"Learn to Code" Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment
"Learn to Code" Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment
The whole "learn to code" push was always about flooding the market with labor to drive down wages. Every industry that starts a massive PR campaign to draw in high school graduates is doing it because the capitalist class wants cheaper labor.
I do believe that Obama legit thought it was a way for people to transition from blue collar work to white collar in an era where the US was clearly outsourcing the nasty stuff to china while holding the better jobs back for Americans. That has changed drastically with the advent of AI, and will only get worse.
Those of you who feel displaced from your profession, I hope you’ll begin looking at other ways to support yourselves in earnest, because no one is coming to save you. I’m a victim of our new reality as well, and fully understand that it’s adapt or live in a van down by the river. I haven’t figured it out yet. Good luck to all.
The worst thing is that having a large workforce of engineers is actually an incredible advantage.
Too bad it has no effect when youre as deindustrialized and neo liberalism is the guiding hand of society.
Paralleling this with China actually having socially beneficial projects for its technocrat base to do rather than building the next ubereats to monopolize another area of the economy.
The whole "learn to code" push was always about flooding the market with labor to drive down wages. When Boomers give advice on what career to pursue, it's a really bad sign for that field.
This was always the plan. Saturate the tech job market so the wages would plummet.
They did the same thing with trucking. Told everyone it was a solid middle class career in dire need of workers. Convinced a bunch of states and the feds to foot the bill for truck driving schools.
They never needed more drivers, what they needed was more people to sucker in to predatory truck leases. They get new graduates to sign a lease for a truck. The lease forces them to only work for the company that leases them the truck, forcing them to accept whatever mileage rate the company decides to give them. Once the driver gets sick of that, the company takes the truck and leases it to the next person they recruit directly from trucking school(paid for by the government).
Saw it a million miles away when "learn to code" was the rage everywhere. All the boot camps, coding classes in elementary schools, encouraging it for every wage issue and job training program (like Hillary Clinton's idea about what to do with the coal miners and people who lose their jobs), etc. It was so obvious they wanted to pay less wages. I feel like freaking Cassandra over here.
TBH, it has never been a good time to be a programmer. I'm 1000 years old so I can tell you, there are brief bursts of "Oh fuck we need warm bodies!" but overall, you're rarely in a great spot.
During the .com bust, which basically limped on for five years from '99-'04, there was no work but you could do garage startups at least.
Then there was 3 years of "Oh fuck we need warm bodies!" before it suddenly got real quiet in late 2007 in terms of job listings because the overlords knew The Great Recession was coming. The bright side was garage startups were still viable, and if you could secure clients, software engineering consultants made BANK because the Dartmouth educated genius 23yos from Deloitte who laid us all off incorrectly thought websites run and implement themselves right as web dominance hit, but it was a BAD time to be looking for work coding if you don't know someone with sales skills or have them yourself until like 2012 still.
The need for warm bodies didn't kick in this time until like 2019, and by now, we're all laid off again, and everything is corporate, locked down and more committed than ever to replacing you with a robot.
So that's like 8 years of "we need warm bodies" against 10 years of no work and 8 years of it being not great but not awful out of the last 26 years, and the overlords are COMPLETELY bought in to paying any price to replace you with a robot going forward.
+1 to this. It matches my experience as well where 2003 to 2007 was a slow rebound after the dot com bust and post-9/11 recession, 2007 to like 2010 was a fucking disaster. 2011 to about 2014 was slow grind back to "normal" and then 2014 to like 2020 was a really hot market. 2020 to about 2023 was just weird, because tech was absolutely insane while everyone else was getting fucked, and then from 2023 to now has been "oh now it's our turn to get fucked" and it's just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I fucking hate this industry but I am trapped
So that's like 8 years of "we need warm bodies" against 10 years of no work and 8 years of it being not great but not awful out of the last 26 years, and the overlords are COMPLETELY bought in to paying any price to replace you with a robot going forward.
This is a very short paraphrase of exactly what I was just reading in Capital about the English cotton trade, lol
I'd wager it felt similar for the workers!
My dad was a coder who graduated in 77 (I think) (back when it was a subset of electrical engineering at the local university) and did ok for himself.
I on the other hand have not been able to find work in the field
There is none to be had as far as I can tell, unless you are recent .NET, which nobody is, and I can tell you from experience, a few years in the aughts won't cut it to even get an interview. The positive though, FOSS exists, we can use our skills outside capitalism to build a better future for all workers.
CS was already oversaturated 10 years ago. There was just lots of cheap money to fund start ups and new business
Yeah that was when I was first job hunting and struggling with it, and I remember people saying “a degree isn’t enough, what you really need these days is a portfolio.” I cobbled one together with school projects and some basic ass robot I made in my free time, and eventually I got in. But now I wonder if a zoomer who just graduated could pull off the same thing.
Schadenfreude moment for me. Laugh some more at us, humanities majors.
Welcome to the Army Reserve of Labor. Get comfortable, stay a while.
Hilariously, I changed majors from CS to painting because CS started to feel really boring and the Recession made it look like things wouldn't be great upon graduation. Better to have a degree that doesn't pay you that you can keep doing while unemployed than a degree that doesn't pay you that you hate.
Hell yeah, Comrade.
I genuinely truly hate that there is both a huge population of older/retiring senior programmers in all sorts of jobs (MEGACORPS, state, local, public, federal, and small-businesses alike) and also a huge population of eager/teachable junior programmers looking for jobs. If our stupid social organization wasn't so motivated by markets and profit we'd all be better off for it.
Older professionals linking up with younger professionals to cultivate talent, share ideas, and generally make better code would be great but the Vampires and Mummies don't want better products or better workers, they want profits and whatever the current magical hyped super-tech is. I'd also think a lot of our terrible brittle software infrastructure wouldn't suck so much either if new hires and seasoned professionals worked together more often.
Regardless, comp-sci majors aren't all would-be techno tyrants and wannabe Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Most of them are just regular people who did what they were "supposed" to do, and went to school to get a degree in field they were told will have have jobs for them. Sure like ~10-20% of them wanna be the next Zuckerberg or whatever, but that's true of any graduating class of STEM dorks.
It's all really fucked up. I feel bad for them because even if you push all of the many legitimate problems of higher education aside, that shit is too expensive to have a job lined up after graduation. 6-18 months of under/unemployment is not good for the souls of young people who have been told their whole life that you have to have a grown-up job or you're a bum.
I went to school for CS out of passion, computers and software have been my bread and butter since I was a kid. Currently on month 7 of the job hunt with no bites. I got another degree in math for similar reasons, but job prospects from that are pretty slim too. It’s a grim landscape; there’s work to be done and a need for more workers, but it’s more profitable to bleed the existing workforce white than to hire new people in any real quantity. And they lean on “AI” as an excuse for the hiring freezes but the reality of that grift is obvious; it’s all just bluster and excuses to pad the margins.
It’s a grim landscape; there’s work to be done and a need for more workers, but it’s more profitable to bleed the existing workforce white than to hire new people in any real quantity.
Facts dude! Objectively correct take. It's so frustrating that you hear all this "No one wants to work anymore"/"There is a talent gap"/"Our graduates just aren't a good 'fit' for our company" all that shit. There are plenty PLENTY of work to around and workers who just need to be taught how to do it from those who are currently doing. These companies don't want to hire, they don't want to train the few hires the few who actually snag a job, they don't want to take any risk of any sort, they just want all the reward. It's so lame.
Same thing with civil engineering too, but don’t worry all of our infrastructure has been well built, maintained, and has thoroughly planned replacements. lol.
This applies to all STEM fields tbh. It's not great out there, folks.
8 years ago at 32 yo I found myself with a film studies degree and not job and decided to coming back to college. I planned to enroll on computer sciences, but days before the inscription I changed it to actuarial sciences mainly because the admission would be easier (like 100 vs 5 students per admission) and I wanted to be sure I was admitted. Best decision ever. Nowadays I have a solid stable job with full benefits, and at the end I'm a programmer (python/pandas now learning polars) but with actuarial/accounting/finance knowledge that gives me an edge over other programmers or actuaries.
I planned to enroll on computer sciences, but days before the inscription I changed it to actuarial sciences mainly because the admission would be easier
It's the complete opposite in my country. Actuarial science requires you to basically have a perfect GPA (at least our country's version of GPA), while computer science "only" requires a good GPA.
In my college is an admission test, best 40 get the spot. High school graduates know and arw interested om computer sciences, actuarial sciences have no glamor, nobody knows about and it's have the reputation of being extremely hard, so almost nobody even gives it a try.
What is this "Futurism" website? All the headlines have this extremely combative kind of headline. The parent company website is the most soulless thing I've ever seen. Look at this crap: https://recurrent.io/what-we-do/
The article says the unemployment rate for software is 6.1% compared to 4.1% in the US in general. Considering a bunch of companies have just done massive layoffs in the last few months and years, is that really something that won't go back to normal in the longer term?
Not even a programmer, just a software implementation person, and it took me almost 2 years to land a job after losing my last tech gig.
It really pains me that so many others are having as much or more trouble than I had. Now im not even in the tech field (but still doing like data analysis shit)
Damn Lucy moved the football again what an unforseen development
I've always told people not to learn to code. Less competitors in my field is good for me.
im not bitter at all
Let’s start the hexbear coding coop and make our own jobs
same :doomjak:
It's actually insane seeing how quickly things flipped or at least how quickly the popular sentiment did. I saw whispers of it which was part of my cope from swapping away from that to IT (which I do genuinely enjoy more than coding most of the time) but a lot of people got completely hosed. What industry is getting rug-pulled next I wonder?
(Pointing to the comp sci industry helped my friends understand some of the Marxist theory I like to espouse and point to during drinking sessions and might have them join the local chapter of my org though so capitalism is truly the best radicalization tool)
the Marxist theory I like to espouse and point to during drinking sessions
it's you, comrade
This image gets me every time. The the sheer force you see in the dude. Love it
evergreen image
It’s actually insane seeing how quickly things flipped
It is. But not entirely unfamiliar. I think we're going through upheaval and the people who are the best trained will be well positioned when things level out. Some types of tech jobs will be gone, but this is also not entirely unfamiliar.
And I mean best trained young people, of course. I don't think ageism has gone anywhere in this field.
Where do they go from here? Aside from going back to school for something more lucrative, they could take the suggestion from one laid-off tech veteran, who last year told SFGATE that she had started selling her blood plasma to make ends meet.
First, the workers need to unionize. Second, the AI bubble is going to burst one of these years. Maybe quite soon. So their skill set isn't totally useless. Third, coding jobs are terrible, so a career change is great for those who can pull it off ... easier said than done, though.
Anecdotally, people writing in relatively niche languages (the ones that are generally available as single-semester electives if at all) are still doing all right since the talent pool is quite small and the pool of companies using those niche languages is similarly limited (but they frequently need another body). Specialization is like the only thing you can use to differentiate yourself, at this point, so it pays to have something weird on your resume to separate you from the 5000th Java/Python candidate. As a person who reviews resumes and interviews candidates, I have a significant bias for people who do that since it demonstrates the quality I actually want (curiosity) rather than the one on the job listing (X years of experience in Y).
what are some examples of such languages
Functional languages like Scala, Haskell, and Lisp dialects are prominent in some industries. Scala is especially workable since it runs on the JVM so there are plenty of Java shops with a chunk of Scala that needs maintaining. Haskell is a little worse on pay since it's a very enthusiast-driven language, so people will take a hit on pay to write the language they like. Most of the jobs are also in crypto and other evil shit, so it's kind of depressing when the market is otherwise cold.
Rust is still in this category, though it's in a hype cycle right now so the market can be weird. Modern PHP is having something of a renaissance, so if you don't still write the ancient garbage version then you can get into some neat spaces.
I also imagine knowing how to write modern C++ will probably get you quite far, considering how much of the industry still writes the C++ I learned in high school.
Any functional or logical language: Clojure, Scheme, Lisp, Haskell, Prolog, ...
To a lesser degree C and C++, plenty of old talent but not a lot of young one.
italian
I interviewed for(and got offered but didn't accept because the compensation wasn't worth moving from my cushy C#/typescript job) a PHP role a couple weeks ago, which I didn't think anyone used any more and they certainly don't teach in 99% of uni courses, I only had experience with it from personal project before even uni, terrible language btw don't recommend
I mean definitely fair enough. In a field where people go into it cause they just wanna make money and gain prestige as opposed to actually enjoy and be interested in it I can imagine something like that is a diamond in the rough.
unlimited unemployment on the stem chuds lol
What's wrong with studying software?
Nothing unto itself, but the tech sector is notorious for being thoroughly permeated with reactionaries 0
So predictable
American computer science is a room of Zionist elon musks finding which public good to privatize and which innovations to squat over for royalties.
Deeply embarassing field (unless you contribute to collectively owned software and hardware projects).
See, they should’ve just gone into the trades.
Also, if you’re in a trade and can’t find a job, that’s your fault for not getting a bachelor’s.
learn to cope
I will never
This is temporary, they will lose all of their infrastructure and come back to comp sci majors after the code gets completely fucked. Trust me these companies can only think in short term which is why so many times they should have lost everything but Government socialism takes care of that.
Cope, the offshored coders taking the jobs are just as good at a quarter of the pay
People are really depending on this round of offshoring going like the previous rounds, but where that failed is that by the time it was viable a lot of talent from the eastern bloc and India had been poached and working in the US. I think there’s a more conscious effort this time to not drain talent from outside the US in order to have as large of a salary gap as possible, without producing lower quality work. Also, coding is significantly easier now, like I feel programmers of the 90s to the early 00s are genuinely less replaceable than modern programmers.
I work with plenty of programmers from Latin America who make a third of what American programmers are paid, speak fluent English, and work harder with better code. Can't imagine it's a trend that will slow down.
they will lose all of their infrastructure and come back to comp sci majors after the code gets completely fucked.
+2
This is how I got my new job a few months ago
Backfires?
That was the point.
They wanted to increase the reserve supply of coders and so they saturated the labor pool with tons and tons of graduates, who now have to compete with each other for a dwindling supply of jobs. "Learn to code" was always about lowering wages and employment.