Growing up near Silicon Valley, Manasi Mishra remembers seeing tech executives on social media urging students to study computer programming.
“The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary,” Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, California.
Those golden industry promises helped spur Mishra to code her first website in elementary school, take advanced computing in high school and major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for tech jobs and internships, Mishra graduated from Purdue University in May without an offer.
“I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle,” Mishra said in a get-ready-with-me TikTok video this summer that has since racked up more than 147,000 views.
The spread of AI programming tools, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code — combined with layoffs at companies like Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft — is dimming prospects in a field that tech leaders promoted for years as a golden career ticket. The turnabout is derailing the employment dreams of many new computing grads and sending them scrambling for other work.
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 per cent.
“I’m very concerned,” said Jeff Forbes, a former programme director for computer science education and workforce development at the National Science Foundation. “Computer science students who graduated three or four years ago would have been fighting off offers from top firms — and now that same student would be struggling to get a job from anyone.”
The process can be arduous, with tech companies asking candidates to complete online coding assessments and, for those who do well, live coding tests and interviews. But many computing graduates said their monthslong job quests often ended in intense disappointment or worse: companies ghosting them.
Some faulted the tech industry, saying they felt “gaslit” about their career prospects. Others described their job search experiences as “bleak”, “disheartening” or “soul-crushing”.
Among them was Zach Taylor, 25, who enrolled as a computer science major at Oregon State University in 2019 partly because he had loved programming video games in high school. Tech industry jobs seemed plentiful at the time.
Since graduating in 2023, however, Taylor said, he has applied for 5,762 tech jobs. His diligence has resulted in 13 job interviews but no full-time job offers. The job search has been one of “the most demoralising experiences I have ever had to go through”, he added.
The electronics firm where he had a software engineering internship last year was not able to hire him, he said. This year, he applied for a job at McDonald’s to help cover expenses, but he was rejected “for lack of experience”, he said. He has since moved back home to Sherwood, Oregon, and is receiving unemployment benefits.
“It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying,” said Taylor, adding that he was now building personal software projects to show prospective employers.
Computing graduates are feeling particularly squeezed because tech firms are embracing AI coding assistants, reducing the need for some companies to hire junior software engineers. The trend is evident in downtown San Francisco, where billboard ads for AI tools like CodeRabbit promise to debug code faster and better than humans.
Last month, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said the company was assessing how AI was changing computer science education.
Mishra, the Purdue graduate, did not get the burrito-making gig at Chipotle. But her side hustle as a beauty influencer on TikTok, she said, helped her realise that she was more enthusiastic about tech marketing and sales than software engineering.
The realisation prompted Mishra to apply cold for a tech company sales position that she found online. The company offered her the tech sales job in July. She starts this month.
(New York Times News Service)