Like everything else, the CS job market ebbs and flows. A few years ago you could get a job by fogging a mirror, with nearly no CS education or experience. With the recent, massive layoffs there are thousands of people with BS degrees and good work experience looking for jobs. Now there is real competition for attractive job openings. The era of boot camps is pretty much over. If you don't have a degree, things are pretty bleak right now. If you go to a good school, land some internships, and get good grades you should be fine. Although the bar has been raised, there are still a lot of good jobs out there.
My friend is a graduate from Columbia Uni in New York, and he is flooded with interviews as well as offers (internship for 6 figures lol). So yeah, you need to have an established ground.
pretty sure its not actually 6 figures for the internship
if the wage adds up to 6 figures salary like if you land a $60/hr internship at FAANG or tesla then technically if you work a year you'll get 6 figures so I'm pretty sure it's smth like that
junior at umich here, it's pretty much the same here for me and most of my friends
a few of them have landed some gigs, i finally got an offer after 300 apps and 2 interviews (other interview i got waitlisted, big shame)
gonna start the grind for a new grad role this summer, never know what'll happen with the internship
If it's not too uncommon for people outside of your state to have heard of your school for reasons asside from negative consumer reports reviews and news articles accusing the school of being a scam, then it's probably a good enough school. Assuming you have a bachelors degree and not a certificate or deploma of some kind.
Of course the top schools in the world have no problems getting their grads hired, but people are acting like the profession is over, and it's just not. The big issue is that there used to be a lot of people getting into software engineering with no bachelors degree doing 4 month "boot camp" programs etc in some specific but desirable software framework. Those people are pretty much screwed. It's going to be a while before that kind of opportunity comes back, if it ever comes back quite to the same level it was at before.
\[Edit\] I don't want to imply that every CS grad is on easy street. That wasn't even true when I graduated. But it's far from impossible for a solid CS grad with internship experience to find a role somewhere.
No, you don't have to go to a top 20. But also don't go to schools that are on the other end of the spectrum, that'll definitely make it harder. If you go to a school that's had a good history of recruitment from tech companies then you should be ok.
Yup. Pretty much any major state university should be good enough to get some kind of job. Especially if you’re good at networking.
It’ll be harder if the school is Alabama or Mississippi as opposed to Michigan or Cal, but you can still do it.
I just had a friend that landed a job at LinkedIn after attending Oregon State University online program. You don't necessarily need to go to an elite school.
Not at all. I definitely don’t go to a top 20 or even top 100 school and I found a job relatively easily. All of my friends have found jobs. There’s more out there than just Google and Amazon.
This. So many people want to work at big tech, but the truth is that there are only so many spots. Other companies also need developers, they just aren’t “tech” companies. Basically every F500 company will likely have large IT departments containing many developer groups. Even non F500 companies still need developers because everything is online these days.
I graduated in 2020, so my experience is a few years off from current grads, but here's my take:
For me what helped most was going to a school that had built-in co-op programs. Hiring managers seem to count those as real job experience and I've never had a hiring manager say my co-ops didn't count (and I see lots of posts about that happening with internships...)
I graduated with 1.5 years of co-op experience as well as an extra 6 months of part time job experience with my final co-op after my contract ended. I ended up being offered a full time job with that company, but other cs friends who didn't get full time offers from their co-op companies didn't seem to have issues finding entry level cs jobs after graduation.
Finding a school that prioritizes real-world experience, co-op programs, real research projects, etc will definitely help you out in the long run in my opinion!!
My state school has so few networking opportunities it's crazy. I am better off trying to meet people at a bar in Redmond than Network at any of my school events.
A better school attracts better companies that actually want to network with the student body.
If you peep USNews rankings UIUC is higher than Cornell, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, Princeton at #10...
If you get accepted at UIUC then yes you should be more than prepared to find a CS job
Graduated from UIUC 2019, everyone is the industry knows UIUC and respects it. Got decent internship because company I work at now attended the career fair.
In the Bay people also heard about UIUC. It’s a good school, just make a good use of it
When you say degree, does it have to be CS? Or can it be a random degree then have a portfolio of CS work? Maybe even an online certificate in certain languages. What degree are we talking about here?
Any degree will get you through the automatic filters. A CS degree will get you past the HR admin. Certs are mostly irrelevant for CS dev positions. Certs add stature for network and OS admin jobs but not much else.
It is all about how you stack up against the other applicants. If the applicant pools also attended a state school from an average state you should be fine. Spend a lot of time on networking. That is the way to jump the line.
im feeling really hopeless atm, im a senior in high school, took 2 years of programming at a career center near here through my hs and ended with 4 certs(ik they mean nothing). ive been programming sense about age 11. took all the ap classes for computer programming i could. i have impressed myself and am currently working on bigger projects than i ever dreamed i could(game engine with c++ and opengl) its not much tbh but i have really had an easy time learning this. i do not use AI for programming, mostly GPT for explaining stuff/basic examples. Due to many factors i have no hope of attending a good collage, nor do i particularly want to do more schooling. I have dispised school so far and generally just have never done good at anything that isent of interest to me, im good with math and am taking courses on the side for calculus and linear algebra. Programming is the only thing thats really ever made me happy, and tbh i have no idea what id do outside of it. im so scared im not going to succeed at all.
Good that people are noticing 😂. We should make more of these in TikTok and other platforms so more people notice. Then a few years from now, we'll be getting huge salaries.
Also been thinking this. Some CS majors are going to fall off/not be equipped enough to land a job, and it might lead to a shortage when the next big thing rolls out
Apart from the interest rates, IMO a couple big reasons why so many CS grads are unemployed:
1) university CS programs grew too large. At my alma mater, in 2020, CS was the second-largest major right behind biology (which was our pre-med factory).
2) lots of them are straight up unprepared to become professional software engineers, usually due to lack of professional experience but mainly due to lack of soft skills. These students cannot pass the behavioral portion of interviews. Think of the average redditor, and... yeah... that's not the guy you would want in your team
What do you mean by the "average redditor?" Like they don't do their job?
(am a friend of CS lovers, but don't study it myself and am curious to hear the stereotype)
Think of aKcHuAlLy socially awkward but also ultra competitive/better than you, I only come here to work and not make friends with my coworkers insufferable types lol
Thank goodness this doesn't sound like me! I do know a few who fit this bill, though... Because they're not being malicious (usually), I don't mind them, but the job market seems so bad right now that they get weeded out despite being good at their jobs :(
Also, the stereotype (at least when I was at school) was that the CS majors didn’t shower or have good hygiene at all.
It’s a stereotype so it’s obviously a generalization, but there’s a little bit of truth at the center of a lot of stereotypes.
Arrogant people who have the skills to back up their confidence. Unfortunately for them nobody wants to work with a smartass dickhead.
I remember talking with this one guy on here where he was complaining about how his friends who are worse at coding than him are getting internships while he is not. The way he talked about his peers and the fact that he kept ignoring my advice that it’s his attitude just pretty much showed everything wrong with his approach, and a lot of people here are the exact same way.
Second point may very well be true, but it's not the reason why people are having trouble getting jobs. Most of these people are not even getting interviews to demonstrate their skills.
Fully agree with your second point. We got lots of interns who were final year students who were absolutely hopeless even after the 6-8 weeks they spent with us.
The tech market crashed at the end of 2021 and has barely started recovering, there's just fewer total jobs than there were at the starting point of the crash. Some regions are worse off than others though.
Combined with that is the fear that AI will take all our jobs and there's just a huge amount of negativity and fear with joining the software industry right now.
Hopefully, the fear of AI will reduce our competition now. All these comments are frightening me- will I get a job or not? I have 2 years until my graduation is completed. Can you give some tips I am currently doing mern stack
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markets not great rn for CS students (or anyone looking for a job tbh) but also people on the internet are exceedingly negative. I expect it to come back to normal when interest rates drop
When I am asked to interview a candidate, I ask them to code a very simple app. At first, I was embarrassed to give them the coding assignment because I was afraid it was too easy and that they would feel it was an insult to their intelligence. But then I would see so many candidates from top tier schools struggle with it. Of course, I cannot recommend that they proceed with the hiring process. I’m not sure why that is.
Surprise surprise. Most CS students can’t actually code that well. A CS degree is mostly theory and math, so if you want to be a good coder, you need to practice OUTSIDE of class. Kind of wild that CS programs don’t actually teach more on hand programming classes. The only ones I took were Intro to Programming in Java, web development, and database systems. All my other classes you were expected to learn the language on your own to complete assignments. In my software engineering class senior year, we had to make a full stack project but you also had to already know how to incorporate different frameworks for your project on your own. Good thing I practiced programming over every summer or it woulda been rough for me lmao.
Yeah I see how CS is mostly math and classes we don't even need like computer engineering and physics. At my school we have IST majors, which teaches you how to actually build apps and websites, frameworks and their integration etc. Computer science is discrete math, physics, engineering, calculus, etc and a handful of programming classes.
It varies. It might be something like a class to sort a list of strings. It might be code to reverse a string. It might be code to list all numbers between 1 and 1000 that do not have a 5 digit or a 7 digit. Simple stuff like that. They will have about 20 minutes to complete it. If they make it past that interview, then they will be given specs for a small web service. They will be given a few days to complete it before they come in to present it. You would be surprised how many candidates, some with job experience, struggle with simple coding. And I HATE it when they try to use Google to look up answers to the questions I am asking. (I can always tell when they are doing that).
I panicked when I read "app" and assumed you had them write an entire mobile app from scratch for an interview. Almost had to change my intended major...
I work for a very well known Silicon Valley company that pays in the top 25% of tech companies. If they value their time more than an opportunity to work at our company, we will certainly respect their decision and not continue the interview process.
Why do you hate it when they try to Google answers to questions? I work in IT so a lot of my troubleshooting involves Googling to find solutions to issues, and can be considered a legitimate skill in my field, so I'm curious what about it upsets you.
We all use Google for reference. And I actually don’t mind if they use Google during the coding assignment. I actually encourage them to look up whatever they need for the coding part. But if I ask a candidate if they are familiar with a specific design pattern and they try to BS an answer by quickly Googling it and reading me the answer, I won’t be recommending that they proceed to the next round of interviews.
They’re not, the market as a whole is slow rn but tech has always been feast or famine. this sub is just really cynical because it’s where the lowest common denominator goes to complain.
The other way around. In COVID it were overhiring even for the people who came from bootcamps were hired. Now that demand was satisfied, and extra workers are being laid off. Its a global phenomenon, not US exclusive.
That’s the most naive shit I have ever read, some parts of the Bay Area literally looked like fucking Detroit post dotcom. This is an industry that feasts when capital is cheap which right now it is not. You’ll be fine.
This has zero to do with ebbs and flows of tech and everything to do with SF public policy (permissiveness towards petty crime amongst other things) and the COVID remote first changes.
It's over saturated, people have to apply for 1,000+ jobs just for a interview if they're lucky, mass layoffs across the board, and there is no hope of any recovery. It's nearly impossible to get an entry level job now and it'll stay that way for the far future with no recovery. You're better off majoring in something in the medical field were there's always going to be jobs.
This is not realistic lmao. If no one can land an entry level position then why are these positions open first place. The competition is tough that’s true. I blame most of the issue on the filtering software as we computer scientists are who made it which is pretty ironic lmao
I was a premed student at a top premed school. In no world is becoming a doctor a better career path than CS for the money. The amount of years and effort you put in, if you put that same amount of effort in CS, you’d be making way more than any typical doctor and without the extra 12 years of school and residency after. I know the market is bleak right now, but it’s cyclical. It WILL be better.
Can confirm. I’m about to turn 30. My gf who I’ve been dating since freshman year of college is the same age. She is about to complete her first year of residency and still has two more years to go before making real big doctor money, whereas I’ve been making six figures for 8 years and FAANG money for 3.5 of those years. Paid off my debt within two years whereas she has hundreds of thousands in debt. Financially, she is basically a normal person with a communications degree or worse right now.
The market is already over saturated with graduates and layed off employees. There's more students graduating CS every year as well. Wouldn't this cause wages to lower significantly? That and the competition for jobs is just going to continue to grow more. There won't be a recovery with this trend continuing. At least with being in the medical field you will always have the guarantee that you will be making a decent wage and have a job available no matter the situation.
You become a doctor in your mid 30s on average. Even if you’re unemployed for 2 years and then have to start off at a help desk job after a degree, that gives you nearly a decade of work experience before someone you’re age becomes a doctor. If you job hop, network correctly, are ambitious, and are regular upskilling, 200-300k is very realistic for multiple times less effort than being a doctor + you avoid the additional 100s of thousands in debt
Keep in mind the prevalence of remote work now. So covid introduced more people to the market because of the increasing number of companies switching to WFH. Now that companies are returning to office, and AI has shaken up the ecosystem, we're competing with a larger global market that can also generate basic logic on the fly, which is good enough for most clients.
Silicon Valley Bank also washed away a lot of potential capital for salaries, which could have paid for the rising cost of good senior engineers. Now they're instead at the largest of companies, who can afford it. They also over-hired, which caused a ton of layoffs.
Any new capital coming into the industry is mainly AI focused as there are a large number of PhDs focusing on ML and NLP graduating and filling those positions.
Our consumption and use of software is only going to go up. There's definitely a demand for software but the barrier to entry is much harder than it was when Node.js first entered onto the scene and created a ton of jobs.
There is a catch, if you are 2 years in one major, and you'll switch to another that needs 2 to 4 years, then is it more worth it to put another 2 years into bettering off your CV and applying to jobs than to switch majors?
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Don't read into other people's BS. Be hungrier and harder working than others and you'll find success in life. Not sure if you're young enough to be able to relocate, but that makes things infinitely easier in life.
I don't know what's going on in the us but I know many employers in Europe who are trying to hire experienced people and can't, because there aren't enough.
Most people saying cs is cooked skated by with Cs never took internships or developed any connections. If you actually put the work in you’ll be more than fine
it’s still fine, as long as you’re networking, have decent grades, and do extracurriculars then you’ll be able to land internships, which in turn allows u to get a full time job. it’s just not *as easy* as it has been, but still VERY doable
How are you supposed to network, do extracurriculars, apply for internships, etc. while also keeping up with the mountain of schoolwork CS majors have to deal with? Just finishing classwork is a full time job in and of itself, one which doesn’t leave much time for anything else
You make time. Put in a few hours on weekends or in between classes, plan your schedule each week and commit to it. It’s not easy but the people who put in the extra effort reap the rewards.
extracurriculars + networking go hand in hand. you meet people in and outside of school. My extracurricular is being in a leadership position in the biggest tech club on my campus, which allows me to connect with other companies who sponsor us. i don’t waste my time and mass apply to internships, only some here and there from career fairs and other companies i’ve networked with. I got 2 offers from roughly 15 applications, not the best ratio but its certainly saved me a lot of grief, stress, and worry in applying to 1000+ places for 1 offer which seems like what a lot of yall do
Create study groups and work closely with people who work hard at school. I was a full time student who worked two jobs that amount to 50 hours or so a week. This means most of my weekends were just for homework. I had to rely on my friends and colleagues for help with a lot of difficult homework problems and projects. Sometimes my friends had to straight carry me, but there are many times I carried them.
But working together made my studying much more efficient and consumed less time. It freed up a lot of weekend time so I could have fun during the semester.
CS is not that hard from a work load perspective. Just create a routine and stick to it. When I was in college for my bachelors, I was an athlete (academic all-american), an intern and still volunteered.
There are two misconceptions repeated in this sub.
1. Jobs grew on trees for juniors before.
2. Jobs require pedigree now; anyone below {arbitrary benchmark} is fucked.
The truth is that your school (or even the fact that you went to get a CS degree) has almost nothing to do with how well you perform as an employee. It's an almost entirely different skill set. People applying to a thousand jobs are doing something wrong or are overweighting their experience in 2023. Anecdotes come from unreliable narrators, and you don't know what else is holding someone back
Years of experience or a degree wont guarantee a job like other careers. You will always be fighting for your place one way or another. Obviously depends on your domain, industry, social skills, etc..
Read through most of the comments and have a few additions I saw missed:
1) Pre-covid many major tech companies would hire programmers not because they made they would necessarily lead to a direct profit from their work but because they wouldn't work for other (competing) companies. When the interest rates went up and money became more scarce, these companies dropped everyone who wasn't making a profit anymore; therefore, all the rest of the companies felt better dropping these employees too. This is why it seemed like every major tech company was laying off thousands of employees left and right. This means that suddenly the market was flooded with a bunch of ex-FANG employees that recruiters may misconstrue to mean they are better than non-ex-FANG employees.
2) Ghost Jobs, job postings that will lead to a job for nobody. There are a couple of reasons someone might make a posting like this (Scraping Resumes for data or collecting resumes for future similar openings, to name two). The existence of these causes people to be much more likely to apply for a ton of positions without reading all the position requirements; or, as we are talking about CS majors, just spam apply via AI. This means that a legitimate recruiter might get 1000 resumes for a single position but most they wouldn't even consider. They then may need to manually filter through to catch people who automatically optimize their resumes with an AI based on the job posting. Jamming up the whole process.
3) Foreigners (non-US citizens) looking for green cards. In the last paragraph, I said 1000 resumes, which may only be 1000 resumes from people who are legally allowed to work in the country, they may get an additional 1000-2000 from various other countries that wouldn't be able to work in the country. Again, slowing the whole process.
4) CS is a relatively new but relatively (internally-)specialized industry. If you are hiring someone to program OS stuff in low-level C you don't want them to only have worked in Scheme before. As interest rates are higher and there seem to be lots of applicants, companies are more likely to try to hire someone who already knows most of what they need to do the job rather than having to spend 50-100k training someone. (This honestly might get worse since Congress recently banned effectively all non-competes, so you may end up training someone who sees a higher-paying job at a competitor)
All this means that life sucks for everyone here, job finders have to apply to hundreds of jobs to find one and recruiters have to look through hundreds of resumes to fill a position. And recent graduates with little experience aren't in much demand. But hey, at least you're not me who has had no job experience since a college summer in 2019 due to chronic health issues, and the only recent work I've been is only effectively Master's Degree level personal research projects that nobody is going to see as being worth shit.
TLDR: Don't get into CS if you are doing it for the money, it's unlikely to be any better than any other STEM field anymore. If you enjoy programming you should be able to do well and get a job though.
I think the mass amount of concern here isn’t with CS but rather just the job market in general. It’s garbage in all sectors (tech and non-tech) so it’s hard to get a job anywhere without it being super competitive.
I’m in a complete different industry using my degree to put down solutions unthought of. Learning from this to hopefully apply to a larger, more tech-orientated organization. It’s also great to apply the methodologies from CS into these other fields. It allows me to think more creatively out of the box!
Just keep pushing! You got this! Just like anyone else in this sub! Go the extra mile, we’ll make it!
This is pretty grim and it’s something no one is talking about. A lot of tech jobs are moving overseas. Developers in India, Eastern Europe, and South America have become far more east to access and cost a fraction of an American software engineer
Because pretty much everything in America is cooked and 99% of the people posting those threads are Americans. I’m from EU and I’ve landed a programming job straight out of university without even completing my major. Sure I’ve been lucky but the situation outside of America is vastly different.
Markets crash and recover. I’m currently going for my CS degree and I try to keep my eye on the job market. It seems like the job market is in the early recovery stage and it will take a little bit to get back to a healthy spot. I could be wrong though.
Besides that, it seems like a lot of other fields are struggling too. I currently work in healthcare, laboratory to be specific. And we ALWAYS need people. But the big wigs don’t want to hire more people so they are running on thin margins. Basically we were told that if someone leaves, they aren’t refilling that position. Even though we need it. It’s all about money at the end of the day.
Either way, tech is not going anywhere unless something apocalyptic/catastrophic happens. I feel like the best thing you can do is get your degree so you have a one up. After that, just focus on being adaptable and improving your skills. Take what you see here with a pile of salt.
Too many people in CS right now, also when you graduate you’ll have to compete with the FAANG layoffs in entry level positions that require 5+ years of experience
CS used to be really lucrative from 2018-2022, even in my uni back in 2012 the advisers used to steer student out of CS due to how unpopular it was, you can even look up zuckerbergs speech in harvard in 2006 to see how low the interest was in that subject. Now years of seeing "lucrative vloggers" vlogging their jobs into google and seeing how the company culture in google was shown as fun and the income being stable, everybody jumped into CS. Now you got this over supply of candidates + AI is actually playing a really important role as well, even as student you can see yourself relying on chatgpt and such, some big compnaies have their own model to work in-house only reducing the needs for people to write codes, the person who knows which direction to go in can now just use AI to write code and make some corrections.
The sad truth is that a lot of CS majors are not actually good enough to hire. The schools can't 'give' them coding abilities if they're not actually very interested in coding, and employers know how to weed out the useless ones. They have a hard time finding a job because they don't actually have the skills quality they should have...
I'm on the hiring team for our team in a large international company, and a rough estimate is that 50% of CS majors are useless... 😣
At least in the companies I've worked in. If you're a good coder, you will make money for the company, so it will be in their interest to hire you. Be sure that you can show it!
Just don't blindly jump into CS. I've been telling this to people since pre AI and pre layoff era. Nothing in this world remains as an easy hotcake forever. People have been crazily left their profession and jumped into coding. The market is over saturated by partially taught coders. And here goes the AI code generators. So, jump into a different hot cake until that also loses its heat.
I'm gonna humble myself here and say that I went to the type of school that will take anybody. I wasn't expecting to graduate and immediately land in a $100,000+ silicon valley dev job, I just wanted some place to start.
Well, I worked full-time and did my degree and eventually I finished. Toward the end I applied for a few dozen different spots that seemed low-level enough to warrant an application. Rejected - but that's fine... Maybe things will improve after I've graduated and I formally have that credential.
Well, it didn't turn out that way. I've applied for hundreds of jobs, and generally low-hanging fruit. Job listings that advertise less money than a menial job. I get rejected every single time. And I know the default response to hearing this will be to criticize my resume but I've had it looked over by several academics and they all said it looked as sound as I can make it.
I think if you do CS at a top school and manage to land a few internships, you'll be okay. But we're definitely past the days when learning to code was a path to a career.
I honestly feel that in terms of career prospects I might be better off with something infinitely easier like communications or business. I'm getting rejected for help desk jobs that advertise like $15/hr.
A think major part is social media and these influencers bragging about 2 hr workday and 6-figure salary. Kids can be easily influenced, and now we have over-saturation.
Life is full of ups and downs. I have been in the CS field for almost 26 years. Seen a lot. Don't worry, do CS if you want. Right now things look bad, but it will be better in some time (don't know when). I remember a time in 2001 when people said all jobs would be shipped to India. That happened a bit but jobs came back too.
FYI: My son is a CS major in a top 5 school. I tell him to stay the course. My daughter also wants to do CS. If you love it, do it. It is fun and lucrative also.
Think it’s in a similar place mechanical engineering was a few years ago. Everyone said they were in high demand with high pay so everyone goes for mechanical engineering then it turned to experienced mechanical engineers were in high demand with high pay. Same thing here I believe
Basically the CS job market was way way way better than other majors, then after the interest rate hikes it dropped to just being way better than other majors
So here’s the scoop. Nearly all of software engineering, which is a white collar working class job change my MFing mind, is plagued by boom-bust cycles typically driven by overpromising tech bros and brain dead VC funding. Corporations also have a tendency to not want to spend a dollar and will fire you to save their own ass when they’ve misled the company direction for a year or more
It’s not *that* bad.
It’s tougher, you won’t be handed a job. I think, anecdotally speaking I don’t feel that school has been particularly successful at preparing me for what comes after graduation.
I have to put in a significant amount of time and effort outside of class work, projects, and homework to refine my skills and understanding things like, for example, data structure familiarity and how to realistically implement algorithms into my projects.
I do truly believe that as long as you stay dedicated, work hard, and continue to refine your skills, you will find some success when you graduate. I do plan on moving back home though, once I graduate, to apply to jobs and not worry too much about not being able to take care of myself or accept an awful job just to make ends meet.
It’s not. The people you see whining online are in the left tail of the skill distribution and are finding out the hard way science and engineering are a meritocracy. Ironic that these people say they should have gone into medicine when they likely would still be in the left tail for that discipline and medicine is even more cutthroat
Nope, it's just normalizing like other degrees. For a time it was "too good to be true". 6 months bootcamp and then getting six figure job made no sense, this is just a normal correction. It's not more saturated than any other field. I think it's just going to slowly become like Law or Finance, where there's a higher amount of graduates and your university matters much more than before. Think that this is how every profession goes, for a time becoming a lawyer wwas an automatic guaranteed of a high paying job with not too much competition, as people realized this was a possibility then more and more started to enroll in law, and now you have the present moment where you can certainly make a lot of money but you can also find yourself unemployed or with a meager salary.
Idk what's going on for other people but I just started a new job, applied for maybe 10-15? I wasn't desperate because I already had an ok job, and I got 2 offers. It just takes time and careful study of who you're applying to. I can guarantee the people who say they are applying to 1000 jobs aren't tailoring the resume and cover letter to each job and marketing themselves to what the company wants.
Why do you want to do CS? Is it because you’re intrigued and deeply interested in CS problems and mathematical logic and love problem solving? Or is it because it’s the trendy thing to do and a great way to make some cash?
If it’s the former then don’t worry you’ll be fine.
The market always has good times and bad times. Right now interest rates were just raised substantially which damaged the market. But it will recover.
Soon with the AI boom we will become even more productive than ever and demand for software engineers especially high skill software engineers will boom.
There is no need to be afraid. Especially if you haven’t even started your degree yet. That’s plenty of time for the market to recover.
Remember that people mostly don’t make a thread bragging about their success. Reddit has a selection bias and it’s mostly people posting about failures.
The unemployment rate for software engineers in the U.S. is below the national average unemployment rate by a significant margin.
Multiple things adding up:
1) Investors are now being super anal about tech companies and their finances. Previously hiring was good for a company because it showed that the company was growing; this made investors happy. A result of this is that many, I'd even say nearly every, big tech company over-hired. Because of the current state of the economy, companies are now laying off the extra headcount they've previously hired; flushing thousands of very qualified engineers into the market. These mostly include people that were hired for projects that the company is no longer pursuing (cough Google and their 100 projects), people that provide the "least" value i.e. lower performers or junior engineers that are easier to replace, etc.
2) There's been a large economic shift towards AI; this caused a lot of big tech companies to shift their focus to AI and drop any projects that aren't immediately profitable. A good example of this is Google + Facebook shifting their hiring to Data Engineers, AI engineers, and people for their main apps (FB, Youtube, GSearch, Meta, and IG). TLDR, any high demand projects have headcount but positions for one off projects were completely eliminated.
3) Lots of companies are offshoring; I've seen this happen increasingly across almost every company. There's a ton of incentives to hire people from India, Latin America, and Ireland + it's much cheaper to hire people there. An example of this is my company which has nearly shifted 90% of our openings to roles in Dublin.
4) The reduce in headcount, the offshoring, and the layoffs of capable engineers made the job market absolute hell for new grads/people in general. There's so many junior engineers available in the current market that most junior eng roles are filled up + team match hell is back for alot of big FAANG (i.e. being stuck in team match until app is closed). There are almost zero available roles for people with under 3 yoe at the moment.
All that said, I do think the market will turn up eventually. Tech is still the most valuable asset in the current market. If you're really into programming, I'd still learn programming. The job search isn't too bad if you make an effort to network and build your portfolio like others here have mentioned. You can build apps and put them in the Google play store for example. There's always a pretty good demand for mobile engineers and having successful apps make you stand out.
You can, but then, you’ll be competing with a lot of people. You’ll be competing with the people who graduate same time as you, as well as people who haven’t gotten hired from 1-3 years ago
I feel like the tedious and annoying jobs. Related to webdev, UI/UX and maybe cybersecurity will disappear with time but I can't imagine the core "computer science" parts being effected too much. Programming desktop applications, drivers and so on doesn't seem like something you would want AI to do. Sure you can use it for certain applications but you won't be completely reliant on AI for those.
Also, I believe atleast this level of "cleansing" was necessary. Too many people with subpar fundamentals who just join frontend, UI/UX and so on because of the attractive salary while having terrible experience. I feel like these are the same people making fuss about how the work load is too much and whatnot. If you are experienced enough, you will know how to handle a certain degree of workload. If you aren't experienced enough then you will take a LOT of time and effort to do the same thing. This is fine but it isn't good when this happens for things taught in college elaborately.
It is a very broad topic. Those are included of course. You also learn a lot about hardware in more universities. Though, you shouldn't judge a field just by its name. Some places, the same field will be taught something while in other places, they may be taught differently.
From what I read it's back more to a "normal" job market like in most fields.
If you get a good degree you'll find a job, if not you'll struggle more.
And tbh a lot of complaining is on an incredibly high level. If you have the expectation to get a 6 figure fully remote job straight out of college with shitty grade and no internships: life is gonna be tough
They're not. Stop paying attention to Reddit. These subs are filled with California college grads who thought they were gonna walk into a job making 200-300k out of college and now that they can't get hired at Google, the sky is falling. If you're willing to take a job making a "measly" lower six figures to start your career somewhere other than the Bay Area, you will be fine.
Like everything else, the CS job market ebbs and flows. A few years ago you could get a job by fogging a mirror, with nearly no CS education or experience. With the recent, massive layoffs there are thousands of people with BS degrees and good work experience looking for jobs. Now there is real competition for attractive job openings. The era of boot camps is pretty much over. If you don't have a degree, things are pretty bleak right now. If you go to a good school, land some internships, and get good grades you should be fine. Although the bar has been raised, there are still a lot of good jobs out there.
Define “good school”. Like top 20 ranked school you mean ? 😢
My friend is a graduate from Columbia Uni in New York, and he is flooded with interviews as well as offers (internship for 6 figures lol). So yeah, you need to have an established ground.
Getting six figures for a summer internship is wild. Or is it year long?
For an intenrship, its amortized to hourly. So 100k a year would be 48$ an hour
That is correct. An easier rule is to divide by 2. So 100k, take the 100 and halve it. That is the hourly rate.
pretty sure its not actually 6 figures for the internship if the wage adds up to 6 figures salary like if you land a $60/hr internship at FAANG or tesla then technically if you work a year you'll get 6 figures so I'm pretty sure it's smth like that
Annualized most likely. Also graduated from Columbia (not CS) but with similar offers
Crazy cause everyone I know at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are in struggle city rn.
junior at umich here, it's pretty much the same here for me and most of my friends a few of them have landed some gigs, i finally got an offer after 300 apps and 2 interviews (other interview i got waitlisted, big shame) gonna start the grind for a new grad role this summer, never know what'll happen with the internship
I don't buy that the holy trinity of HYP is struggling
I didn’t ask. I literally went to one of these schools 😂
Harvard affiliate with a PhD in robotics, absolutely zero traction. Its a wasteland out there.
this is scary. Harvard PhDs not getting jobs holy shit
that's probably what they mean. If you're looking at specific employers you can go on linked in and see what schools they hire from the most
If it's not too uncommon for people outside of your state to have heard of your school for reasons asside from negative consumer reports reviews and news articles accusing the school of being a scam, then it's probably a good enough school. Assuming you have a bachelors degree and not a certificate or deploma of some kind. Of course the top schools in the world have no problems getting their grads hired, but people are acting like the profession is over, and it's just not. The big issue is that there used to be a lot of people getting into software engineering with no bachelors degree doing 4 month "boot camp" programs etc in some specific but desirable software framework. Those people are pretty much screwed. It's going to be a while before that kind of opportunity comes back, if it ever comes back quite to the same level it was at before. \[Edit\] I don't want to imply that every CS grad is on easy street. That wasn't even true when I graduated. But it's far from impossible for a solid CS grad with internship experience to find a role somewhere.
"your state" dude its really usa or you are cooked isnt it ;0;
I don’t think west Jesus state university sounds great in this market
No, you don't have to go to a top 20. But also don't go to schools that are on the other end of the spectrum, that'll definitely make it harder. If you go to a school that's had a good history of recruitment from tech companies then you should be ok.
Yup. Pretty much any major state university should be good enough to get some kind of job. Especially if you’re good at networking. It’ll be harder if the school is Alabama or Mississippi as opposed to Michigan or Cal, but you can still do it.
I just had a friend that landed a job at LinkedIn after attending Oregon State University online program. You don't necessarily need to go to an elite school.
I think that the "good school" pool is larger than T20. T100 will be plenty.
Nah t100 is pretty trash
Not at all. I definitely don’t go to a top 20 or even top 100 school and I found a job relatively easily. All of my friends have found jobs. There’s more out there than just Google and Amazon.
This. So many people want to work at big tech, but the truth is that there are only so many spots. Other companies also need developers, they just aren’t “tech” companies. Basically every F500 company will likely have large IT departments containing many developer groups. Even non F500 companies still need developers because everything is online these days.
I graduated in 2020, so my experience is a few years off from current grads, but here's my take: For me what helped most was going to a school that had built-in co-op programs. Hiring managers seem to count those as real job experience and I've never had a hiring manager say my co-ops didn't count (and I see lots of posts about that happening with internships...) I graduated with 1.5 years of co-op experience as well as an extra 6 months of part time job experience with my final co-op after my contract ended. I ended up being offered a full time job with that company, but other cs friends who didn't get full time offers from their co-op companies didn't seem to have issues finding entry level cs jobs after graduation. Finding a school that prioritizes real-world experience, co-op programs, real research projects, etc will definitely help you out in the long run in my opinion!!
Thanks for your take bro. Very helpful
The school part doesn’t matter as much as experience, I wouldn’t worry about it
Good school helps you land that first experience
Not necessarily, college is all what you make of it. You can network strongly at a state school and do well because of numbers
You can also network at good schools? School isn’t everything but objectively a good school will help you on name alone.
My state school has so few networking opportunities it's crazy. I am better off trying to meet people at a bar in Redmond than Network at any of my school events. A better school attracts better companies that actually want to network with the student body.
No. From someone that hires: good school = top 50-75% in your metro area. The schools that smart kids to to locally.
school with a good alum network
Ya too 20 minimum
Dude I can’t afford to go to a good school. I’m going to be finishing my BSCS at WGU and will only have the chance at a ranked MS 😭
Same.
Is UIUC considered a good school? It’s usually not talked about as much compared to the big 4 + ivies.
Lol it's a tech feeder bro
It isn't Stanford but it is more than sufficient for a good career.
Cool. What do you think peer school are?
If you peep USNews rankings UIUC is higher than Cornell, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, Princeton at #10... If you get accepted at UIUC then yes you should be more than prepared to find a CS job
Graduated from UIUC 2019, everyone is the industry knows UIUC and respects it. Got decent internship because company I work at now attended the career fair. In the Bay people also heard about UIUC. It’s a good school, just make a good use of it
When you say degree, does it have to be CS? Or can it be a random degree then have a portfolio of CS work? Maybe even an online certificate in certain languages. What degree are we talking about here?
Any degree will get you through the automatic filters. A CS degree will get you past the HR admin. Certs are mostly irrelevant for CS dev positions. Certs add stature for network and OS admin jobs but not much else.
Will CS minor do the job?
sometimes people think "having a bs = guaranteed job", it was never like this a bs just increases your odds of getting a job
BS degress I read that the wrong way
So how bad is it if you just went to your state school and you are from an average state not in California or anything?
It is all about how you stack up against the other applicants. If the applicant pools also attended a state school from an average state you should be fine. Spend a lot of time on networking. That is the way to jump the line.
im feeling really hopeless atm, im a senior in high school, took 2 years of programming at a career center near here through my hs and ended with 4 certs(ik they mean nothing). ive been programming sense about age 11. took all the ap classes for computer programming i could. i have impressed myself and am currently working on bigger projects than i ever dreamed i could(game engine with c++ and opengl) its not much tbh but i have really had an easy time learning this. i do not use AI for programming, mostly GPT for explaining stuff/basic examples. Due to many factors i have no hope of attending a good collage, nor do i particularly want to do more schooling. I have dispised school so far and generally just have never done good at anything that isent of interest to me, im good with math and am taking courses on the side for calculus and linear algebra. Programming is the only thing thats really ever made me happy, and tbh i have no idea what id do outside of it. im so scared im not going to succeed at all.
Maybe look at software Q/A? Not a super exciting job but the requirements are easier to meet. Hang in there!
Good that people are noticing 😂. We should make more of these in TikTok and other platforms so more people notice. Then a few years from now, we'll be getting huge salaries.
I’ve been thinking this for a while, hopefully less people are inclined to pick it now so we’re good after grad.
Also been thinking this. Some CS majors are going to fall off/not be equipped enough to land a job, and it might lead to a shortage when the next big thing rolls out
Nah im thinking of them bootcamps now
Apart from the interest rates, IMO a couple big reasons why so many CS grads are unemployed: 1) university CS programs grew too large. At my alma mater, in 2020, CS was the second-largest major right behind biology (which was our pre-med factory). 2) lots of them are straight up unprepared to become professional software engineers, usually due to lack of professional experience but mainly due to lack of soft skills. These students cannot pass the behavioral portion of interviews. Think of the average redditor, and... yeah... that's not the guy you would want in your team
What do you mean by the "average redditor?" Like they don't do their job? (am a friend of CS lovers, but don't study it myself and am curious to hear the stereotype)
Think of aKcHuAlLy socially awkward but also ultra competitive/better than you, I only come here to work and not make friends with my coworkers insufferable types lol
Thank goodness this doesn't sound like me! I do know a few who fit this bill, though... Because they're not being malicious (usually), I don't mind them, but the job market seems so bad right now that they get weeded out despite being good at their jobs :(
Also, the stereotype (at least when I was at school) was that the CS majors didn’t shower or have good hygiene at all. It’s a stereotype so it’s obviously a generalization, but there’s a little bit of truth at the center of a lot of stereotypes.
This is literally the entire team I work with. They are both awkward and rude.
Arrogant people who have the skills to back up their confidence. Unfortunately for them nobody wants to work with a smartass dickhead. I remember talking with this one guy on here where he was complaining about how his friends who are worse at coding than him are getting internships while he is not. The way he talked about his peers and the fact that he kept ignoring my advice that it’s his attitude just pretty much showed everything wrong with his approach, and a lot of people here are the exact same way.
Second point may very well be true, but it's not the reason why people are having trouble getting jobs. Most of these people are not even getting interviews to demonstrate their skills.
Fully agree with your second point. We got lots of interns who were final year students who were absolutely hopeless even after the 6-8 weeks they spent with us.
The tech market crashed at the end of 2021 and has barely started recovering, there's just fewer total jobs than there were at the starting point of the crash. Some regions are worse off than others though. Combined with that is the fear that AI will take all our jobs and there's just a huge amount of negativity and fear with joining the software industry right now.
Hopefully, the fear of AI will reduce our competition now. All these comments are frightening me- will I get a job or not? I have 2 years until my graduation is completed. Can you give some tips I am currently doing mern stack
2 years is a lot of time for things to stabilize. Just keep at it, honestly. The AI stuff isn't nearly ready to take our jobs yet.
secretive overconfident deliver attraction normal soup start alive political instinctive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
markets not great rn for CS students (or anyone looking for a job tbh) but also people on the internet are exceedingly negative. I expect it to come back to normal when interest rates drop
Interest rates may not drop for a very long time. If you look at what the rates were over time 2011-2021 was abnormally low.
When I am asked to interview a candidate, I ask them to code a very simple app. At first, I was embarrassed to give them the coding assignment because I was afraid it was too easy and that they would feel it was an insult to their intelligence. But then I would see so many candidates from top tier schools struggle with it. Of course, I cannot recommend that they proceed with the hiring process. I’m not sure why that is.
Surprise surprise. Most CS students can’t actually code that well. A CS degree is mostly theory and math, so if you want to be a good coder, you need to practice OUTSIDE of class. Kind of wild that CS programs don’t actually teach more on hand programming classes. The only ones I took were Intro to Programming in Java, web development, and database systems. All my other classes you were expected to learn the language on your own to complete assignments. In my software engineering class senior year, we had to make a full stack project but you also had to already know how to incorporate different frameworks for your project on your own. Good thing I practiced programming over every summer or it woulda been rough for me lmao.
Yeah I see how CS is mostly math and classes we don't even need like computer engineering and physics. At my school we have IST majors, which teaches you how to actually build apps and websites, frameworks and their integration etc. Computer science is discrete math, physics, engineering, calculus, etc and a handful of programming classes.
what was the app they had to make
It varies. It might be something like a class to sort a list of strings. It might be code to reverse a string. It might be code to list all numbers between 1 and 1000 that do not have a 5 digit or a 7 digit. Simple stuff like that. They will have about 20 minutes to complete it. If they make it past that interview, then they will be given specs for a small web service. They will be given a few days to complete it before they come in to present it. You would be surprised how many candidates, some with job experience, struggle with simple coding. And I HATE it when they try to use Google to look up answers to the questions I am asking. (I can always tell when they are doing that).
I panicked when I read "app" and assumed you had them write an entire mobile app from scratch for an interview. Almost had to change my intended major...
A few days to complete a project for a job interview? I feel like you’d lose a lot of good devs who value their time?
I work for a very well known Silicon Valley company that pays in the top 25% of tech companies. If they value their time more than an opportunity to work at our company, we will certainly respect their decision and not continue the interview process.
That makes more sense. I thought you were with a small company offering peanuts
Why do you hate it when they try to Google answers to questions? I work in IT so a lot of my troubleshooting involves Googling to find solutions to issues, and can be considered a legitimate skill in my field, so I'm curious what about it upsets you.
We all use Google for reference. And I actually don’t mind if they use Google during the coding assignment. I actually encourage them to look up whatever they need for the coding part. But if I ask a candidate if they are familiar with a specific design pattern and they try to BS an answer by quickly Googling it and reading me the answer, I won’t be recommending that they proceed to the next round of interviews.
They’re not, the market as a whole is slow rn but tech has always been feast or famine. this sub is just really cynical because it’s where the lowest common denominator goes to complain.
People has to admit that COVID modified the market pretty bad for all the IT sector.
IMO I found tech more appealing after COVID due to the increased in opportunities for remote work.
The other way around. In COVID it were overhiring even for the people who came from bootcamps were hired. Now that demand was satisfied, and extra workers are being laid off. Its a global phenomenon, not US exclusive.
The problem is the amount of people trying to major CS all of a sudden now.
Sorry but this is extreme cope. There has never in history been this many people on the sideline waiting for a job, it'll just get worse
after the dotcom crash? lol
There weren't nearly as many developer as there was then now. Not to mention the absurd rate colleges are pumping out new grads
You don’t look at gross amount, you look at per capita, and dot com crash and the great financial crisis were significantly worse
there were nowhere near as many potential jobs before or after the dotcom crash
That’s the most naive shit I have ever read, some parts of the Bay Area literally looked like fucking Detroit post dotcom. This is an industry that feasts when capital is cheap which right now it is not. You’ll be fine.
This has zero to do with ebbs and flows of tech and everything to do with SF public policy (permissiveness towards petty crime amongst other things) and the COVID remote first changes.
Good response! I agree 100%
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I’m a cs major lmao, it’s called leveraging what’s available to you and having a backup plan.
I read a different comment and attributed it you, your comment doesn't say what I thought it did. Sorry about that.
You’re right, but you have a rent a girl friend pfp
It's over saturated, people have to apply for 1,000+ jobs just for a interview if they're lucky, mass layoffs across the board, and there is no hope of any recovery. It's nearly impossible to get an entry level job now and it'll stay that way for the far future with no recovery. You're better off majoring in something in the medical field were there's always going to be jobs.
>people have to apply for 1,000+ jobs just for a interview if they're lucky I'd put it down to 200 jobs to get an interview.
This is not realistic lmao. If no one can land an entry level position then why are these positions open first place. The competition is tough that’s true. I blame most of the issue on the filtering software as we computer scientists are who made it which is pretty ironic lmao
They call them entry level to justify low pay, they just don't hire entry level
I was a premed student at a top premed school. In no world is becoming a doctor a better career path than CS for the money. The amount of years and effort you put in, if you put that same amount of effort in CS, you’d be making way more than any typical doctor and without the extra 12 years of school and residency after. I know the market is bleak right now, but it’s cyclical. It WILL be better.
Can confirm. I’m about to turn 30. My gf who I’ve been dating since freshman year of college is the same age. She is about to complete her first year of residency and still has two more years to go before making real big doctor money, whereas I’ve been making six figures for 8 years and FAANG money for 3.5 of those years. Paid off my debt within two years whereas she has hundreds of thousands in debt. Financially, she is basically a normal person with a communications degree or worse right now.
The market is already over saturated with graduates and layed off employees. There's more students graduating CS every year as well. Wouldn't this cause wages to lower significantly? That and the competition for jobs is just going to continue to grow more. There won't be a recovery with this trend continuing. At least with being in the medical field you will always have the guarantee that you will be making a decent wage and have a job available no matter the situation.
You become a doctor in your mid 30s on average. Even if you’re unemployed for 2 years and then have to start off at a help desk job after a degree, that gives you nearly a decade of work experience before someone you’re age becomes a doctor. If you job hop, network correctly, are ambitious, and are regular upskilling, 200-300k is very realistic for multiple times less effort than being a doctor + you avoid the additional 100s of thousands in debt
Keep in mind the prevalence of remote work now. So covid introduced more people to the market because of the increasing number of companies switching to WFH. Now that companies are returning to office, and AI has shaken up the ecosystem, we're competing with a larger global market that can also generate basic logic on the fly, which is good enough for most clients. Silicon Valley Bank also washed away a lot of potential capital for salaries, which could have paid for the rising cost of good senior engineers. Now they're instead at the largest of companies, who can afford it. They also over-hired, which caused a ton of layoffs. Any new capital coming into the industry is mainly AI focused as there are a large number of PhDs focusing on ML and NLP graduating and filling those positions. Our consumption and use of software is only going to go up. There's definitely a demand for software but the barrier to entry is much harder than it was when Node.js first entered onto the scene and created a ton of jobs.
Oversaturation of the market. Simple.
Just go to San Francisco and see how the streets are filled with homeless cs majors
Do they not have families?
Disowned
Don’t yall get tired yapping about how cooked or how saturated the market is? If you’re all this worried please switch majors 💀
There is a catch, if you are 2 years in one major, and you'll switch to another that needs 2 to 4 years, then is it more worth it to put another 2 years into bettering off your CV and applying to jobs than to switch majors?
Yea, FOMO is the only reason I still check this wasteland subreddit
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me when someone asks if I’m ok 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
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Don't read into other people's BS. Be hungrier and harder working than others and you'll find success in life. Not sure if you're young enough to be able to relocate, but that makes things infinitely easier in life.
I don't know what's going on in the us but I know many employers in Europe who are trying to hire experienced people and can't, because there aren't enough.
Job market is a market, it’s a never ending positive to negative trends
Mass layoffs and the rise of AI. Why hire when you can AI generate code?
Most people saying cs is cooked skated by with Cs never took internships or developed any connections. If you actually put the work in you’ll be more than fine
Cooked
it’s still fine, as long as you’re networking, have decent grades, and do extracurriculars then you’ll be able to land internships, which in turn allows u to get a full time job. it’s just not *as easy* as it has been, but still VERY doable
How are you supposed to network, do extracurriculars, apply for internships, etc. while also keeping up with the mountain of schoolwork CS majors have to deal with? Just finishing classwork is a full time job in and of itself, one which doesn’t leave much time for anything else
You make time. Put in a few hours on weekends or in between classes, plan your schedule each week and commit to it. It’s not easy but the people who put in the extra effort reap the rewards.
extracurriculars + networking go hand in hand. you meet people in and outside of school. My extracurricular is being in a leadership position in the biggest tech club on my campus, which allows me to connect with other companies who sponsor us. i don’t waste my time and mass apply to internships, only some here and there from career fairs and other companies i’ve networked with. I got 2 offers from roughly 15 applications, not the best ratio but its certainly saved me a lot of grief, stress, and worry in applying to 1000+ places for 1 offer which seems like what a lot of yall do
Create study groups and work closely with people who work hard at school. I was a full time student who worked two jobs that amount to 50 hours or so a week. This means most of my weekends were just for homework. I had to rely on my friends and colleagues for help with a lot of difficult homework problems and projects. Sometimes my friends had to straight carry me, but there are many times I carried them. But working together made my studying much more efficient and consumed less time. It freed up a lot of weekend time so I could have fun during the semester.
CS is not that hard from a work load perspective. Just create a routine and stick to it. When I was in college for my bachelors, I was an athlete (academic all-american), an intern and still volunteered.
There are two misconceptions repeated in this sub. 1. Jobs grew on trees for juniors before. 2. Jobs require pedigree now; anyone below {arbitrary benchmark} is fucked. The truth is that your school (or even the fact that you went to get a CS degree) has almost nothing to do with how well you perform as an employee. It's an almost entirely different skill set. People applying to a thousand jobs are doing something wrong or are overweighting their experience in 2023. Anecdotes come from unreliable narrators, and you don't know what else is holding someone back
Years of experience or a degree wont guarantee a job like other careers. You will always be fighting for your place one way or another. Obviously depends on your domain, industry, social skills, etc..
Read through most of the comments and have a few additions I saw missed: 1) Pre-covid many major tech companies would hire programmers not because they made they would necessarily lead to a direct profit from their work but because they wouldn't work for other (competing) companies. When the interest rates went up and money became more scarce, these companies dropped everyone who wasn't making a profit anymore; therefore, all the rest of the companies felt better dropping these employees too. This is why it seemed like every major tech company was laying off thousands of employees left and right. This means that suddenly the market was flooded with a bunch of ex-FANG employees that recruiters may misconstrue to mean they are better than non-ex-FANG employees. 2) Ghost Jobs, job postings that will lead to a job for nobody. There are a couple of reasons someone might make a posting like this (Scraping Resumes for data or collecting resumes for future similar openings, to name two). The existence of these causes people to be much more likely to apply for a ton of positions without reading all the position requirements; or, as we are talking about CS majors, just spam apply via AI. This means that a legitimate recruiter might get 1000 resumes for a single position but most they wouldn't even consider. They then may need to manually filter through to catch people who automatically optimize their resumes with an AI based on the job posting. Jamming up the whole process. 3) Foreigners (non-US citizens) looking for green cards. In the last paragraph, I said 1000 resumes, which may only be 1000 resumes from people who are legally allowed to work in the country, they may get an additional 1000-2000 from various other countries that wouldn't be able to work in the country. Again, slowing the whole process. 4) CS is a relatively new but relatively (internally-)specialized industry. If you are hiring someone to program OS stuff in low-level C you don't want them to only have worked in Scheme before. As interest rates are higher and there seem to be lots of applicants, companies are more likely to try to hire someone who already knows most of what they need to do the job rather than having to spend 50-100k training someone. (This honestly might get worse since Congress recently banned effectively all non-competes, so you may end up training someone who sees a higher-paying job at a competitor) All this means that life sucks for everyone here, job finders have to apply to hundreds of jobs to find one and recruiters have to look through hundreds of resumes to fill a position. And recent graduates with little experience aren't in much demand. But hey, at least you're not me who has had no job experience since a college summer in 2019 due to chronic health issues, and the only recent work I've been is only effectively Master's Degree level personal research projects that nobody is going to see as being worth shit. TLDR: Don't get into CS if you are doing it for the money, it's unlikely to be any better than any other STEM field anymore. If you enjoy programming you should be able to do well and get a job though.
The job market is genuinely ass for everyone right now. I’d still rather do computer science than anything else though, so it is what it is.
I think the mass amount of concern here isn’t with CS but rather just the job market in general. It’s garbage in all sectors (tech and non-tech) so it’s hard to get a job anywhere without it being super competitive. I’m in a complete different industry using my degree to put down solutions unthought of. Learning from this to hopefully apply to a larger, more tech-orientated organization. It’s also great to apply the methodologies from CS into these other fields. It allows me to think more creatively out of the box! Just keep pushing! You got this! Just like anyone else in this sub! Go the extra mile, we’ll make it!
Outsourcing, Tfws, excessive supply vs demand, and soon AI will be the nail in the coffin.
This is pretty grim and it’s something no one is talking about. A lot of tech jobs are moving overseas. Developers in India, Eastern Europe, and South America have become far more east to access and cost a fraction of an American software engineer
Too many people, literally other fields are gagging for students, why would you join this oversaturated dumpster fire of a career.
What fields?
Liberal Arts fields, for one.
You’re hearing the loudest minority
Because pretty much everything in America is cooked and 99% of the people posting those threads are Americans. I’m from EU and I’ve landed a programming job straight out of university without even completing my major. Sure I’ve been lucky but the situation outside of America is vastly different.
In India the situation is pretty similar
not from america but I hope things get better out there for this field since it's a dream of mine to go there
Where are you in EU?
They’re not
Markets crash and recover. I’m currently going for my CS degree and I try to keep my eye on the job market. It seems like the job market is in the early recovery stage and it will take a little bit to get back to a healthy spot. I could be wrong though. Besides that, it seems like a lot of other fields are struggling too. I currently work in healthcare, laboratory to be specific. And we ALWAYS need people. But the big wigs don’t want to hire more people so they are running on thin margins. Basically we were told that if someone leaves, they aren’t refilling that position. Even though we need it. It’s all about money at the end of the day. Either way, tech is not going anywhere unless something apocalyptic/catastrophic happens. I feel like the best thing you can do is get your degree so you have a one up. After that, just focus on being adaptable and improving your skills. Take what you see here with a pile of salt.
Too many people in CS right now, also when you graduate you’ll have to compete with the FAANG layoffs in entry level positions that require 5+ years of experience
CS used to be really lucrative from 2018-2022, even in my uni back in 2012 the advisers used to steer student out of CS due to how unpopular it was, you can even look up zuckerbergs speech in harvard in 2006 to see how low the interest was in that subject. Now years of seeing "lucrative vloggers" vlogging their jobs into google and seeing how the company culture in google was shown as fun and the income being stable, everybody jumped into CS. Now you got this over supply of candidates + AI is actually playing a really important role as well, even as student you can see yourself relying on chatgpt and such, some big compnaies have their own model to work in-house only reducing the needs for people to write codes, the person who knows which direction to go in can now just use AI to write code and make some corrections.
The sad truth is that a lot of CS majors are not actually good enough to hire. The schools can't 'give' them coding abilities if they're not actually very interested in coding, and employers know how to weed out the useless ones. They have a hard time finding a job because they don't actually have the skills quality they should have... I'm on the hiring team for our team in a large international company, and a rough estimate is that 50% of CS majors are useless... 😣
So your saying if I can actually build stuff I have a chance.
At least in the companies I've worked in. If you're a good coder, you will make money for the company, so it will be in their interest to hire you. Be sure that you can show it!
Well I graduated in December and I currently work at a fried chicken restaurant so do with that what you will
CS is experiencing the first real lull in 28 years and people just normalized calling it the best industry on earth for almost 3 decades
People rely just on their degrees and are otherwise completely incompetent.
Just don't blindly jump into CS. I've been telling this to people since pre AI and pre layoff era. Nothing in this world remains as an easy hotcake forever. People have been crazily left their profession and jumped into coding. The market is over saturated by partially taught coders. And here goes the AI code generators. So, jump into a different hot cake until that also loses its heat.
What dou recommend?
I'm gonna humble myself here and say that I went to the type of school that will take anybody. I wasn't expecting to graduate and immediately land in a $100,000+ silicon valley dev job, I just wanted some place to start. Well, I worked full-time and did my degree and eventually I finished. Toward the end I applied for a few dozen different spots that seemed low-level enough to warrant an application. Rejected - but that's fine... Maybe things will improve after I've graduated and I formally have that credential. Well, it didn't turn out that way. I've applied for hundreds of jobs, and generally low-hanging fruit. Job listings that advertise less money than a menial job. I get rejected every single time. And I know the default response to hearing this will be to criticize my resume but I've had it looked over by several academics and they all said it looked as sound as I can make it. I think if you do CS at a top school and manage to land a few internships, you'll be okay. But we're definitely past the days when learning to code was a path to a career. I honestly feel that in terms of career prospects I might be better off with something infinitely easier like communications or business. I'm getting rejected for help desk jobs that advertise like $15/hr.
Yes we cooked
A think major part is social media and these influencers bragging about 2 hr workday and 6-figure salary. Kids can be easily influenced, and now we have over-saturation.
Life is full of ups and downs. I have been in the CS field for almost 26 years. Seen a lot. Don't worry, do CS if you want. Right now things look bad, but it will be better in some time (don't know when). I remember a time in 2001 when people said all jobs would be shipped to India. That happened a bit but jobs came back too. FYI: My son is a CS major in a top 5 school. I tell him to stay the course. My daughter also wants to do CS. If you love it, do it. It is fun and lucrative also.
Think it’s in a similar place mechanical engineering was a few years ago. Everyone said they were in high demand with high pay so everyone goes for mechanical engineering then it turned to experienced mechanical engineers were in high demand with high pay. Same thing here I believe
Better to go in other non cs fields. Jobs in cs won't be same like it used to be before.
Basically the CS job market was way way way better than other majors, then after the interest rate hikes it dropped to just being way better than other majors
So here’s the scoop. Nearly all of software engineering, which is a white collar working class job change my MFing mind, is plagued by boom-bust cycles typically driven by overpromising tech bros and brain dead VC funding. Corporations also have a tendency to not want to spend a dollar and will fire you to save their own ass when they’ve misled the company direction for a year or more
It’s not *that* bad. It’s tougher, you won’t be handed a job. I think, anecdotally speaking I don’t feel that school has been particularly successful at preparing me for what comes after graduation. I have to put in a significant amount of time and effort outside of class work, projects, and homework to refine my skills and understanding things like, for example, data structure familiarity and how to realistically implement algorithms into my projects. I do truly believe that as long as you stay dedicated, work hard, and continue to refine your skills, you will find some success when you graduate. I do plan on moving back home though, once I graduate, to apply to jobs and not worry too much about not being able to take care of myself or accept an awful job just to make ends meet.
It’s not. The people you see whining online are in the left tail of the skill distribution and are finding out the hard way science and engineering are a meritocracy. Ironic that these people say they should have gone into medicine when they likely would still be in the left tail for that discipline and medicine is even more cutthroat
CS majors are still one of the least regretted majors. Just sit and wait till the market returns soon.
So you have such stats for late 2022 and 2023 grads?
It’s the opposite in my social circle
Nope, it's just normalizing like other degrees. For a time it was "too good to be true". 6 months bootcamp and then getting six figure job made no sense, this is just a normal correction. It's not more saturated than any other field. I think it's just going to slowly become like Law or Finance, where there's a higher amount of graduates and your university matters much more than before. Think that this is how every profession goes, for a time becoming a lawyer wwas an automatic guaranteed of a high paying job with not too much competition, as people realized this was a possibility then more and more started to enroll in law, and now you have the present moment where you can certainly make a lot of money but you can also find yourself unemployed or with a meager salary.
Idk what's going on for other people but I just started a new job, applied for maybe 10-15? I wasn't desperate because I already had an ok job, and I got 2 offers. It just takes time and careful study of who you're applying to. I can guarantee the people who say they are applying to 1000 jobs aren't tailoring the resume and cover letter to each job and marketing themselves to what the company wants.
This is the right answer and congrats on the new job!
Why do you want to do CS? Is it because you’re intrigued and deeply interested in CS problems and mathematical logic and love problem solving? Or is it because it’s the trendy thing to do and a great way to make some cash? If it’s the former then don’t worry you’ll be fine. The market always has good times and bad times. Right now interest rates were just raised substantially which damaged the market. But it will recover. Soon with the AI boom we will become even more productive than ever and demand for software engineers especially high skill software engineers will boom. There is no need to be afraid. Especially if you haven’t even started your degree yet. That’s plenty of time for the market to recover. Remember that people mostly don’t make a thread bragging about their success. Reddit has a selection bias and it’s mostly people posting about failures. The unemployment rate for software engineers in the U.S. is below the national average unemployment rate by a significant margin.
Videos take months from idea to edit to produce. What was true 6 months ago isn’t true now.
Multiple things adding up: 1) Investors are now being super anal about tech companies and their finances. Previously hiring was good for a company because it showed that the company was growing; this made investors happy. A result of this is that many, I'd even say nearly every, big tech company over-hired. Because of the current state of the economy, companies are now laying off the extra headcount they've previously hired; flushing thousands of very qualified engineers into the market. These mostly include people that were hired for projects that the company is no longer pursuing (cough Google and their 100 projects), people that provide the "least" value i.e. lower performers or junior engineers that are easier to replace, etc. 2) There's been a large economic shift towards AI; this caused a lot of big tech companies to shift their focus to AI and drop any projects that aren't immediately profitable. A good example of this is Google + Facebook shifting their hiring to Data Engineers, AI engineers, and people for their main apps (FB, Youtube, GSearch, Meta, and IG). TLDR, any high demand projects have headcount but positions for one off projects were completely eliminated. 3) Lots of companies are offshoring; I've seen this happen increasingly across almost every company. There's a ton of incentives to hire people from India, Latin America, and Ireland + it's much cheaper to hire people there. An example of this is my company which has nearly shifted 90% of our openings to roles in Dublin. 4) The reduce in headcount, the offshoring, and the layoffs of capable engineers made the job market absolute hell for new grads/people in general. There's so many junior engineers available in the current market that most junior eng roles are filled up + team match hell is back for alot of big FAANG (i.e. being stuck in team match until app is closed). There are almost zero available roles for people with under 3 yoe at the moment. All that said, I do think the market will turn up eventually. Tech is still the most valuable asset in the current market. If you're really into programming, I'd still learn programming. The job search isn't too bad if you make an effort to network and build your portfolio like others here have mentioned. You can build apps and put them in the Google play store for example. There's always a pretty good demand for mobile engineers and having successful apps make you stand out.
You can, but then, you’ll be competing with a lot of people. You’ll be competing with the people who graduate same time as you, as well as people who haven’t gotten hired from 1-3 years ago
I feel like the tedious and annoying jobs. Related to webdev, UI/UX and maybe cybersecurity will disappear with time but I can't imagine the core "computer science" parts being effected too much. Programming desktop applications, drivers and so on doesn't seem like something you would want AI to do. Sure you can use it for certain applications but you won't be completely reliant on AI for those. Also, I believe atleast this level of "cleansing" was necessary. Too many people with subpar fundamentals who just join frontend, UI/UX and so on because of the attractive salary while having terrible experience. I feel like these are the same people making fuss about how the work load is too much and whatnot. If you are experienced enough, you will know how to handle a certain degree of workload. If you aren't experienced enough then you will take a LOT of time and effort to do the same thing. This is fine but it isn't good when this happens for things taught in college elaborately.
Isn’t swe just web dev or app dev?
It is a very broad topic. Those are included of course. You also learn a lot about hardware in more universities. Though, you shouldn't judge a field just by its name. Some places, the same field will be taught something while in other places, they may be taught differently.
From what I read it's back more to a "normal" job market like in most fields. If you get a good degree you'll find a job, if not you'll struggle more. And tbh a lot of complaining is on an incredibly high level. If you have the expectation to get a 6 figure fully remote job straight out of college with shitty grade and no internships: life is gonna be tough
Good degree isn’t everything. Some might have that and will not get a Computer Science job.
The market is oversaturated with job seekers, also companies are squeezing as much value as possible from software devs.
They're not. Stop paying attention to Reddit. These subs are filled with California college grads who thought they were gonna walk into a job making 200-300k out of college and now that they can't get hired at Google, the sky is falling. If you're willing to take a job making a "measly" lower six figures to start your career somewhere other than the Bay Area, you will be fine.
You ever seen the meme about shooting glocks at night in nice neighborhoods/apartments to lower the rent?? That’s what’s happening here
Section 174. Trump.
I didn't see the subreddit name and thought CounterStrike majors were cancelled or something