When Manasi Mishra began researching computer science, she imagined future writing codes for major tech companies, rather than rolling burritos.
However, a recent Purdue graduate has not been able to acquire jobs in her chosen field as tech companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to perform entry-level tasks.
“I just graduated with a computer science degree and the only company that called me for an interview is Chipotle,” annoyed Mishra was seen nearly 150,000 times on Tiktok videos earlier this summer.
Mishra's experience highlights unpleasant changes in the job market for new coders.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the recent unemployment rate for computer science alumni is 6.1% and 7.5% for computer engineering majors, surpassing the average of 5.3% for all recent graduates, roughly doubles the 3% of majors in biology and art history.
“I'm very worried,” Jeff Forbes, former program director for computer science education and workforce development at the National Science Foundation, told the New York Times.
“Computer science students who graduated three or four years ago would have been battling offers from top companies. Now, the same students are struggling to get jobs from everyone.”
For over a decade, technology leaders, billionaires, and even the US president have encouraged young people to “learn coding,” and their programming skills promise to ensure six-figure starting salaries and job security.
There were a handful of winners in the AI economy, but large salaries have skyrocketed as a valuation of AI companies. Most of these companies employ a relatively small number of people.
Dario Amodei, CEO of AI developer Anthropic, warns that AI can wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next 1-5 years.
The arrival of AI coding assistants such as Github Copilot and Coderabbit has accelerated the decline in the role of entry-level programming. This is the easiest thing for businesses to automate.
Economists and industry executives say the slowdown in recruitment has also been linked to overstaffing, aggressive cost reductions, high interest rates and a widespread hiring freeze.
Experts discuss how much of the current recession is directly caused by AI and the business cycle, but there is little disagreement that junior coding positions are under intense pressure.
The result is a labor market that appears to be very different from a few years ago.
Zach Taylor, a 2023 graduate of Oregon State University, said he applied to the Times for nearly 5,800 technical jobs, leading to just 13 interviews and zero offers.
Even the company he interns could not take him full time.
After attempting to acquire a role for McDonald's and being rejected “due to lack of experience,” he returned home to Sherwood, Oregon, and began collecting unemployment.
“It's difficult to find an incentive to continue applying,” he told The Times.
For many job seekers, the application process has become a gauntlet: online coding assessments, live technology testing, multiple interviews are simply turned down or ignored.
Some describe experiences as “dark” or “spirited”; Others say they feel “gas lighting” in an industry that once said software skills were golden tickets.
In San Francisco, Billboard promotes AI coding tools that promise to write or debug code faster than humans.
Coderabbit is not as widely used as Copilot, but has been praised for its features such as real-time collaboration and context-enabled code reviews. These tools, combined with a large number of applicants, mean that fewer junior engineers can produce more software.
Audrey Lawler, a recent graduate with a data science degree from Worcester, Massachusetts-based Clark University, told The Times that he wrote his application without AI tools in hopes of standing out from the automated crowd.
However, when one company sent a rejection email just three minutes after applying, she suspected that the algorithm had made the decision.
“Some companies use AI to screen candidates and remove the human side,” she told The Times.
The recession has hampered the parallel pipeline with Tech: Coding BootCamp.
For over a decade, these intensive programs have provided a route to a well-paid engineering job for people without a traditional computer science degree.
Many people are now seeing employment rates fall apart, Reuters reported.
Jonathan Kim, who paid nearly $20,000 for a part-time program at Codesmith in 2023, applied for over 600 software engineering roles without an offer.
He currently works at his uncle's ice cream shop in Los Angeles, continuing to code for his open source projects.
“They sold fake dreams of a great job market,” he told Reuters.
At Code Smith, only 37% of students in the 2023 part-time cohort acquired full-time technology employment within six months, from 83% in the second half of 2021, according to the Integrity Council on Results Report.
Placement rates in other bootcamps are similarly categorized in some cohorts in the range of 37-50%.
The company told Reuters that the market was “hard,” but noted that 70% of full-time alumni had found work within a year.
Industry veterans say the environment pushed tech companies back to traditional employment models that favored graduates from elite universities such as MIT and Stanford, and reversed some of the diversity.
“They send recruiters to MIT and Stanford, beat top students and eat,” Michael Novati, co-founder of Formation Dev, which trains experienced engineers for interviews, told Reuters.
With post wire
