If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning:
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
To a much smaller extent due to where I live, I noticed this too. From merely the fact that I had a (local economy relative) high paying software job and that I could "make stuff happen" for people with capital or people in the "boys club", I was introduced to an entirely different layer of the city I had no idea about. I noticed how effortlessly the signals transfer and how it all feels very meritocratic, you don't even notice the layer and you just see the people.
Until someone who's not in that layer shows up, and suddenly the doors close, the conversation chills and the barriers to the layer become evident.
I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort.
I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming.
I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
Honestly I do the reverse of that. I dress like shit and when introducing myself I specifically use the word "immigrant" rather than "expat" because signalling high social position attracts people who want something from me but don't offer anything in return.
For those looking for one practical way to do this in the US, I can share my story.
In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.
Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)
If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.
The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).
Most of the value of a CS degree is being able to say that you have a degree truthfully. If you don't have a degree then you just lie and say that you do, which is a moral papercut. Nobody really cares about your education though, they just want their world view to be maintained.
Yes 100%. I was born upper middle class. I have a BIT from a global top 50 University. I understood this after working in cryptocurrency sector in Germany.
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.
> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming.
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%.
Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment.
The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree.
The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor's degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job.
Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree.
Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest).
If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job.
Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate.
There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
I'm glad you pointed this out because I think the difference is due to philosophy grads being ready and willing to enter the workforce as a welder or an au pair or a restaurant manager, whereas a CS grad is gonna hold out for a CS job.
Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.
There is an image crisis. Yes, it's not a badly paid profession. But the perception that it's a dead end will lead to a sharp drop off in the student numbers.
Such a correction was always going to happen. Coders always were the blue-collar workers of the 21st century, and capital ruthlessly optimises for profit. Where you once needed thousands of workers to run an assembly line, you now have dozens; where you once needed hundreds of programmers to run a big SaaS, you will now have a handful. It was always inevitable.
That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted.
As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause.
I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out to of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally.
I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
In your example you knew the issues with the original fix, had some ideas to the cause, even if they were wrong, and generally knew where to look.
In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.
I think that figure (haven’t verified it but assuming it’s true) isn’t complete. It hides who and where those people are - for example, I imagine art history skews towards higher ranked schools in the first place.
Unemployment is based on the amount looking. I gotta say, how many philosophy students do you know actively looking for jobs? Now ask yourself why you think it's zero.
I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.
A few major failures will scare the risk mitigating bejesus out of some kinds of businesses, but maybe AI will be better than us at fixing those kinds of problems by then.
My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive:
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
I think interest rates have a lot to do with that mindset. If you view a Jr engineer as a long term investment (in 18 months you get an SDE 2 who knows your business), that's much easier to justify when borrowing money is close to free.
Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
A difficult degree in philosophy or english lit also does the same thing. Humans are amazing generalists, and when we practice thinking deeply, that skill transfers and allows us to pickup new domains.
Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
There is a weird assumption nowadays that “making money = you’re an expert and know what you’re doing.” The best X is the one that makes the most cash, full stop.
People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?
Where do you draw the line on that attitude? Do you not care about global warming because in your lifetime, you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live?
I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth.
> Do you not care about global warming because you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live in your lifetime?
Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
If I decide you're having a negative impact on my net worth, can I come to your home and shoot you in the head?
It seems we need a remedial class in morality here, where we work up to you understanding the golden rule. But perhaps you're not capable of understanding that. Is euthanizing you then the only option?
It's a self-solving problem, though. At that point, every remaining senior+ engineer will be paid a bajillion dollars (like they are now) and companies will start to invest in actual training.
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort.
I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming.
I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.
Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)
If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.
The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.
You only miss a bad job market entry and low salaries, you need every meagre advantage you can get.
100% agree on a degree being a strong signal, by the way.
Maybe, but the degree has to be paid for, with time and money.
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%.
Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment.
The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree.
Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree.Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest).
If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job.
Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate.
There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.
I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.
Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take.
There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.
That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted.
As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause.
I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out to of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally.
I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.
I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
Very scary for the future, unfortunately.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
That country never ceases to astonish me lol.
Idk though, really seems like the "AI layoffs" are just corps shedding headcount bloat accumulated in 2020-23.
I never understood why software engineers were so excited about open source and teaching everyone to code.
Why aren‘t we more like doctors or lawyers?
I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth.
> Do you not care about global warming because you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live in your lifetime?
Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
I suppose that makes a change from it's not happening or it is happening but it isn't man made or it is man made but we can't do anything about it.
That is a really interesting admission upon which to evaluate your other comments here…
If I decide you're having a negative impact on my net worth, can I come to your home and shoot you in the head?
It seems we need a remedial class in morality here, where we work up to you understanding the golden rule. But perhaps you're not capable of understanding that. Is euthanizing you then the only option?
Hope you like being overworked!