolve it, it's hurting business. And once you get started, toss in your resume.
Tossing it into an HR blackhole is a waste of time. Tossing it onto the desk of the hiring manager.. better. Getting it on the desk someone many managers higher up? That is where things are good, because they pass it down the chain and say "Hey call this guy up." Now you've gone from a pretty good shot to a guaranteed call back at the very least.
weatherwar | 17 hours ago
If you're submitting 2000 applications, you're doing it wrong and have been for a while.
AX_99 | 15 hours ago
Stay with the electrician route, eventually open your own business.
LogicianMission22 | 9 hours ago
Oof I’ve heard that reference checks for military jobs are very intense.
SanDiegoDude | 15 hours ago
These are the same fields that took a huge hit after the 08 meltdown. Economy goes to shit and the tech companies start shedding jobs. I've been in the tech industry since 2001, been laid off 3 times in that period. When money gets cheap and the economy is roaring (without an orange fool trying to grift everybody), the jobs in the tech industry will come back. To look at the economic situation of the US today and blame it all on AI is ignoring the 900 lb orange idiot in the corner breaking everything. AI is having an impact and it'd be silly to say it doesn't, but is it to blame for shitty job market in IT now? Nah, not from my past experiences in the field.
grlkeepgrowing | 16 hours ago
I graduated in 2022 with an Econ bachelors degree and moved across the country. I wasn’t able to find something in my field and pivoted to Marketing. I absolutely hated it and feel like I wasted 4 years of my career doing Marketing. I now work in insurance and have a part time retail job to bring in some extra cash. I work 7 days a week and still feel like I’m struggling financially
RockHardSalami | 17 hours ago
I graduated in 2009 and never got to use my Business degree. Literally can't do anything with it unless I got my masters and went into a specific career like accounting or finance etc.
Ended up in sales and been doing it since, mostly. Can't complain, I have a awesome and chill job now thats AI proof. But man I feel for these new grads. Been there.
Negative_Aerie2825 | 15 hours ago
What business degree? Those are normally broad and are you to cast a wide net. Theyre typically a good degree, sales just has a higher upside
Cantseetheline_Russ | 14 hours ago
What business degree did you get? I hire accounting, finance, marketing, OISM, RE grads etc all the time without a masters.
Runfasterbitch | 17 hours ago
You don’t need a masters to work in either finance or accounting. You don’t even need a bachelors in finance or accounting to work in finance. Just saying, if you’re still interested, you can find an in without more schooling
RockHardSalami | 16 hours ago
In areas where thats who i was competing against, yes, you do.
Particular-Break-205 | 16 hours ago
This. MBAs usually like hiring other MBAs, so it’s kind of a soft requirement.
The CPA exam required an equivalent to a masters in term of education credits to sit for the exam.
BloomInTune | 16 hours ago
Even graduating from college in 2016 with a marketing degree, I still find myself down back into the retail aligned job with the same place I worked during my college days. Granted, it's not a big conglomerate of a store, but even if there's "job security", it doesn't mean anything when even those jobs don't wanna hire the help necessary to not strain those of us who either choose or are stuck at these positions.
disignore | 11 hours ago
seams like sales is still an AI proof
sybildb | 16 hours ago
I had to claw my way into white-collar work after college. I graduated in 2024. Hundreds of apps, nothing, not even an interview. I also finished top of my class at a good state school.
I ended up grinding in a 100% commission sales job just to get something professional on my resume. It was exhausting. But the second they promoted me to a sales leader position, I started applying for normal jobs. I landed a good one just recently, thankfully.
I’m still lucky, though. Most people my age, and the majority of those I graduated with, are having a really tough time. The ladder has been pulled up.
espressocycle | 14 hours ago
It was the same for me 25 years earlier. 2001 was a rough time to graduate. I ended up doing Americorps VISTA with a non-profit just to get out of retail.
User299651 | 18 hours ago
Yep. Exactly what I and my friends are going through now. The debate now is whether it’s even worth it to go back to school. More debt and less time spent making money. At a certain point it seems better just to stick to a low paying job and contribute everything you can to ETFs. At least maybe later on in life you can enjoy it.
_tsi_ | 18 hours ago
I mean, you gotta put food on the table. The job market is rough. What did you study?
User299651 | 17 hours ago
We all studied completely different things and are experiencing the same issues. So it’s not just me picking a bad major.
_tsi_ | 12 hours ago
OK, didn't say it was. I'm just asking because me and my friends are not experiencing this, so I wanted to see what areas were.
1098duc_w_the_termi | 5 hours ago
It’s likely regional too
kgtsunvv | 16 hours ago
I studied history and political science then worked in investment banking. Lost my job and now I work in finance for an F50 company. My wage is in poverty levels tho 🤪
1-Dollar-Doge-Coins | 15 hours ago
How does someone who formerly worked in IB, who now works in finance for a F50 company, have poverty-level wages?
50Target | 12 hours ago
Same, I need to know what “poverty level” is
Mizery | 4 hours ago
Probably NYC
kgtsunvv | 15 hours ago
I’m asking myself the same question. It hurts even more because I googled my company thinking they’re like F100 or something but they’re F50
kgtsunvv | 17 hours ago
Well I’m going to grad school. I actually want to but if I didn’t I would’ve forced myself to go to law school
User299651 | 17 hours ago
Nice. I don’t have the money and don’t want to risk taking on more debt in case it doesn’t work out again. Maybe I can try to find a sales job that pays better, but I don’t know if I have the personality for it.
kgtsunvv | 16 hours ago
Even without wanting to go, going to grad school pays more than my actual job. It’s like a dissonance realized in real life. They tell you to go to college and get a degree and do well. Did all that. After I lost my first job, I was unemployed for seven months. I was able to get a job at a nice company and pays poverty levels. Like manager at McDonald’s. The hourly rate for the PhD programs I’m applying to pays more. It’s a fucking joke. So in the most literal sense, getting a PhD pays more.
FantasticMeddler | 17 hours ago
I think this exposes a larger issue with our employment and education system. For the longest time when this happened to millennials there was a gotcha moment where people would say it was your major and you should have studied something more in demand.
But now that even the “good” majors are getting a taste of what happens to most of the majors it’s beginning to become apparent that college is a bad ROI unless employers buy in as well.
Somewhere along the way employees started valuing a narrower and narrower set of skills until they stopped valuing entry level work at all.
And people will argue that employment is still high for a college grad…well yeah they had to get a job in retail or food service to pay their loans back.
RealKillerSean | 12 hours ago
I still agree with my accounting professor, college was sold as the modern gold rush and we’re learning that now. And this was like a decade ago lol
Fatefire | 11 hours ago
They also end up in my call center making as much as me which never got a degree. I'm not saying college isn't a good thing. Learning is never bad but it sucks spending all that money to just get screamed at professionally .
throwaway214203 | 17 hours ago
People graduating from college overwhelmingly are “under employed” for a few years. This has been happening for decades. Just bigger scale and new genre of problem this decade.
I graduated 2014 and delivered sandwiches after. I knew I was fucked and graduation day was quite sad because I knew I was headed back to my childhood bedroom. It would take me 4-5 years to get my first full time salaried gig.
Cantseetheline_Russ | 14 hours ago
It really depends where you graduated from and with what degree. I am still hiring as are many other firms I know, but for genuinely useful degrees from schools with great reputations. Accounting, Finance, Engineering, Data Science etc are still starting in the 65-75K range straight out of college. No switch that to a less selective college university where everyone gets in and they're basically a diploma mill and a generic "business" degree... yeah, nobody's hiring those for competitive roles.
Fantastic_Matter_137 | 17 hours ago
My life when I graduated in the early 90’s
Waiting tables and f’ng around.
It’s worse now for so many reasons
My son is 3 years in his field but I’m worried (he’s a coder)
My daughter a FR in college Doug. Chemical engineering for Now
64_hit_combo | 16 hours ago
I'm not a scientist but chemical engineering seems like something that will always be in demand
Fantastic_Matter_137 | 16 hours ago
She’s got ideas about med school but we can’t afford that.
Concerned that for any kind of science degree to be useful
You’ve got to have at least a masters.
El_Cato_Crande | 15 hours ago
Masters today is what a bachelor's was in the past
Society_Careful | 5 hours ago
Engineering is a little different from science. She should be okay.
The job prospects for engineering/applied Science are far different from pure sciences. She definitely doesn't need a master's degree if engineering is her current
Omni-impotent | 17 hours ago
Computer science students/majors in restaurant and retail roles?!? That explains a lot. (I’m a prof that teaches a wide range of majors. The people-skills trends are pretty obvious.)
LeekyOnion | 12 hours ago
Yo I'ma be real dawg. I got hired to work as a programmer for a small established company and I'm getting that experience. I feel like I'm the fish out of water for the guy who graduated college with a cs degree in game design & development in the year of our AI Lords 2026
joshocar | 17 hours ago
For computer science, I wonder how many of these graduates can't find jobs because they did not develop the knowledge and skill required for a job due to an over reliance on LLMs during school?
LLMs can solve essentially all homework and project assignments for CS majors. It is very likely that a significant portion of students are leaning on them to do assignments and not picking up the knowledge required to be a useful employee.
There is a whole can of worms that I am not discussing related to what should be taught to CS majors in college.
YeetCompleet | 17 hours ago
I think there's two parts. Yes we're seeing an issue with over reliance on LLMs. Just within interviews at my own company I'm seeing new grads who can't write loops properly. On the other hand, AI knowledge is basically a necessity in our work now. The expectations grew so that engineers need both the fundamentals and the ability to use AI critically, so there's a lot more to learn overall.
We're in a position now where juniors have less skills than required and we're asking for more, not less. AI knowledge is additive to software engineering knowledge.
I do think that inevitably my career will be replaced entirely though but that's not today's picture. Transitional phases like this are always the hardest, all throughout history.
Yourdataisunclean | 17 hours ago
...and many if the junior employees who do get jobs end up overrelying on LLMs at work and gain less experience because of it. This is a huge chicken and egg problem thats been created and very few are working on solving it, or even care at the current time.
GristForMaladyMill | 17 hours ago
Probably some.
My experience graduating in this cohort, however, is that we were prohibited from using coding agents in school and were never really taught much about them. It was usually high-level "oh, yeah, those are changing the industry quickly". So I graduated into an industry without entry level jobs and a whole new tooling set to learn.
Lazy devs have always existed. Unfortunately, they can be both lazy and prolific now, leading to a bunch of slop output and them not learning. But you can certainly learn and use coding agents at the same time.
joshocar | 17 hours ago
There is incredible potential for using LLMs as tutors for learning new material or understanding complex code bases, but that also makes them a double edged sword. Like a lot of technology, whether it helps or hurts depends on how you use it.
GristForMaladyMill | 17 hours ago
Absolutely. I've intentionally used them to explore areas of system design that I wasn't that strong in by the time I graduated. As you say, it's how you use them.
mynameisrockhard | 17 hours ago
It’s also compounded by the fact that CS is kind of a flooded field now in terms of raw employee supply coming out of or already out of school. Even where there is still demand for new hires, employers know they can ask for more in skill and offer less in compensation because they can have their pick of the litter. Combine that with AI during school and early career periods having observably detrimental effects on actual skills development and it really does paint a bleak picture overall.
CollaWars | 17 hours ago
I mean these jobs are heavily outsourced as well so I don’t think it is really it is an issue with the quality of applicants. Just cost cutting
weatherwar | 17 hours ago
CS is completely saturated. Couple that with a need for less junior staff...
Even without AI, CS is still a supply issue.
DnTnPhxRdCe | 17 hours ago
Studying CS nowadays is silly to me, it’s too broad and LLMs can do what you’re studying but better. If you want to be a developer wouldn’t it be better to study a specific field (like accounting) and then work in accounting firms as cs dev where you can deploy solutions for a work environment you intricately understand? Getting a CS degree nowadays is like someone telling me they’re getting a “business” degree. Way too broad.
joshocar | 16 hours ago
What LLMs produce for code is analogous to what they produce for art/images. It is impressive and can be very good, but they don't produce amazing things on their own and slop is common. An artist who knows what they are doing will create images/art using LLMs that is much better than what is produced by someone who doesn't have that experience and knowledge. The same is true for software.
geft | 2 hours ago
Many compsci grads were barely surviving even before AI. Few were legitimately passionate about coding and companies don't want to hire those scraping by. Though CS is less about coding and more about the science but that's another issue.
Jewboy-Deluxe | 13 hours ago
I have a degree that never got used to obtaining a job but it certainly helped get me through life. I hope it works out that way for these kids and think it likely will.
Tessady | 2 hours ago
I wish they’d hire them at my job to make Gemini do what they told me Gemini could do in the training. Because right now all Gemini does is tell me all the things it can’t do when I ask it to do things.
B00marangTrotter | 17 hours ago
My nephews are both in college, and I told my brother unless they studying medicine they're probably just wasting time an money and would be better off learning a skilled trade like plumbing, electrician, HVAC, anything requiring hands on skills.
When I was growing up I was always told I could be anything I wanted to be, and for the most part that was true. Today, entire generations are limited and sandboxed into careers.
It's fucking dystopian.
thought_provoked1 | 17 hours ago
The skilled trades are struggling too, though. Apprenticeships are harder to come by, and there will be a glut of young people doing exactly the same. Ask a retired tradesperson how their body feels, and if they have the medical coverage to support the years of damage hard labor wrought--they don't.
I have nothing but respect for the trades, but it is not sunshine and roses.
lion7725 | 17 hours ago
You shouldn’t give such poor, doomer like advice to your nephews.
There are loads of college majors that can still lead to a good career, as there always will be.
Pugsly007 | 17 hours ago
There are loads of great paying trade jobs.
DnTnPhxRdCe | 16 hours ago
I manage trades people, don’t know a single one over the age of 40 that doesn’t have some form of dependency on pain pills.
Pugsly007 | 16 hours ago
I was for 35 years and don’t take pills. Neither does my partner.
DnTnPhxRdCe | 16 hours ago
I work in heavy construction bridges and highways. Ymmv
lion7725 | 17 hours ago
I agree with you. Wasn’t saying that’s not a viable option.
Cantseetheline_Russ | 14 hours ago
There are, but people vastly overestimate what trades are paying because they've heard of a linesman somewhere working massive amounts of overtime and traveling all over the country making 150K-200K... that is not the reality. The vast majority are sub 100K jobs... which is fine, but the idea that college is not worth it is vastly overstated.
Pugsly007 | 14 hours ago
College is still worth it for a much smaller group of people. Yes, they are making more money, but there are a large group of college graduates that can’t find decent employment.
B00marangTrotter | 17 hours ago
I didn't say shit to my nephews, I was talking to my brother.
I don't have a crystal ball and neither do you, I'm just looking at the evidence in front of us.
weatherwar | 16 hours ago
The evidence in front of us still say 4-year degrees outperform long-term in terms of lifetime income.
Not to mention blue collar wear and tear on the body.
Just offering up this evidence since we're not trying to use a crystal ball.
B00marangTrotter | 16 hours ago
I agree, but the the rub is which degree path? Options are getting limited, and there's a lot of people with degrees that are essentially worthless.
Idk.
Striper_Cape | 2 hours ago
Engineering.
DnTnPhxRdCe | 16 hours ago
Terrible advice
janethefish | 17 hours ago
Medicine is a huge gamble. You need to get into med school, get through med school, get a residency and get through residency. There are simply not enough residency slots for every med school grad. Without residency an MD is worse than worthless.
That's a lot of failure points and residency is already extremely competitive and only getting more competitive.
In college you should pick a major that works without getting into med school. Only try for med school if you can count on connections to get a residency.
B00marangTrotter | 16 hours ago
Lots of careers in medicine, doctor is just one path.
I was just spit balling with my brother about career paths for those in school right now and what options these kids actually have.
Ultimately, it's not my decision, but I think we can all agree these are confusing and difficult times and we all want what's best for those we care about. There was a time just being educated with any degree got you a good return on your effort, money , and time. Those days are long gone.
NoPerformance5952 | 16 hours ago
School isn't worth it unless it's a targeted degree like medicine. I still remember my accounting profs swearing AI wouldn't hit accounting, but it absolutely has and dried up entry level work. Also the degree is worthless without about 5 years experience behind it, generally
zeroman987 | 15 hours ago
So what will happen in five years when there aren’t any accountants with five years’ experience?
I mean I know the answer. It’s only going to get worse - giving new employees uncomplicated grunt work is training, not an inefficiency.
Running_Gamer | 11 hours ago
Easiest way to fix this is to reduce mass immigration. But nobody wants to have that conversation. They’d rather screw over Americans by suppressing wages and opportunities in favor of billionaire interests.
Ataris8327 | 10 hours ago
Found the MAGA
WindwardSnow | 10 hours ago
That conversation is verboten. Legal immigration reform is totally outside the overton window.