The ongoing AI apocalypse is hitting prices for high-end components from RAM to GPUs to storage hard, which is bad enough when you have a job to try and budget for those now-pricier items — but what if you don’t? Once upon a time, it might have been good advice to tell a jobless friend to “learn to code,” but is that still true in the era of AI? [Brian Jenney], writing for IEEE Spectrum, says the death of the CS degree has been vastly exaggerated, but your take might differ. Let’s look at the numbers.
Unemployment is higher amongst new Computer Science grads than ever: in the US, it’s at 6.1%, while 7.5% of Computer Engineering graduates are on the dole. That’s a record high, and while various EU countries have their own numbers, they all have one thing in common: they’ve all shot up like a rocket in the past few years. In the USA, Philosophy grads report only 3% unemployment. Let that sink in: the folks you used to bully as being the most useless on campus are twice as likely to get a job as you would be if you were in school today.
Granted, one of the ways future BAs were bullied when we were on campus was with photocopies of job applications to McDonald’s, and [Brian] points out that that is a big part of the discrepancy in the USA: Philosophers are far more willing to accept underemployment — that is, to work at a job that doesn’t require their degree-designated skills. Recent graduates in the USA are, on average, underemployed at a rate of 42% — clearly a sign of a highly efficient free market system in action — while CS grads who have jobs are only underemployed 20% of the time. To pick CS today is to halve your chance of getting a job, in order to double your chance of getting a good one.
So, is the lesson to be more like the dude who never shut up about Nietzsche and go flip burgers? Maybe as a temporary measure; more realistically, [Brian] offers some advice for new grads to keep themselves out of that unlucky 6%. Unfortunately, it’s all the sort of common sense they should have already heard dozens of times by graduation: cultivate a network, since most want ads are fake; create your own, non-job experience to polish and demonstrate your skills — we hear projects submitted to Hackaday are great for this — and make sure you’re building the skills that are in demand right now.
To [Bryan], that doesn’t mean you should learn to code really well without the help of LLMs; nor does it mean embracing the vibe. It means really understanding the black box that we call AI and the workflows that can leverage its strengths. Like it or not, “AI” is the boom right now, and that’s where the startup jobs are, which is, of course, another tip — find a startup. If the company just started, they have to be hiring, right?
