When Manasi Mishra graduated from Purdue with a computer science degree, working on software at a big-tech firm was on her mind, and turning burritos down the counter was the furthest thing from it.
But after submitting scores of applications and receiving only a single callback from Chipotle, the 22-year-old started to get a sense of how much the job market had changed.
“I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle,” Mishra explained in a TikTok video earlier this summer. Since then, the ranting clip has been viewed almost 150,000 times.
Her tale has resonated with thousands of new programmers who thought “learning to code” was the ticket to a six-figure, job-for-life role and found instead that machine learning was automating the kind of beginner positions that they had learned to code.
TikTok/khuhlina
A Promised Land Gone Sour
Schools built out computer science programs, coding boot camps proliferated, and the promise of job security attracted students in mass numbers. However, those very graduates now face a surprising reality: a declining job market and hiring freezes in the technology sector.
By Federal Reserve Bank of New York statistics, the jobless rate among new Bachelor’s graduates in computer science had risen to 6.1%, and among computer engineers to 7.5%, significantly higher than the 5.3% rate among all new graduates.
“Computer science students who graduated three or four years ago would have been fighting off offers from top firms, and now that same student would be struggling to get a job from anyone,” described former National Science Foundation program director Jeff Forbes.
AI’s Quiet Takeover
A major reason behind the downturn? The rise of artificial intelligence tools has enabled them to perform many of the repetitive, low-level tasks once assigned to junior developers.
AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and CodeRabbit will write, debug, and optimize code in a matter of seconds and improve with each and every day. Excellent news in terms of productivity, horrible news in terms of new graduates coming into the trade.
Zach Taylor, a 2023 Oregon State graduate who’s interviewed with close to 5,800 technical job openings and only secured 13 interview requests, none of which produced an offer.
A Brutal Job Hunt
Even new graduates complain that the process itself has grown soul-crushing, an ordeal of online coding challenges, algorithm puzzles, and dead-end interviews. Others still report feeling betrayed by an industry that previously touted coding up as the ultimate safety net.
Ironically, even artificial intelligence is being deployed to screen job applicants, at times in a matter of minutes.
Audrey Roller, a new data science graduate from Clark University in Massachusetts, reported to The New York Times that a company rejected her exactly three minutes after clicking on “submit.”
At the same time, San Francisco billboards promote AI coding software that boasts that it writes software “faster than human.”
Bootcamps Take a Hit
The shift to AI hasn’t only impacted college graduates; it’s pounding the previously successful coding bootcamp market as well.
These short-term programs had been promising six-figure salaries to students who would study JavaScript or Python for years. But with the hiring decline, that dream is fading fast.
Jonathan Kim, who paid close to $20,000 to go to a part-time program at Codesmith in Los Angeles, reports that he had applied to more than 600 positions with no job offer. His job now is working at his uncle’s ice cream parlor and writing on open-source projects in his spare time.
“They sold a fake dream of a great job market,” he told Reuters.
As the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting puts it, just 37% of part-time Codesmith 2023 students ended up with full-time IT jobs within six months, down precipitously from 83% in late 2021.
Codesmith described the job market this year as “challenging,” and reported that 70% of its full-time graduates go on to get a job within a year or so. But that’s a small consolation to thousands of freshly minted developers with student debts and fading optimism.
A Return to Elitism
Observers insist that the AI disruption and hiring freeze have quietly reversed a decade of gains in access to technology and diversity.
As corporations reduce entry-level jobs, recruiters are turning to graduates from top colleges such as Stanford and MIT, the very institutions that previously appeared to most potential programmers to be in a world of their own.
“They’re sending their recruiters to MIT and Stanford and wining and dining the top students,” added Michael Novati, co-founder of Formation Dev, a training firm that specializes in seasoned engineers.
What’s to Follow
Economists disagree on whether AI alone is to blame. Some point to post-pandemic overhiring, high interest rates, and corporate cost-cutting as factors making an already competitive field even more brutal.
Software now automates all these tasks, all the way from debugging to documentation, in place of the kind of routine tasks that were used to train up junior engineers. The result: a step lost on the career ladder.
But others, such as Mishra and Taylor, have no future in their respective careers. Some diversify into other areas; others learn AI-related fields in a bid to stay ahead.
Mishra admits that she still enjoys coding, but nowadays, it seems all the jobs disappear before even being afforded a chance.
In the meantime, however, she’s still holding out, waiting to get that callback at Chipotle. And like so many new developers, all she hopes the next gig won’t require a hairnet.
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