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by JumpCrisscross 301 days ago
> companies are just now trending towards running leaner vs hiring every good engineer available during ZIRP

This sounds more like overproduction of entry-level computer scientists than anything AI or hiring managers are up to.
2 comments
treve 301 days ago
Absolutely, and this trend didn't start with the current AI boom. It started getting tough for people around ~2017 (with some exceptions in between). Before that you could likely get a job right out of a boot camp. Supply now has far outweighed demand on the junior level.
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mothballed 301 days ago
Nothing new. Circa the great recession, most of my fellow grads at a top-5 engineering school could not get jobs. Out of my friends, most of whom had internships, co-ops, and top ~10% of class, it mostly took us 6 months or so to secure a job as all our co-ops/internships cut off hiring before graduation. Many people did stuff like drive forklifts or work at walmart for awhile. Another friend of mine with a dual engineering major summa-cum-laude worked sorting screws in a screw factory, a position normally occupied by people in that town with serious mental handicaps.
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WillPostForFood 301 days ago
The data in the paper shows a clear negative turning point for junior workers in late 2022.
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mothballed 301 days ago
I suspect it is also universities realizing that (pure) computer science has low demand so they shifted their program to either focus it on more industry-geared education, or dumb-dumbed the grade-inflation (data backs this up) enough the masses had the confidence to do it.
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bwfan123 301 days ago
> focus it on more industry-geared education

I was told that a student can now get a CS degree without courses in OS, Compilers, Programming Languages, theory of computing etc. The argument being that a vast majority of jobs do not ever use the above. That may have caused a flood of grads with a shaky knowledge of the basics. The idea that software engineering is not really a science but more of a trade for which anyone could be trained without a formal degree has some shades of truth.

But in my experience, technology changes so fast that someone with a better grasp of the basics can evolve with the tech since they understand the fundamentals better. LLMs really separate those who can critique and correct its output, and those that blindly follow it, and the former will continue to have jobs.

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the_snooze 301 days ago
>The argument being that a vast majority of jobs do not ever use the above.

Yikes. At that point, it's really not much of a "CS" degree. It's a trade program that teaches you how to use particular programming languages and frameworks.

Someone with that background is in a brittle position. They won't be able to pivot as easily to different technologies when things inevitably change. And they'll be ill-equipped to handle interesting open-ended projects where it's up to them to decide what approaches to use, how to bound problems, how to reason through trade-offs, and what lessons to take from prior work.

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JumpCrisscross 301 days ago
> dumb-dumbed the grade-inflation (data backs this up)

Source for CS graduates?

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mothballed 301 days ago
Here's one survey, but the literature is plastered with it

https://www.gradeinflation.com/

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JumpCrisscross 301 days ago
That doesn't mention computer science. English departments giving away A's to attract students don't trash the job market for recent CS grads.
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mothballed 301 days ago
Your theory that universities broadly started inflating grades, but miraculously excepted computer science is pretty damn bold one that you've made baselessly.
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JumpCrisscross 301 days ago
> theory that universities broadly started inflating grades, but excepted computer science is pretty damn bold one that you've made baselessly

I'm saying that a source from more than a decade ago describing a general trend doesn't explain why recent CS graduates are facing a worse job market than folks five years ago did.

Grade inflation, per your source, has been happening for decades across the board. That does not tell us why "since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in the most AI-exposed occupations have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment even after controlling for firm-level shocks" [1].

[1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

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