Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates

https://www.newsweek.com/computer-science-popular-college-major-has-one-highest-unemployment-rates-2076514

by xena_lawless

9 comments

  1. Welcome to ai. And any programming will go out of the us to cheap labor. No such thing as proprietary knowledge anymore. Eventually no one will very able to purchase much and the US economy will be like Europe with everyone being very financially conservative. We have killed the golden goose..

  2. Totally fair to be concerned when a top major like CS has high unemployment. However, those in big state universities with huge computer science classes may understand that a lot of students are in there because they believed computer science was the highest paying job and not their actual passion. I think the supply of computer science students are way over saturated.
    Instead of steering everyone toward four-year degrees, we should expand options like apprenticeships and trade programs.

  3. A lot of people who share this article overlook this section:

    >”Every kid with a laptop thinks they’re the next Zuckerberg, but most can’t debug their way out of a paper bag,” one expert told Newsweek.

    Basically, a driving reason for the drop in employment for CS majors is the lack of quality control. Yeah, a lot of people are getting CS degrees, but many of them should have been failed out.

  4. This seems to be cyclical, a few years back it was everyone wanted to go into nursing, a few years before that it was law degrees and then of course years back it was everyone in the trades saying go to college.

  5. They go into it thinking this is a major that makes money. Sometimes. If you cant do it then you wont. But even if you can, right now it sucks

  6. Oh no how do our delusional techies spin this please show yourself lmaoooooooooo

  7. so ur telling me that the Psychology and Art History and Liberal Arts majors who basically do minimum wage jobs or something completely different than what they studied for are more gainfully employed than computer science majors

  9. I’ve worked in creative and technology for the last 35 years. I’ve worked with many computer scientists, including at big tech firms. I know many and I’ve watched them struggle with jobs. Here is my take:

    In a word, it’s AI. Nobody likes to admit it, and every one of them emphatically says that “AI can’t do my job”, but AI is being used to eliminate jobs at an alarming rate.

    Without going into too much detail, the usual structure is that you’ll have a lead engineer who defines the architecture and a bunch of other engineers who work below them with varying levels of skill. Usually the lowest skilled engineers start coding some aspect and that work gets refined or supervised by more skilled engineers, etc.

    But now, increasingly the lowest skilled are replaceable via programs like ChatGPT (but different, there are some other LLMs that are made specifically to code and to work well with code)

    Even in the fringes where engineers might work on solo projects, this is taking over so much that a new way of working has emerged called “Vibe coding” where a lesser, or non skilled coder basically uses one of these LLMs to text chat their way to a complete app or program. It’s got some issues, but it’s viable and works.

    So, long story short, this is a period of transition in technology, similar to what happened with print shops in the 1980s/1990s when desktop publishing put a lot of offset press operators and related professions out of work. Back then, the change was in favor of computer operators who could use programs like Photoshop and Pagemaker and then print the outcome at Kinkos.

    IMHO, this “replacement” WILL happen to all knowledge workers within the next ten years. If you are working on a computer right now and not architecting an AI or otherwise working with AI, then your job will likely soon be in jeopardy as well.

    The question is what will happen to the economy when everyone starts to realize that AI is coming for their job as well? Replacing one industry with new technology happens all the time. I think we are on the cusp of a “full replacement” by AI, which hasn’t happened before. (Maybe the Industrial Revolution?)

    Sorry for the long post.

    TLDR: AI

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