If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning:
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
There's a formula I've bookmarked from someone to help you get better social capital. In order to increase your surface for social capital you need to expand your influence, therefore you need to increase your luck:
L (luck) = D (doing) x T (telling)
Basically, you need to be able to show you are able to do stuff (D) and with enough people seeing this by you sharing (T) through different channels, can open doors. I haven't been doing it as heavily but it has already given me incredible opportunities.
To a much smaller extent due to where I live, I noticed this too. From merely the fact that I had a (local economy relative) high paying software job and that I could "make stuff happen" for people with capital or people in the "boys club", I was introduced to an entirely different layer of the city I had no idea about. I noticed how effortlessly the signals transfer and how it all feels very meritocratic, you don't even notice the layer and you just see the people.
Until someone who's not in that layer shows up, and suddenly the doors close, the conversation chills and the barriers to the layer become evident.
I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort.
I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming.
I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
Similar story where as soon as someone made a 100k+ offer to me I dropped out of school and never looked back (was making $12/hr at the time).
In retrospect it was not the best choice because college does give you a unique chance to get connections that let you into "the club" and will send you to the upper echelons of FAANG and early retirement.
I always thought I would just become a better and better engineer cutting my teeth at startups and then make the switch, but now it almost feels like you are a career startup engineer or a career big tech engineer, and making the switch is difficult. One is obviously insanely more lucrative, probably 3-5X with the way equity has exploded.
At work nobody knows what degree you've got. I mean some people insist to be called Dr. X if they have a Ph.D. (and in some cultures that's more common). You can have a B.Sc. in biology, or an M.Sc. in EE, or a law degree or no degree and nobody knows. As a manager in a large tech company I didn't even know that for the people I managed. I would usually find out people's background through random talk but it's not information I had access to. I was surprised to find one of the rising stars didn't finish his degree and wanted to take some time off to finish it.
Where it does matter is in the hiring process and especially for juniors and larger companies.
> I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
Sad but my experience as well.
As someone who started being more self-educated (I did learn a lot of theory myself) and only later finished my degree (started, dropped out to do some real work, came back much later) I do think a good CS program teaches a lot of important things. Most importantly the ability to learn and understand research in this area. Not all the specific things you're going to learn are going to be applicable all the time, some will some of the time, and not having that background at all is limiting. You can learn this without going through the academic system but it's much harder and most people don't and stay stuck in some sense.
I guess it depends on what you want out of life too. I did not go to Uni, started my career early and had a very comfortable income my entire 20’s. No debt, travelled all over the world, relaxed freelance contracts. I had a lot of free time and low stress.
Later I joined one of my freelance clients as a co-founder (early 30s), more risky than the FAANG path but we’re on the right path to a comfortable pension.
I wouldn’t trade my life for that of some of my FAANG friends.
This is completely correct. It's the same reason why an MBA or PhD can be valuable if you want to go the management track. In Europe specifically - especially in the UK - the class based system is still alive and kicking and is based on subtle tells such as education, name, accent and more. It's less overt than in say India, but still very much present.
For those looking for one practical way to do this in the US, I can share my story.
In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.
Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)
If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.
The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).
Yes 100%. I was born upper middle class. I have a BIT from a global top 50 University. I understood this after working in cryptocurrency sector in Germany.
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.
As someone who got a Comp Sci degree from a good school and who worked at FAANG right out of school, it seems like this is all that matters to companies looking to hire me.
Most of the value of a CS degree is being able to say that you have a degree truthfully. If you don't have a degree then you just lie and say that you do, which is a moral papercut. Nobody really cares about your education though, they just want their world view to be maintained.
Learning can be done without a degree, but building connections and securing funding is difficult without one.
A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree.
But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself.
Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder.
Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do.
I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.
Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention.
I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree.
And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out.
I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.
> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming.
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%.
Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment.
The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree.
The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor's degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job.
Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree.
Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest).
If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job.
Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate.
There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
> Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry.
In my (admittedly vibes-based) opinion, this is just a result of there being a huge supply of CS grads in this country due to it being popularized as a path to a stable, high-paying job. Those degrees are now more often than ever held by people who aren't necessarily passionate about, or good at, the field.
The signal-to-noise ratio in hiring, therefore, is worse than ever. AI exacerbates the problem, of course. But I don't think this is an existential crisis; I think the market will sort itself out, as those less-qualified entrants leave.
Such a correction was always going to happen. Coders always were the blue-collar workers of the 21st century, and capital ruthlessly optimises for profit. Where you once needed thousands of workers to run an assembly line, you now have dozens; where you once needed hundreds of programmers to run a big SaaS, you will now have a handful. It was always inevitable.
That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.
I think that figure (haven’t verified it but assuming it’s true) isn’t complete. It hides who and where those people are - for example, I imagine art history skews towards higher ranked schools in the first place.
Unemployment is based on the amount looking. I gotta say, how many philosophy students do you know actively looking for jobs? Now ask yourself why you think it's zero.
I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it.
What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI.
So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway.
Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.
This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished.
Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy.
Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly.
> a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments
The decline in quality of STEM students/graduates is alarming, but the decline in intellectual quality of students is generalised.
Little did Dodson think he was being prophetic when he wrote satirically of Reeling, Writhing, and the arithmetical operations of Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
[0] _ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Isn't this just grading on a curve, which has been done probably as long as universities have existed? The key is the instructor making sure a high standard is met (which seems to be the crux of the issue).
Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.
All exams should be verbal. The fact that verbal exams are so rare is because teachers/professors are overworked and (outside of AI) underpaid. Too many students, not enough time.
The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.
There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive:
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today?
Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art.
Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
If anything it seems wide deployment of LLMs would go against this. When nobody writes code by hand anymore, who will care about the ergonomics of programming languages? And even if a few do care, how would you get adoption? I expect everyone will just use whatever is already used most.
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
I think interest rates have a lot to do with that mindset. If you view a Jr engineer as a long term investment (in 18 months you get an SDE 2 who knows your business), that's much easier to justify when borrowing money is close to free.
It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money.
Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this.
I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation.
Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.
If a job is well-paying, there will always be many people going into it for the money. High paying and only people who love it do it are pretty much incompatible.
There are two things you can get from a degree:
1. Knowledge and skills
2. A network and a reputation
While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.
Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
Getting a PhD is almost never worth the foregone wages if your goal is to be in private industry. For sure, people should get one if they are interested in research, or specific jobs that are only available to people with PhDs. But otherwise it isn't something to get into half-hearted.
A difficult degree in philosophy or english lit also does the same thing. Humans are amazing generalists, and when we practice thinking deeply, that skill transfers and allows us to pickup new domains.
Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
Ironic. I did both a humanities and a CS degree. The CS degree was filled with either south asian internationals or people who just want to make money. The rest were antisocial dudes. Humanities however was filled with young social women. The experiences I got from the latter was a huge ego and confidence boost.
Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.
People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?
Where do you draw the line on that attitude? Do you not care about global warming because in your lifetime, you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live?
If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.
If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning:
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
There's a formula I've bookmarked from someone to help you get better social capital. In order to increase your surface for social capital you need to expand your influence, therefore you need to increase your luck:
L (luck) = D (doing) x T (telling)
Basically, you need to be able to show you are able to do stuff (D) and with enough people seeing this by you sharing (T) through different channels, can open doors. I haven't been doing it as heavily but it has already given me incredible opportunities.
To a much smaller extent due to where I live, I noticed this too. From merely the fact that I had a (local economy relative) high paying software job and that I could "make stuff happen" for people with capital or people in the "boys club", I was introduced to an entirely different layer of the city I had no idea about. I noticed how effortlessly the signals transfer and how it all feels very meritocratic, you don't even notice the layer and you just see the people. Until someone who's not in that layer shows up, and suddenly the doors close, the conversation chills and the barriers to the layer become evident.
I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort.
I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming.
I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
Similar story where as soon as someone made a 100k+ offer to me I dropped out of school and never looked back (was making $12/hr at the time).
In retrospect it was not the best choice because college does give you a unique chance to get connections that let you into "the club" and will send you to the upper echelons of FAANG and early retirement.
I always thought I would just become a better and better engineer cutting my teeth at startups and then make the switch, but now it almost feels like you are a career startup engineer or a career big tech engineer, and making the switch is difficult. One is obviously insanely more lucrative, probably 3-5X with the way equity has exploded.
I got a job first and my degree later.
At work nobody knows what degree you've got. I mean some people insist to be called Dr. X if they have a Ph.D. (and in some cultures that's more common). You can have a B.Sc. in biology, or an M.Sc. in EE, or a law degree or no degree and nobody knows. As a manager in a large tech company I didn't even know that for the people I managed. I would usually find out people's background through random talk but it's not information I had access to. I was surprised to find one of the rising stars didn't finish his degree and wanted to take some time off to finish it.
Where it does matter is in the hiring process and especially for juniors and larger companies.
> I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
Sad but my experience as well.
As someone who started being more self-educated (I did learn a lot of theory myself) and only later finished my degree (started, dropped out to do some real work, came back much later) I do think a good CS program teaches a lot of important things. Most importantly the ability to learn and understand research in this area. Not all the specific things you're going to learn are going to be applicable all the time, some will some of the time, and not having that background at all is limiting. You can learn this without going through the academic system but it's much harder and most people don't and stay stuck in some sense.
I guess it depends on what you want out of life too. I did not go to Uni, started my career early and had a very comfortable income my entire 20’s. No debt, travelled all over the world, relaxed freelance contracts. I had a lot of free time and low stress.
Later I joined one of my freelance clients as a co-founder (early 30s), more risky than the FAANG path but we’re on the right path to a comfortable pension.
I wouldn’t trade my life for that of some of my FAANG friends.
This is completely correct. It's the same reason why an MBA or PhD can be valuable if you want to go the management track. In Europe specifically - especially in the UK - the class based system is still alive and kicking and is based on subtle tells such as education, name, accent and more. It's less overt than in say India, but still very much present.
My experience has been quite the opposite. I have done far better than my peers and have less debt. I wonder which country you're in?
Opposite of my experience. I never cared about social networking. I focused only on being good.
For those looking for one practical way to do this in the US, I can share my story.
In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.
Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)
If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.
The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).
Yes 100%. I was born upper middle class. I have a BIT from a global top 50 University. I understood this after working in cryptocurrency sector in Germany.
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.
As someone who got a Comp Sci degree from a good school and who worked at FAANG right out of school, it seems like this is all that matters to companies looking to hire me.
Shouldn't a bad job market convince people to get a degree?
You only miss a bad job market entry and low salaries, you need every meagre advantage you can get.
100% agree on a degree being a strong signal, by the way.
Hi, can you elaborate, I don't think I understand what you mean.
Most of the value of a CS degree is being able to say that you have a degree truthfully. If you don't have a degree then you just lie and say that you do, which is a moral papercut. Nobody really cares about your education though, they just want their world view to be maintained.
Learning can be done without a degree, but building connections and securing funding is difficult without one.
A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree.
But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself.
Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder.
Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do.
I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.
Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention.
I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree.
And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out.
I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.
> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming.
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (note: Latest Release: February 4, 2026, based on data from 2024)
Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%.
Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment.
The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree.
Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree.Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest).
If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job.
Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate.
There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
Oh good lord not that statistic again.
Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take.
There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.
Cut juniors for AI
Save money
Invest in market share
Increase market cap
Hire the last remaining seniors at higher rates but only where needed
Great time to be a shareholder or staff level engineer. For everyone else, the ladder has been pulled.
> Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry.
In my (admittedly vibes-based) opinion, this is just a result of there being a huge supply of CS grads in this country due to it being popularized as a path to a stable, high-paying job. Those degrees are now more often than ever held by people who aren't necessarily passionate about, or good at, the field.
The signal-to-noise ratio in hiring, therefore, is worse than ever. AI exacerbates the problem, of course. But I don't think this is an existential crisis; I think the market will sort itself out, as those less-qualified entrants leave.
Decades of experience here, and have not worked in over two years. Tell me again how I have nothing to worry about.
Such a correction was always going to happen. Coders always were the blue-collar workers of the 21st century, and capital ruthlessly optimises for profit. Where you once needed thousands of workers to run an assembly line, you now have dozens; where you once needed hundreds of programmers to run a big SaaS, you will now have a handful. It was always inevitable.
That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.
I think that figure (haven’t verified it but assuming it’s true) isn’t complete. It hides who and where those people are - for example, I imagine art history skews towards higher ranked schools in the first place.
Unemployment is based on the amount looking. I gotta say, how many philosophy students do you know actively looking for jobs? Now ask yourself why you think it's zero.
I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it.
What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI.
So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway.
Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.
This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished.
Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy.
Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly.
[1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...
> a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments
The decline in quality of STEM students/graduates is alarming, but the decline in intellectual quality of students is generalised.
Little did Dodson think he was being prophetic when he wrote satirically of Reeling, Writhing, and the arithmetical operations of Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
[0] _ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
> many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments
Isn't this just grading on a curve, which has been done probably as long as universities have existed? The key is the instructor making sure a high standard is met (which seems to be the crux of the issue).
Good good and good.
Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.
All exams should be verbal. The fact that verbal exams are so rare is because teachers/professors are overworked and (outside of AI) underpaid. Too many students, not enough time.
The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.
There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney
IEEE Spectrum is one of the many things that is always high on the HN front page, but is never worth reading.
IEEE has been putting their name on garbage journals and conferences since forever.
Good sleuthing, this really lowers the IEEE's quality in my eyes
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today?
Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art.
Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
> better compilers, more ergonomic languages
If anything it seems wide deployment of LLMs would go against this. When nobody writes code by hand anymore, who will care about the ergonomics of programming languages? And even if a few do care, how would you get adoption? I expect everyone will just use whatever is already used most.
I agree with the "what" but not with the "how".
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
I think interest rates have a lot to do with that mindset. If you view a Jr engineer as a long term investment (in 18 months you get an SDE 2 who knows your business), that's much easier to justify when borrowing money is close to free.
Tragedy of the commons. What stops a company taking on the strong junior engineers you just invested time and resources into?
It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money.
Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this.
I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation.
Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.
If a job is well-paying, there will always be many people going into it for the money. High paying and only people who love it do it are pretty much incompatible.
There are two things you can get from a degree: 1. Knowledge and skills 2. A network and a reputation
While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.
Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
Getting a PhD is almost never worth the foregone wages if your goal is to be in private industry. For sure, people should get one if they are interested in research, or specific jobs that are only available to people with PhDs. But otherwise it isn't something to get into half-hearted.
A difficult degree in philosophy or english lit also does the same thing. Humans are amazing generalists, and when we practice thinking deeply, that skill transfers and allows us to pickup new domains.
Related: Do You Really Want That Computer-Science Degree? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418782
Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
Ironic. I did both a humanities and a CS degree. The CS degree was filled with either south asian internationals or people who just want to make money. The rest were antisocial dudes. Humanities however was filled with young social women. The experiences I got from the latter was a huge ego and confidence boost.
> who built a product with actual paying users
How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
A degree was never supposed to make someone instantly productive on day one. It was supposed to be paired with junior roles, mentoring, code review
Computer Science is still useful. It is software development that is made trivial now that software can write software.
Not many people are employed as computer scientists (they are mostly academics) compared to SWEs.
Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.
People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?
Ideally you want society to continue to function after you retire unless you plan on jumping off a cliff at 62.
To twist another saying: "Employers can be short-sighted for longer than I can delay my rent payment."
You're framing it like they're making a mistake, so if they are, yeah that's not good for you either.
Idk though, really seems like the "AI layoffs" are just corps shedding headcount bloat accumulated in 2020-23.
It would actually be good for us…
I never understood why software engineers were so excited about open source and teaching everyone to code.
Why aren‘t we more like doctors or lawyers?
Sure. Why give a shit about anything really.
Where do you draw the line on that attitude? Do you not care about global warming because in your lifetime, you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live?
Because eventually you'll get to the point where you've too much work to do and there's not enough people to delegate it to.
Hope you like being overworked!
If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
> probability, calculus, linear algebra
All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.
In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree?
Isn't it normal to study mathematics in a computer science bachelor program in USA?
That country never ceases to astonish me lol.
First step is denial