Professor Warns CS Graduates are Struggling to Find Jobs (yahoo.com) 70
"Computer science went from a future-proof career to an industry in upheaval in a shockingly small amount of time," writes Business Insider, citing remarks from UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid said during a recent episode of Nova's "Particles of Thought" podcast.
"Our students typically had five internship offers throughout their first four years of college," Farid said. "They would graduate with exceedingly high salaries, multiple offers. They had the run of the place. That is not happening today. They're happy to get one job offer...." It's too easy to just blame AI, though, Farid said. "Something is happening in the industry," he said. "I think it's a confluence of many things. I think AI is part of it. I think there's a thinning of the ranks that's happening, that's part of it, but something is brewing..."
Farid, one of the world's experts on deepfake videos, said he is often asked for advice. He said what he tells students has changed... "Now, I think I'm telling people to be good at a lot of different things because we don't know what the future holds."
Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't. "I don't think AI is going to put lawyers out of business, but I think lawyers who use AI will put those who don't use AI out of business," he said. "And I think you can say that about every profession."
"Our students typically had five internship offers throughout their first four years of college," Farid said. "They would graduate with exceedingly high salaries, multiple offers. They had the run of the place. That is not happening today. They're happy to get one job offer...." It's too easy to just blame AI, though, Farid said. "Something is happening in the industry," he said. "I think it's a confluence of many things. I think AI is part of it. I think there's a thinning of the ranks that's happening, that's part of it, but something is brewing..."
Farid, one of the world's experts on deepfake videos, said he is often asked for advice. He said what he tells students has changed... "Now, I think I'm telling people to be good at a lot of different things because we don't know what the future holds."
Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't. "I don't think AI is going to put lawyers out of business, but I think lawyers who use AI will put those who don't use AI out of business," he said. "And I think you can say that about every profession."
It’s simple (Score:5, Insightful)
It’s actually simple: you have businesses holding their breath with the idea that AI is going to just materialize and replace people so they don’t have to hire, fire, etc. It’s actually really bad too because it’s what you see in a lot of businesses around automation: not making a choice because of the belief that something so much better will show up making all the waiting worth it.
It’s pretty sad because in a few years, they won’t have entry level people who’ve started the climb to replace those who have moved on, up, retired, etc.
With no real choices made, still stuck and the lack of commitment has materially hurt them.
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I think a part of it is that many of those programming hires never really made any sense in the first place.
A great chunk of the programming hires were done with no good idea on how to actually utilize those people. It was more performative for the sake of investors and clients than a good use of peoples' time. So you end up with horrible bureaucracies of developers that in aggregate never got anywhere real, but to some extent that's ok because they didn't have any real idea in the first place and they can
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There is also the fact that we have had high interest rates for a long time now (in order to fight inflation), and that has motivated significant budget cuts, especially for exploratory development, which in turn has motivate significant reduction in headcount and a unwillingness to hire new talent.
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Probably didn't help that in the craziness of post-pandemic recovery a fair number of software developers managed to swing 100% raises when the flood of covid recovery cash went into play...
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Staffing of software developers has always been a challenge from an efficiency standpoint.
Once you are a large enough organization to have specialized internal line of business applications, you need at least some retained development staff with familiarity over the code base. If something changes and you need modifications fast or if something breaks you gotta have people that not only know the technologies but know the app handy. However if you use them to do that sort of maintenance programing, then yo
Re: It’s simple (Score:2)
Also though, the idea of infinite growth seems to have run out of runway. Needs are artificially created, yesterday's ideas have to be crushed to allow the economy to grow. I don't much actual value, it seems we are chasing our tail, in the name of growth.
Re:It’s simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Or tariffs and uncertainty are making businesses pause.
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Obviously, this instance of concentrated stupid also leads to lots of people changing fields or not even getting into them in the first place. Hence all this does is making things much, much more expensive for the morons that did not hire when they could have. And people remember who specifically did that.
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With no real choices made, still stuck and the lack of commitment has materially hurt them.
Im sorry but that does not make sense. These decision makers likely earned massive bonuses and pay raises because of all the money the hiring freezes saved, and future performance degradation is quarters and quarters away meaning they already left with the money. So it doesn’t hurt them at all, it’s massively helping. It just hurts the company and all the employees who actually make things work.
Re: It’s simple (Score:2)
Mod parent up!
Couple that with the fact that many entry level CS jobs can be done remotely from lower cost countries, and you get this situation. Smart companies will keep hiring a few juniors as a hedge...
Most companies are not that smart.
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Re:It’s simple (Score:5, Informative)
In last six months, a lot of small and mid sized software development businesses that have one-two mid sized projects in the work discovered that they only really need two people for all but the biggest software projects.
You need one senior software architect who does design aspects of the software, and one really skilled senior coder that is good enough to clean up inputs into AI and sanity check output of AI (usually with a help of a different AI model, as just like in real world, best method of sanity checking one person is to ask another person).
All the supporting coders, developers, designers, etc which is what fresh graduates are hired to do? They were support staff for those two before. And AI now does support for those two. Faster and with less mistakes overall once work flow for those two is properly built up. This is in fact the main current bottleneck for AI adoption. It's no longer model development. It's upper level people learning how to have AI handle their support tasks instead of support staff. The commands are different, as is methodology, as you no longer need to learn which of your support staff are good at what tasks, and what kind of words are needed to get them to do those tasks well enough. Instead you need to learn which models have what strengths, and what kind of inputs are needed to do those tasks well.
As often noted, AI doesn't replace "people". AI replaces "people doing support for those actually doing the critical work". People who still do things that are really important have more work than ever.
But all their support staff? That's going away once work flow for how to get same/better outcomes is worked out.
Notably this isn't just software development. We see this in everything from university research work (where feeding inputs into a model rather than having an undergrad sort through them is rapidly becoming a norm), to McKinsey and co consulting giants where there's no more junior consultants, it's all senior consultants having AI support them in terms of data collation etc.
If your job is fundamentally about providing some kind of a data generation support for someone above you, get to that level above you, be in terms of coding, collating, computing, inputting, or similar task. Or you have a very high chance of your job not existing soon. Because that is what current AI already does better than overwhelming majority of currently employed people who do those tasks. Current bottleneck is no longer in developing the models, but in the upper level people learning how to order AI to do the same tasks they have to order support staff to do right now. So everyone doing those lower level data related jobs are on a timer. When upper level people learn how to order AI assistants to do the support tasks, these jobs are going away.
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Tech is simply catching up to the rest of the economy. It's the only field that was booming and constantly hiring, and now that too stopped. The "Learn to Code" line came to life 10 years ago not because tech was hiring, but because no one else was.
There's something fundamentally wrong with the economy and we just managed to kick the can down the road because we shoved every child into a CS career. Now that this "solution" has been milked dry, we will be able (or will have) to actually look the economy in t
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AI *is* replacing people. If you haven't seen this, you aren't paying attention or don't have insight into whats happening in businesses. Most people only work at one company so it's understandable. I consult for over 200 businesses per year and AI is absolutely replacing people right now.
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Otherwise known as the Osborne Effect [wikipedia.org]
Rational Rose and Rhapsody (Score:1)
Re: Difficult when psychiatry wants to destroy you (Score:2)
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Well, many students are not very good (Score:2, Informative)
Those that got into CS or IT just because it was easy to get a job even when you were not good at things now find that this approach does not work anymore. For the rest, this is at worst a temporary set-back. Real experts always may face a year or two or three where they find it hard to stay employed or find another job. That universally goes away and they usually recover what they lost.
The thing is that enterprises often mistakenly think they can do without those expensive experts. That stupidity universal
Re:Well, many students are not very good (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but once you are unemployed, it is very difficult to get another position. For one, you are out of the "flow" and so will be looked upon as dated no matter what you did to keep up on your own. And, depending upon your specialty and equipment necessary to maintain your expertise, that equipment may not be available to you. And even if you get an interview, the interviewers can stupidly ask, well why were you let go even after you tell them why you were let go. They cannot fathom a useful employee being let go even though that happens. And if you pick up a job not in your specialty to tide you over, prospective employers think you have left your field and cannot be trusted.
It does not have to make sense, employers do not care whether it does or doesn't. They see you are unemployed and hence view you as unemployable.
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do you really think the hiring manager is choosing to not hire anyone at all?
Yes. You can get filtered out (automatically or by HR) for having too large of a gap between jobs. The hiring manager will never see your resume. He'll just be told that there hasn't been any qualified applicants.
another candidate who is currently employed and has all the same skills, why would you assume the person who was laid off is the better candidate?
Because objectively they are the better candidate. That person will be more grateful to you for giving them the job thus they may put in more effort or be more loyal to your company. They need the job more and know it. The person already employed is job hoping which implies they won't be loya
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Those that got into CS or IT just because it was easy to get a job even when you were not good at things now find that this approach does not work anymore. For the rest, this is at worst a temporary set-back.
I graduated into the .com bust and was still able to get a job. But it was harder to land, farther away, and for less money than it would have been previously. Take what you can get, and eventually you won't be a junior developer anymore.
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Take what you can get, and eventually you won't be a junior developer anymore.
Indeed.
Everyone must learn to code!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
H-1B (Score:4, Insightful)
CS grads can't find jobs but industry shills say all the CS jobs will move offshore if we don't allow unlimited, unfettered H-1B visas.
Make it make sense.
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Maximizing efficiency in algorithms is often useful, but often it's better to get a correct answer quickly. I can program in C, or C++ or Fortran IV, but I often choose Python. You need to pick the right tool for the job.
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I have several Python code bases that I maintain that have become so large that they're effectively undebuggable. They literally take ~5-15 minutes to start.
Quick can be good, particularly when the project is small- but there is a technical debt incurred using Python for large projects, and people who do so should be beaten senseless with a wet fish.
Re: H-1B (Score:1)
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Make it make sense.
Different people saying different things.
That's why you need statistical, scientific analysis if you want to understand what is going on.
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CS grads can't find jobs but industry shills say all the CS jobs will move offshore if we don't allow unlimited, unfettered H-1B visas.
Make it make sense.
Companies want to spend less money. CS grads can't find jobs because companies think that AI will save them from having to pay people. The companies are willing to pay people less, but you can't live on that in the Silicon Valley because the cost of living is too high, and those employees will immediately leave for a better-paying job as soon as they can find one, so hiring Americans at decreased wages would be a revolving door of short-term temp work, and you don't want to spend a lot of money hiring peo
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Just a 10 or 15 minute assignment each day, but do something. Over a four year degree, they'll have written a lot of code.
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If I were designing a university CS program, I would have my students program every day (every weekday). Just a 10 or 15 minute assignment each day, but do something. Over a four year degree, they'll have written a lot of code.
Make the stuff they write start to interconnect as the semester progresses too. It will help them learn a lot more about how to make reusable code, common libraries, etc.
Re:Universities don't make good devs (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience as a CTO hiring developers is very similar: there just aren’t many fresh graduates worth hiring anymore. I’m not sure exactly what changed: maybe universities got worse at teaching? maybe students got worse at learning? maybe a bit of both.
Ten years ago I had a steady supply of promising graduates to choose from. Now, most fall into two categories: a small handful with multiple offers (hard to compete for), and many others who are net-negative for at least two years. They require so much time and effort from more senior colleagues before becoming productive that the investment rarely pays off. Especially if you consider that often once they finally reach that point, they leave before they even break even. So what’s the point of hiring them in the first place? That's why we're only hiring folks with 5 or more of experience now.
(For context, I’m in the EU, so YWMV.)
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I'll share this story from the 80s:
My littler brother was running a S/36 shop and hired a fresh graduate of the state university, with specific skills in RPG and OS/400. Gave them a project, a very simple report, and turned them loose.
After a few hours, they report. "I can't fine the file'. My brother responds, 'Yeah, you have to create the file'.
Four years of CS at this otherwise well regarded institution, and because they ran student jobs, in some sort of a partition, and due to space constraints and fear
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They require so much time and effort from more senior colleagues before becoming productive
I've been wondering about this myself. People graduating now have been living on-screen for all their lives, but hardly ever question what a computer really is - as in, a really complicated Turing machine.
I get really strange questions when applying for jobs as a senior non-programmer (mostly automation, cloud, CI/CD, etc). Can I program? Well duh, who can't. Do I know python? Well duh, I can lookup the syntax (of course I actually do know python). People seem to think these are questions actually worth ask
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there just aren’t many fresh graduates worth hiring anymore. I’m not sure exactly what changed [...] Ten years ago I had a steady supply of promising graduates to choose from.
That's what happens when your field isn't fashionable anymore. Ten years ago my field was all fashion, but now the very good students join the Master in Quantum programming, get PhDs in that field, so I only get to talk those who weren't "good enough". (I am in the EU as well.)
Re: Universities don't make good devs (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely right.
The reasons why you've become a software engineer matter, too. Did you learn it for the money at the age of 19, or did you start playing with software, hardware and everything in between at the age of 10 out of your own curiosity?
Mindset matters. Good software engineers are those who have the natural, organic inclination to try out new things and to solve problems. Making money is just a nice to have.
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It takes many days of coding till 4AM to become a great developer.
No, you don't need to absolutely break your lifestyle in unhealthy ways to become a great developer. Yes you need a bit more grounded experience than what universities offer, but that doesn't mean absurd lifestyle choices.
I remember back in the day "real developers" bragging about how they needed Jolt Cola and because they drank so much Jolt, you *know* they must be good... I had hoped we had gotten over that mindset..
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Again, here motivation matters. If you stayed up programming because you wanted to, then it's a positive. If you stayed up because you had to, then it's a negative.
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It takes many days of coding till 4AM to become a great developer.
What the hell? You go to bed at 4AM? Allergic to all-nighters? How about all-weekers? Sometimes that's what it takes to push through. Of course it's unsustainable, but employers notice and appreciate dedication to get through the tough patch without sacrificing the employer's business for the sake of sleep :-P
In my career (retired now, btw), my longest sustained software development crunch was 5 months. Many all-nighters, more 7-day weeks than I could keep track of. The biggest overall, however,
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt (Score:4, Interesting)
"Computer science went from a future-proof career to an industry in upheaval in a shockingly small amount of time."
This is basically 2001 prior to 9/11 again. Even the Slashdot comments could be substituted. I must be getting old.
Sucks to be graduating right now.
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A suggestion for graduates (Score:4, Interesting)
They could easily sell by saying the board could fire over compensated employees allowing the company to hire more customer facing and/or production employees increasing customer satisfaction. In short, cut costs while improving customer facing response! C-Level's won't like it, but they're outclassed by AI which can do their jobs faster and cheaper.
What IS still future-proof (Score:1)
Re: What IS still future-proof (Score:2)
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Supply and demand works every time (Score:2)
AI is only a very small part of it. Before, during, and immediately after COVID, tech companies were hiring like mad. Way more people than they needed, warehousing software engineers either just because or perhaps to try to keep them away from competitors. Seeing this high demand, more people went into software; the number of bachelors degrees awarded went up from ~64,000 in 2016 (when it was already on a rising trend) to ~108,000 in 2022.
Then we got higher interest rates, Musk proving you COULD run a se
Nothing to do with "A.I", but that will make it fa (Score:2)
A.I has only been a thing for about a year, so new that bigwigs where I work are still asking IT if we can get their laptop to run an LLM.
I have a degree in computer science earned back in 2006. I can say from my entore career in IT since 2006 that the main cause of it all is: cloud and outsourcing.
Here in the UK many companies will still have IT depts. But It is the department that is the least funded and most abused. Where I currently work we have just lost an employee to retirement. She had been in th
My observation (Score:4, Insightful)
I learned CS in the 70s
Back then, there weren't that many of us and even less who were good at it. I was paid and treated very well.
Then the word spread, making software was the key to high pay, and the flood started.
Thousands of students of varying talent flooded into colleges. Business leaders and politicians told everybody to learn to code. Boot camps and private tutors appeared. Soon there was an abundance of programmers, but few who were excellent. Talent is real. It takes a special kind of mind to be good at making software.
In boom times, even the less talented could find work, copying and pasting code fragments and using poorly understood frameworks to quickly and cheaply churn out mediocre code. People in foreign countries also learned to code, and had the benefit of being really cheap.
Now there are way too many people with mediocre talent competing for jobs. The best of the best have no problem, but the rest will learn the meaning of the word "oversupply". This would have happened even without AI, but AI is definitely a factor
Economy (Score:3)
CS is now a commodity job market. (Score:2)
Masters or PhD (Score:2)