Growing up near Silicon Valley in the US, Manasi Mishra remembers seeing tech executives on social media urging students to study computer programming.
“The rhetoric was, if you just learnt to code, worked hard and got a computer science degree, you could get six figures for your starting salary,” Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, California, US.
That 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.
Since the early 2010s, a parade of billionaires, tech executives and even US presidents has urged young people to learn coding, arguing that the tech skills would help bolster their job prospects as well as the economy.
“Typically their starting salary is more than $1,00,000” plus $15,000 hiring bonuses and stock grants worth $50,000, Brad Smith, a top Microsoft executive, said in 2012 as he kicked off a company campaign to get more high schools to teach computing.
The financial incentives, plus the chance to work on popular apps, quickly fed a boom in computer science education, the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms.
But now, the spread of AI programming tools, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code is dimming prospects in the field.
Among college graduates aged 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates.
In response to questions from The New York Times, more than 150 college students and recent graduates shared their experiences. Some said they had applied to hundreds, and in several cases thousands, of tech jobs at companies, nonprofits and government agencies.
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 months-long 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.
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.
“The unfortunate thing right now, specifically for recent college grads, is those positions that are most likely to be automated are the entry-level positions that they would be seeking,” said Matthew Martin, a senior economist at Oxford Economics, a forecasting firm.
Tracy Camp, executive director of the Computing Research Association, said new computer science graduates might be particularly hard hit this year because many universities were just now starting to train students on AI coding tools, the newest skills sought by tech companies.
Some graduates described feeling caught in an AI “doom loop”. Many job seekers now use specialised AI tools like Simplify to tailor their resumes to specific jobs and autofill application forms, enabling them to quickly apply to many jobs. At the same time, companies inundated with applicants are using AI systems to automatically scan resumes and reject candidates.
To try to stand out, Audrey Roller, a recent data science graduate from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, US, said she highlighted her human skills, like creativity, on her job applications, which she writes herself, unassisted by chatbots. But after she recently applied for a job, she said, a rejection email arrived three minutes later.
“Some companies are using AI to screen candidates and removing the human aspect,” Roller, 22, said.
Recent graduates looking for government tech jobs also report increased hurdles.
Jamie Spoeri, who graduated this year from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C, US, said she majored in computing because she loved the logical approach to problem-solving. During college, she also learnt about the environmental impacts of AI and grew interested in tech policy.
Last summer, she had an internship at the National Science Foundation, where she worked on national security and technology issues, like the supply of critical minerals. She has since applied for more than 200 government, industry and nonprofit jobs, she said.
“It’s demoralising to lose out on opportunities because of AI,” said Spoeri, 22, who grew up in Chicago. “But I think, if we can adapt and rise to the challenge, it can also open up new opportunities.”
NYTNS
