The high salaries commanded by FAANG engineers right out of college motivated a lot of students to take up computer science as a major and this led to a massive oversupply. It might take a few years to cool.
MIT graduates are not going to be struggling for anything, much less for new grad jobs. They're among the most privileged humans to exist on earth by nature of their degree and admission.
Tech employers are saying it's efficiencies gained in AI that led to layoffs for the past few years. Yet they have increased headcount in engineering offices in other countries at the same time.
This is also happening at small and midsize companies that ship software. It's easy to find this information, particularly for the largest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Like the article states, there are a number of confounding factors. But it's not AI, no matter how much founders and CEOs want it to be true.
That’s because the globally talent works much longer hours at lower salary while in US you have to pay 100k for each h1b. Let’s get rid of the ridiculous administration first and then talk about greedy ceo.
The elephant in the room: the H1B visa and the influx of Indian workers into the U.S. labor market. Many of them are willing to work for lower wages, demand less, and have fewer rights—essentially becoming exploited labor for Corporate America. Why would a corporation hire an American graduate who won’t tolerate these conditions when an H1B worker will?
Instead of confronting the issue directly, people often sidestep it with other excuses. The reality is, if we eliminated all H1B workers, every American in the IT industry, including recent graduates, would have a job. And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
H-1B workers at companies such as Google, Meta or Microsoft are not treated any different, they are not taking abuse or being exploited. There may be smaller companies where this is happening though.
One of the issues is conflation of IT jobs and High Tech jobs. Those making laws don't understand the difference -- they are all "computer jobs" to them. IT does not require immigrant labor. Companies such as Infosys and Tata don't need to be operating in the US. There are plenty of US workers available to do the job.
But High Tech is different. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US. The US leads the world in tech not because the best ideas were all American but because the best people in the world immigrated to the US. Stopping this will be ruinous to American prosperity.
The seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration undercut Americans? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, and their innovations create jobs.
You've identified the problem, but not the solution. We must make it illegal for corpos to do labour exploitation in this way and then enforce that law for immigrants and native workers alike.
Immigration is good. Creating a two-tiered job market is not.
If you just end H1Bs, then many of these jobs will move permanently overseas, there won't be a magical moment of restitution for the aggrieved American tech worker.
Unionize if you want to actually make things change for the better for all workers in your industry. You can't post your way out of this.
It's truly amazing how little you need to intrude into the privileges of an already extremely privileged group as US software developers are, to make them go full "immigrats are taking our jobs".
> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
Skills? Not necessarily, but there's something a lot of immigrants possess that your university graduates don't: freedom from the weight of student loans.
I'm not from India, so I can't speak for them. Plus, I imagine that the situation in India changed over the years and it's probably not the same as when this trend started. But I can speak for myself and people I know from many other countries, including China. Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.
Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.
There are two types of H1B recipients, the type that you describe (in somewhat discriminatory terms) and the type that the program was built for.
The actual geniuses that move to America and stay here to build crazy stuff are also H1B visa holders.
We do NOT want to turn those people away. If you don’t like immigrants “taking your jobs” you are definitely not going to like the alternative reality of a brain drain. You aren’t going to like the alternative reality where there aren’t any immigrants starting businesses to hire you. Without immigration there’s no Google or Apple (these weren’t specifically H1B immigrants but still, Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs’ dad were first generation immigrants)
Again I must point out that every H1B employee that is here is physically in America buying things from American businesses. Immigrants starting businesses at a higher rate than native born citizens.
But I think it’s obvious that the program needs reform. Big companies have been gaming the system and using tricks to abuse it, and they use the visa’s restrictions to trap employees and give them below-market working conditions under the threat of visa revocation.
My proposal would be:
1. Make the visa cost more to acquire depending on the amount of employees in the program at a single company. If your company has 10,000 H1B employees your cost to add another one should be a lot higher than a small company with one H1B worker.
2. Make the visa guarantee permanent resident status to the recipient for a time period once they’ve worked for their company for ~90 days. They should have full job mobility just like a citizen so their employer doesn’t use the program as an excuse to pay below-market wages.
3. Provide a real path to citizenship that doesn’t take decades. I think that people in the country who can treat it like a long-term “forever home” will be more beneficial than ones who have plans to go back home eventually.
> And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
Everyone defending H1Bs forgets why we even have an economy. America never signed up to be some hegemon that needs to compete with the entire world. America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point. You get revolutions and revolutionary acts when it feels that the opportunity for foreigners and the aristocratic is exceeding opportunity for the normal everyday people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.
The crazy thing is how suppressed this opinion was. You got banned on most websites for bringing this up. I credit free speech on X for bringing h1b visas into the national conversation
I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs".
To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs. I know nothing about this field, but I expect it has always been and always will be very hard to get into this field.
Then you have these programming jobs:
IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business. These days would usually mean supporting or in-house custom developing for things like SAP or Oracle. This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like SAP. I have since retired but I know where I last worked, that company was moving these jobs outside the US. From friends still there, those moves have increased quite a bit. Maybe work could be still available in small companies.
Then there are working at startups, which is rare but gets all the press, I know nothing about this area.
Then there is working a a company that develops software for sale (like SAP), I tend to think this is starting to go the way of IT work mentioned above.
I would like to know what is meant by "Computer science jobs"
The context is that the author is a computer science professor discussing the prospects of people graduating from his program, so I would interpret this very broadly as "the sorts of jobs that a person with a newly-minted computer science degree tends to pursue."
Typically this is jobs where one's job revolves primarily around writing code.
To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs.
These are all arbitrary labels in an ever-changing field so I'm not going to say anybody is right or wrong, but I'm quite certain this is not what others typically mean when they say "computer science jobs."
IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business
If a person's job primarily revolves around writing and shipping code this is most commonly just called "software engineering" or "software development" whether or not it's internal software or some kind of external product offered for sale externally.
If it's internal application development, the department might typically be called "IT" but the job role would still typically just be "software developer" or "software engineer."
This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all
in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like
SAP. I have since retired
I've been at it since the late 90s. Just a baby compared to you. :D
Right so there's currently a mismatch between higher education and industry. Ideally Computer Science is a branch of Applied Mathematics primarily concerned with the theory of computation. But due to demand from students who want to get industry jobs instead of doing research, many schools have "polluted" their CS majors with more practical programming courses. This confuses the issue and doesn't do anyone any good.
A better approach would be to have separate majors targeted towards students who want industry careers. I would suggest two separate tracks: Software Engineering which would take a disciplined, analytical approach and Software Development which would treat software construction for like a fine art, akin to sculpture or music performance.
I'm a CS professor and this is not really what we are seeing. I'm not at Berkeley but it's an R1. Yes, students on the lower end of the GPA scale are having a harder time finding jobs. But in terms of my program's ability to place students after graduating, the vast majority have been placed.
It's important to also note that some who have not found a place did so because the thought they could find a better salary by holding out for longer. So yes, probably average post-grad offer is going down, that's true. But it's definitely not true to say "everybody is struggling to get jobs"
Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't.
"AI" professor tells everyone to use "AI". With the usual fatalism that nothing can ever be done about anything.
One option for example would be to fire all "AI" professors. Another one would be to outlaw "AI", just as nuclear energy was outlawed in Germany and DDT was banned worldwide.
Even if it was a good idea - how would you draw a boundary between AI and the rest of computing? In the end you'd have to go full Butlerian Jihad and prohibit computation in general, or at least limit allowed computing power.
Engineering and construction type careers in general, anything involving "capital investment", are very sensitive to market conditions. That is, future expectations. Very boom and bust, dependent on credit.
Fix the curriculums so I can justify restarting a new grad hiring pipeline in the US.
CS (along with ECE/EECS) degrees have been watering down their curriculum for a decade by reducing the amount of hardware, low level, and theory courses that remain requirements abroad.
Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of table stakes EE/CE content like circuits, signals, computer architecture, and OS dev (all of which are building blocks for Cybersecurity and ML) and an increased amount in math.
Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.
And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.
I CANNOT JUSTIFY building a new grad pipeline in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, CloudSec, MLOps, Infra Silicon Design, or ML Infra with people who don't understand how a jump register works, the difference between BPF and eBPF, or how to derive a restricted Boltzmann machine (for my ML researcher hires) - not because they need to know it on the job, but because it betrays a lack of fundamental knowledge.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but (Cal specific) someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the early career pipeline for a security startup when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier", or isn't getting hired as a junior MLE if they didn't take all the more theoretical undergrad ML classes at Cal like CS182, CS185, CS188, and CS189. And even worse if they are a BA DS without a second fundamental major like AMATH or IEOR.
> Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job
I 100% agree. A lot of core foundational classes that at the very least build the mindset of how to problem solve are not offered or have severely reduced the curriculum and content offered.
> until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.
Not what I meant. What I mean is you can't understand or ramp up on (eg.) eBPF without understanding how the Linux Kernel, syscalls, and registries work. If you don't have the foundations down, I can't justify spending $120k base plus 30% in benefits and taxes hiring you out of college.
> These are kind oddly specific criteria
I'm giving random examples from individual portfolio companies
> Are those really things you think new grads need to know
This is the kind of curriculum a new grad from Cal (be they on F1 OPT or a citizen) are competing with when my portfolio companies have hired new grads.
There is a level of mathematical or hardware-software maturity that is built into top programs abroad that make it hard to justify hiring new grads domestically.
In Israel, India, much of Eastern Europe, and China - all universities follow the same curriculum as defined by their Ministries of Education.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the pipeline for a cybersecurity vendor when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier".
Your ideal candidate needs to know: assembly, trivia about the history of eBPF, an obscure data structure specific to a certain field. As a bonus you would like them to know a little electrical engineering, and written on OS kernel as well?
Are those really things you think new grads need to know? I'm not sure you could find more than a handful of mid level or senior engineers with familiar with more than 2/3 of that.
This reads to me like things you know, that you think everyone should know.
Why not details on the network stack? Or database design and internals? Why not file systems specifically?
Those are much more relevant to the majority of modern development that the differences between bpf and epbf.
There might be advantages to increasing the amount of hardware and low level courses in the curriculum. But, I am pretty sure that is not the primary reason for young graduates not being to find jobs.
I was going to agree with you until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.
I can teach someone the details on the job. Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job.
However I've noticed that the fundamentals are so watered down, even at top-tier schools, that young devs like that are harder and harder to find.
That’s a different group of skills than are required to build and maintain a CRUD app with complex regulatory requirements at 1m TPS running on a fleet of virtual hosts which are geographically remote from each other. And someone who is great at going deep on hardware may not be good at that role.
Asserting that the way it was done in the past is the best way will always get agreement from some, but the needs of industry change over time.
It's not like hardware and low-level jobs were booming either. If anything, universities have been adjusting to requirements of the market whether it's right or wrong.
This is the huge trend I’ve noticed on the last ten years. I too would love it if CS students studied more operating systems, networks, and computer architectures. Software engineering is very much an apprenticeship and we’re building real things. Few of us will dabble in academic domains but we all dabble in large complex stacks, often times distributed.
Learning computer architecture is fine and good and useful, but in a secondary fashion to help understand the main tool people in CS use. However, it is not the core of what makes computer science "computer science", or even the main thing that makes CS grads hire-able, despite the common misconception that computer science is about computers.
I would emphasize something along the lines of an HtDP approach developed by Felleisen et al. which goes beyond just the coursework in the HtDP book [0]. It extends into several core courses and in fact much of the core CS curriculum was being overhauled by Felleisen until Northeastern unceremoniously decided to dumb down the curriculum to satisfy some idiotic administrative idea of "market fit" and the desire to homogenize content across their expanding network of satellite campuses. When the curriculum was implemented, companies became very hungry for NU CS graduates, esp. given their experience with them during co-ops.
CS curricula are sadly being bootcampified, because that is the will of university administration.
I hate to say this but it is not just the curriculums.
A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were taught flawed pedagogy and just blindly follow what they know like trained monkeys despite how ineffective it is.
If you've ever heard the phrase, "if you are not struggling, you are not learning", you know that quite a lot of people have been twisted by the beast that is education. Such tools usually follow and originate in actual torture techniques, but that is obscured purposefully to the unwary. Paulo Freire's pedagogy follows this.
There is no longer any place in academia for competency, or accountability. Its been destroyed and sieved for decades, and eventually there's no turning back. You hit a critical point. That unfortunately, in my view, is where we stand today.
All except the top 0.1% of the competent people were driven out through social harassment, the remainder eventually conformed to the lower demands because they made the pool of people who remained looked bad. There is no economic benefit to good teaching, and most teachers overall fail, and even the good ones fail too because education is a sieve process and poisoned students coming in may not overcome the adverse effects despite perfect effort and knowledge (which is rare). I'm not saying all do, but the vast majority with few exception, remain poisoning minds; and those are people who can't be fired and must be waited out to retirement.
The same thing happens with any government organization where you can't fire such chaff, and these teachers who are often unfit in the profession are who get to teach your children, and determine whether they become engineers or other productive members; that is unless you spend hundreds of thousands on a private school of repute (which are rare, and highly selective).
The dominant pedagogy has gone by many names, by-rote teaching, lying to children, common core... aimed at depriving people of the most basic skills needed to get to the end-point.
The system certainly won't be refining any Einsteins, it will be destroying them before they even consider picking up Differential Equations at 16. They won't have the background to even get interested because the curricula has been turned into a torture machine and their prospects poisoned before they knew it.
A few years ago we hit a critical threshold, mostly silently, for credibility that there will be economic benefit. School Administrations have done the unacceptable, moved goalposts, and done everything in their power to incentivize the 'forever' student.
Families today have watched those that have gotten those degrees (at around a 1-3% pass rate) unable to get jobs, they aren't seeing the economic returns, and the debt crushes those people. This is why there are fewer children today. The group of your most productive people are fallow.
CS has one of the highest unemployment rates at around 70% according to BLS data. ECE pass rate while somewhat better (but not much) requires mind-destroying classes, compressed into time that no working adult would be required to work (>40h/wk), and perfect recovery from the sophisticated torture techniques used which destroy any intuition.
Education today is more about hobbling the student with trauma so they'll remain a student forever, while maintaining the lie that they can have a better life if they complete something they do their best to prevent sometimes through quite arbitrary means.
Math is taught from Algebra in K-12 on, following a lying to children approach. The good teachers who buck the trend and excel competently are so rare you might find only 1 in a county, and they have not been rewarded; in fact they've been passed up for higher credentialed peers who couldn't teach.
There comes a point where you just have to gut everything and go back to the way things worked. A working system. For teaching that's a first-principled approach following the greeks, where every teacher must follow it without exception, with strict requirements to maintain those standards and psychological support for students who may have had such trauma imposed.
The last thing that should ever happen is an Algebra student getting to Trigonometry and immediately failing because they were taught a flawed version, and Geometry was passed, but not a 'true' Algebra, and by that point you can't go back because that Algebra professor burnt the bridges on a lag (without accountability).
The problems we face today are largely self-inflicted, through blind destructive people who won't stop unless someone else stops them, and they have removed any ability to stop them non-violently following Tolstoy's philosophy, and utilizing existing structure not unlike any other parasite/cancer that tries to kill its host.
Evil people are those that are blind to the consequences of their actions and continue regardless. History has a lot to say about how this impacts the fall of empires, and we will be living through a fall; and proper education has been purposefully withheld to create environments of people follow a complete compromise, succumbing to systems of control.
We desperately need programmers with any sort of skills.
The pay is not as good, but the companies are more stable (generally) and the benefits are fine. Mostly remote work for programming. You'll have to deal with bio people too. Family friendly.
Maybe the internet is complete. Programming was not that big until the internet came along. Writers started writing for web sites, some of them even started learning to code. Huge hoards of people were needed to "build the internet" as we know it today. That process has IMHO been stabilizing for a while now. Every local restaurant has a web site of some sort - some even have an event calendar that is updated regularly. It's not just Google and Amazon, the electronic version of the entire world has been built out. Payment systems are in place - even hobbyists or crafters can take payments online. It took 30 years with countless dead ends and restarts in a number of areas, but we finally have a stable functioning internet with common development tools and practices. Maintenance of this thing is going to take fewer resources than building it took. It kinda makes sense that jobs are getting harder to find.
I've been working in product development and embedded software most of this time, and I don't see too much change.
The internet != all software jobs. I don't think the internet can be complete anymore than an economy can be complete, but sectors can be mature and/or commoditized. Software is definitely not mature, but AI makes people think it is commoditized (it's not).
It's probably more cyclic than systemic and related to the larger economic trends, federal monetary policy, and growing protectionism. But tech is outsized in the economy, so I'm not sure which one is the horse and which is the cart.
[+] [-] yangikan|5 months ago|reply
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/computer-science-major...
"Between 2018 and 2023, the number of students majoring in computer and information science jumped from about 444,000 to 628,000."
Around 40% of MIT graduates are now in CS https://alum.mit.edu/slice/conversation-new-computing-dean-a...
Further, COVID has reduced a lot of friction for remote work, so now there is also global competition for these jobs.
[+] [-] laidoffamazon|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] strict9|5 months ago|reply
This is also happening at small and midsize companies that ship software. It's easy to find this information, particularly for the largest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Like the article states, there are a number of confounding factors. But it's not AI, no matter how much founders and CEOs want it to be true.
It's the pursuit of lower cost employees.
[+] [-] jewelry|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepyguy|5 months ago|reply
Instead of confronting the issue directly, people often sidestep it with other excuses. The reality is, if we eliminated all H1B workers, every American in the IT industry, including recent graduates, would have a job. And don’t try to convince me that a Java developer from India possesses skills that our university graduates don’t.
[+] [-] breadwinner|5 months ago|reply
One of the issues is conflation of IT jobs and High Tech jobs. Those making laws don't understand the difference -- they are all "computer jobs" to them. IT does not require immigrant labor. Companies such as Infosys and Tata don't need to be operating in the US. There are plenty of US workers available to do the job.
But High Tech is different. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US. The US leads the world in tech not because the best ideas were all American but because the best people in the world immigrated to the US. Stopping this will be ruinous to American prosperity.
The seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration undercut Americans? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, and their innovations create jobs.
[+] [-] lkey|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] oytis|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeMage|5 months ago|reply
Skills? Not necessarily, but there's something a lot of immigrants possess that your university graduates don't: freedom from the weight of student loans.
I'm not from India, so I can't speak for them. Plus, I imagine that the situation in India changed over the years and it's probably not the same as when this trend started. But I can speak for myself and people I know from many other countries, including China. Most of us have had an education that is on par with a lot of American colleges and universities, but without the crushing cost.
Get rid of all immigrant workers and the industry will collapse, because your graduates need to pay off a huge debt that immigrants don't have.
[+] [-] dangus|5 months ago|reply
The actual geniuses that move to America and stay here to build crazy stuff are also H1B visa holders.
We do NOT want to turn those people away. If you don’t like immigrants “taking your jobs” you are definitely not going to like the alternative reality of a brain drain. You aren’t going to like the alternative reality where there aren’t any immigrants starting businesses to hire you. Without immigration there’s no Google or Apple (these weren’t specifically H1B immigrants but still, Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs’ dad were first generation immigrants)
Again I must point out that every H1B employee that is here is physically in America buying things from American businesses. Immigrants starting businesses at a higher rate than native born citizens.
But I think it’s obvious that the program needs reform. Big companies have been gaming the system and using tricks to abuse it, and they use the visa’s restrictions to trap employees and give them below-market working conditions under the threat of visa revocation.
My proposal would be:
1. Make the visa cost more to acquire depending on the amount of employees in the program at a single company. If your company has 10,000 H1B employees your cost to add another one should be a lot higher than a small company with one H1B worker.
2. Make the visa guarantee permanent resident status to the recipient for a time period once they’ve worked for their company for ~90 days. They should have full job mobility just like a citizen so their employer doesn’t use the program as an excuse to pay below-market wages.
3. Provide a real path to citizenship that doesn’t take decades. I think that people in the country who can treat it like a long-term “forever home” will be more beneficial than ones who have plans to go back home eventually.
[+] [-] emchammer|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] _fizz_buzz_|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ponector|5 months ago|reply
You mentioned it, the skill your graduates don't have: willing to work for lower wages
[+] [-] gjsman-1000|5 months ago|reply
Everyone defending H1Bs forgets why we even have an economy. America never signed up to be some hegemon that needs to compete with the entire world. America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point. You get revolutions and revolutionary acts when it feels that the opportunity for foreigners and the aristocratic is exceeding opportunity for the normal everyday people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.
[+] [-] laidoffamazon|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chaostheory|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mikert89|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jmclnx|5 months ago|reply
To me, Computer Science would be like research type jobs. I know nothing about this field, but I expect it has always been and always will be very hard to get into this field.
Then you have these programming jobs:
IT would be working on Internal Applications for a Business. These days would usually mean supporting or in-house custom developing for things like SAP or Oracle. This is what I did, in the 70s/80s/90s it was all in-house systems. Starting early 2000s, systems like SAP. I have since retired but I know where I last worked, that company was moving these jobs outside the US. From friends still there, those moves have increased quite a bit. Maybe work could be still available in small companies.
Then there are working at startups, which is rare but gets all the press, I know nothing about this area.
Then there is working a a company that develops software for sale (like SAP), I tend to think this is starting to go the way of IT work mentioned above.
[+] [-] JohnBooty|5 months ago|reply
Typically this is jobs where one's job revolves primarily around writing code.
These are all arbitrary labels in an ever-changing field so I'm not going to say anybody is right or wrong, but I'm quite certain this is not what others typically mean when they say "computer science jobs." If a person's job primarily revolves around writing and shipping code this is most commonly just called "software engineering" or "software development" whether or not it's internal software or some kind of external product offered for sale externally.If it's internal application development, the department might typically be called "IT" but the job role would still typically just be "software developer" or "software engineer."
I've been at it since the late 90s. Just a baby compared to you. :DCongrats on making it thru and retiring!
[+] [-] nradov|5 months ago|reply
A better approach would be to have separate majors targeted towards students who want industry careers. I would suggest two separate tracks: Software Engineering which would take a disciplined, analytical approach and Software Development which would treat software construction for like a fine art, akin to sculpture or music performance.
[+] [-] bongodongobob|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ModernMech|5 months ago|reply
It's important to also note that some who have not found a place did so because the thought they could find a better salary by holding out for longer. So yes, probably average post-grad offer is going down, that's true. But it's definitely not true to say "everybody is struggling to get jobs"
[+] [-] joquarky|5 months ago|reply
Most people don't speak or write literally about this kind of subject.
[+] [-] bgwalter|5 months ago|reply
"AI" professor tells everyone to use "AI". With the usual fatalism that nothing can ever be done about anything.
One option for example would be to fire all "AI" professors. Another one would be to outlaw "AI", just as nuclear energy was outlawed in Germany and DDT was banned worldwide.
[+] [-] oytis|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alephnerd|5 months ago|reply
CS (along with ECE/EECS) degrees have been watering down their curriculum for a decade by reducing the amount of hardware, low level, and theory courses that remain requirements abroad.
Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of table stakes EE/CE content like circuits, signals, computer architecture, and OS dev (all of which are building blocks for Cybersecurity and ML) and an increased amount in math.
Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.
And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.
I CANNOT JUSTIFY building a new grad pipeline in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, CloudSec, MLOps, Infra Silicon Design, or ML Infra with people who don't understand how a jump register works, the difference between BPF and eBPF, or how to derive a restricted Boltzmann machine (for my ML researcher hires) - not because they need to know it on the job, but because it betrays a lack of fundamental knowledge.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but (Cal specific) someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the early career pipeline for a security startup when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier", or isn't getting hired as a junior MLE if they didn't take all the more theoretical undergrad ML classes at Cal like CS182, CS185, CS188, and CS189. And even worse if they are a BA DS without a second fundamental major like AMATH or IEOR.
[0] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2025
[1] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2017
[2] - https://www.scribd.com/document/555216170/6-3-roadmap
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Edit: can't reply so replying here
> Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job
I 100% agree. A lot of core foundational classes that at the very least build the mindset of how to problem solve are not offered or have severely reduced the curriculum and content offered.
> until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.
Not what I meant. What I mean is you can't understand or ramp up on (eg.) eBPF without understanding how the Linux Kernel, syscalls, and registries work. If you don't have the foundations down, I can't justify spending $120k base plus 30% in benefits and taxes hiring you out of college.
> These are kind oddly specific criteria
I'm giving random examples from individual portfolio companies
> Are those really things you think new grads need to know
This is the kind of curriculum a new grad from Cal (be they on F1 OPT or a citizen) are competing with when my portfolio companies have hired new grads.
TAU - https://exact-sciences.m.tau.ac.il/yedion/2021-22/computer_s...
IITD - https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/academics/btech_links/curriculum....
Uniwersytet Warszawski - https://informatorects.uw.edu.pl/en/programmes-all/IN/S1-INF...
Babeş-Bolayai University - https://cci.ubbcluj.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Curricula-...
There is a level of mathematical or hardware-software maturity that is built into top programs abroad that make it hard to justify hiring new grads domestically.
In Israel, India, much of Eastern Europe, and China - all universities follow the same curriculum as defined by their Ministries of Education.
I can find new grad candidates with a similar profile at a handful of domestic CS programs (Cal included), but someone with a BA CS from LAS who never touched CS152, CS161, CS162, or CS168 isn't getting hired into the pipeline for a cybersecurity vendor when they took CS160, CS169L, or CS169A because they are "easier".
[+] [-] MeetingsBrowser|5 months ago|reply
Your ideal candidate needs to know: assembly, trivia about the history of eBPF, an obscure data structure specific to a certain field. As a bonus you would like them to know a little electrical engineering, and written on OS kernel as well?
Are those really things you think new grads need to know? I'm not sure you could find more than a handful of mid level or senior engineers with familiar with more than 2/3 of that.
This reads to me like things you know, that you think everyone should know.
Why not details on the network stack? Or database design and internals? Why not file systems specifically?
Those are much more relevant to the majority of modern development that the differences between bpf and epbf.
[+] [-] yangikan|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ng12|5 months ago|reply
I can teach someone the details on the job. Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job.
However I've noticed that the fundamentals are so watered down, even at top-tier schools, that young devs like that are harder and harder to find.
[+] [-] shermantanktop|5 months ago|reply
Asserting that the way it was done in the past is the best way will always get agreement from some, but the needs of industry change over time.
[+] [-] hiddencost|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] oytis|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] goalieca|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|5 months ago|reply
I would emphasize something along the lines of an HtDP approach developed by Felleisen et al. which goes beyond just the coursework in the HtDP book [0]. It extends into several core courses and in fact much of the core CS curriculum was being overhauled by Felleisen until Northeastern unceremoniously decided to dumb down the curriculum to satisfy some idiotic administrative idea of "market fit" and the desire to homogenize content across their expanding network of satellite campuses. When the curriculum was implemented, companies became very hungry for NU CS graduates, esp. given their experience with them during co-ops.
CS curricula are sadly being bootcampified, because that is the will of university administration.
[0] https://htdp.org/
[+] [-] trod1234|5 months ago|reply
A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were taught flawed pedagogy and just blindly follow what they know like trained monkeys despite how ineffective it is.
If you've ever heard the phrase, "if you are not struggling, you are not learning", you know that quite a lot of people have been twisted by the beast that is education. Such tools usually follow and originate in actual torture techniques, but that is obscured purposefully to the unwary. Paulo Freire's pedagogy follows this.
There is no longer any place in academia for competency, or accountability. Its been destroyed and sieved for decades, and eventually there's no turning back. You hit a critical point. That unfortunately, in my view, is where we stand today.
All except the top 0.1% of the competent people were driven out through social harassment, the remainder eventually conformed to the lower demands because they made the pool of people who remained looked bad. There is no economic benefit to good teaching, and most teachers overall fail, and even the good ones fail too because education is a sieve process and poisoned students coming in may not overcome the adverse effects despite perfect effort and knowledge (which is rare). I'm not saying all do, but the vast majority with few exception, remain poisoning minds; and those are people who can't be fired and must be waited out to retirement.
The same thing happens with any government organization where you can't fire such chaff, and these teachers who are often unfit in the profession are who get to teach your children, and determine whether they become engineers or other productive members; that is unless you spend hundreds of thousands on a private school of repute (which are rare, and highly selective).
The dominant pedagogy has gone by many names, by-rote teaching, lying to children, common core... aimed at depriving people of the most basic skills needed to get to the end-point.
The system certainly won't be refining any Einsteins, it will be destroying them before they even consider picking up Differential Equations at 16. They won't have the background to even get interested because the curricula has been turned into a torture machine and their prospects poisoned before they knew it.
A few years ago we hit a critical threshold, mostly silently, for credibility that there will be economic benefit. School Administrations have done the unacceptable, moved goalposts, and done everything in their power to incentivize the 'forever' student.
Families today have watched those that have gotten those degrees (at around a 1-3% pass rate) unable to get jobs, they aren't seeing the economic returns, and the debt crushes those people. This is why there are fewer children today. The group of your most productive people are fallow.
CS has one of the highest unemployment rates at around 70% according to BLS data. ECE pass rate while somewhat better (but not much) requires mind-destroying classes, compressed into time that no working adult would be required to work (>40h/wk), and perfect recovery from the sophisticated torture techniques used which destroy any intuition.
Education today is more about hobbling the student with trauma so they'll remain a student forever, while maintaining the lie that they can have a better life if they complete something they do their best to prevent sometimes through quite arbitrary means.
Math is taught from Algebra in K-12 on, following a lying to children approach. The good teachers who buck the trend and excel competently are so rare you might find only 1 in a county, and they have not been rewarded; in fact they've been passed up for higher credentialed peers who couldn't teach.
There comes a point where you just have to gut everything and go back to the way things worked. A working system. For teaching that's a first-principled approach following the greeks, where every teacher must follow it without exception, with strict requirements to maintain those standards and psychological support for students who may have had such trauma imposed.
The last thing that should ever happen is an Algebra student getting to Trigonometry and immediately failing because they were taught a flawed version, and Geometry was passed, but not a 'true' Algebra, and by that point you can't go back because that Algebra professor burnt the bridges on a lag (without accountability).
The problems we face today are largely self-inflicted, through blind destructive people who won't stop unless someone else stops them, and they have removed any ability to stop them non-violently following Tolstoy's philosophy, and utilizing existing structure not unlike any other parasite/cancer that tries to kill its host.
Evil people are those that are blind to the consequences of their actions and continue regardless. History has a lot to say about how this impacts the fall of empires, and we will be living through a fall; and proper education has been purposefully withheld to create environments of people follow a complete compromise, succumbing to systems of control.
[+] [-] red_rech|5 months ago|reply
The layoff and market conditions helped me realized just how useless my career has been.
I knew I never wanted to work professionally in software, but it was the only thing accessible that pays well.
Even now it’s the only thing keeping me afloat, so I don’t see any way out but slow painful [career] death.
[+] [-] HPsquared|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|5 months ago|reply
We desperately need programmers with any sort of skills.
The pay is not as good, but the companies are more stable (generally) and the benefits are fine. Mostly remote work for programming. You'll have to deal with bio people too. Family friendly.
[+] [-] ponector|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tarwich|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stronglikedan|5 months ago|reply
There's plenty of jobs - just not always in the most popular areas.
[+] [-] ponector|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|5 months ago|reply
I've been working in product development and embedded software most of this time, and I don't see too much change.
[+] [-] sltr|5 months ago|reply
It's probably more cyclic than systemic and related to the larger economic trends, federal monetary policy, and growing protectionism. But tech is outsized in the economy, so I'm not sure which one is the horse and which is the cart.