Learning to code and working hard hasn’t been quite enough to land the coveted tech jobs and six-figure starting salaries that computer science graduates were promised, according to a new report in The New York Times this weekend.
As the industry grapples with layoffs and the rise of artificial intelligence tools that can perform jobs faster, recent grads paint a picture in which they’re applying for hundreds if not thousands of tech positions only to be ghosted and left feeling “gaslit” about their career prospects.
Some of the grads, who had visions of cruising into the tech workforce with skills that were deemed highly coveted, are resorting to jobs in the fast food industry, according to the Times.
It’s a topic we have been closely watching at GeekWire.
While the Times report does namecheck Amazon and Microsoft for recent layoffs and an embrace of AI tools, and University of Washington students and graduates are among those who replied to questions from the Times, a GeekWire report last month offered a different perspective.
In that story, Amazon was said to have hired more than 100 engineers from the latest graduating class at UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering — an all-time high, according to university data shared with GeekWire. Microsoft, Meta and Google were each hiring more than 20 UW CSE grads, reflecting a strong talent pipeline between the UW and Seattle’s tech industry.
Allen School director Magdalena Balazinska told GeekWire last month that the school is rethinking its curriculum for the AI era.
“Coding, or the translation of a precise design into software instructions, is dead,” Balazinska said. “AI can do that. We have never graduated coders. We have always graduated software engineers.”
Balazinska argued that the most demanding work remains distinctly human.
In a discussion on the GeekWire Podcast this weekend, longtime UW computer science professor Ed Lazowska agreed with that assessment about coding, to the extent that it represents “the translation of somebody else’s design into something executable.”
However, Lazowska said, “Design is not dead, working in teams is not dead, figuring out what problems need to be solved — and what the right approach is to tackling those problems — is not dead, and understanding how humans are going to use and be influenced by digital technology is not dead.”
While AI coding assistants may be getting some of the credit for putting a dent in job prospects, the use of AI in the actual hiring process is also gaining attention as companies use the technology to automatically scan resumes and reject candidates. Some graduates described feeling caught in an AI “doom loop,” the Times reported.
“It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying,” said an Oregon State University grad who has applied for 5,762 tech jobs since graduating in 2023, according to the Times. He’s had 13 job interviews but no full-time job offers.
Another data science graduate told the Times that she received a rejection email three minutes after applying for a job. More companies are using AI to screen candidates and are removing the human element from the process. Seattle-based Humanly unveiled its “AI interviewers” product last month in which job candidates interact with an AI-generated video interviewer.
“It’s hard to stay motivated when you feel like an algorithm determines whether you get to pay your bills,” the grad told the Times.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that while the U.S. labor market is cooling, AI can be ruled out — so far — as a culprit in any hiring slowdown. U.S. workers whose jobs involve tasks that AI can do are actually much less likely than other workers to be unemployed, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group.
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