[rizza]

The same thing happened in dentistry, law, EE, some medical specialties, vets. Job path gets seen as a golden ticket to high pay for low to medium effort and people pile into the profession and saturate the market. Then some thing happens, a recession, technological innovation, or geopolitical/geo-economic shift, and the demand changes dramatically. These things work in cycles, happened before in the .com bust, and this will take 5-10 years to work its way out. The good news is that for the new grads who manage to hang on they will make a killing as the demand for mids and seniors will be insane due to the lack of qualified candidates available.

[someguydave]

Uhh dentists doctors and EEs are low effort jobs?

[fyredge]

Yes? Insofar as a career path. You go to a good school, get a good degree and be almost guaranteed a good pay with known career progression. It's not like entrepreneurship, where you can't see the path ahead of you. Think video games, much easier to play when the goals are given to you than to make your own.

[wakawaka28]

You just described a bunch of hard and continuous work, and oversell the "almost guaranteed" part. Nothing is guaranteed in life, except death and taxes. Entrepreneurship can be harder or easier than working for someone else. Some entrepreneurs just show up with a bunch of money and hire other people to do the bulk of the work. That's a different kind of stress.

[fyredge]

I won't undersell the efforts professionals need to acquire their skills, but I also stand by my view that a clearly defined progression makes life a lot easier to navigate. It's why quests are fundamental in RPGs and uncertainty is bad for business. When you can see the path ahead, the problems that need to be solved are clear. It's why research is so painstakingly slow when we are treading on unknown unknowns.

As for those who showed up and everything worked out, consider them lucky, though I doubt there are many of them out there.

[altcognito]

Entrepeneurship is not a career path.

[zetsurin]

seriously. I don't see how CS is low effort either, maybe they mean physically low effort.

[znpy]

> I don't see how CS is low effort either, maybe they mean physically low effort.

It's pretty common in the us to sell software engineering-centric courses (bachelors) for computer science courses.

software engineering is a thing, computer science is something else.

actual computer science is not trivial at all. the math gets hard.

software engineering on the other hand is way more shallow in this sense... rightfully so, don't get me wrong.

[wakawaka28]

Software engineering is not necessarily shallow in any sense. Reasoning about large and imperfect systems can be so much harder than finding average publishable CS results. But the difficulties are often so particular to the software and situations that it isn't of interest to academics.

[znpy]

> Software engineering is not necessarily shallow in any sense.

I should have been clearer in my writing. What i meant to say is that the math involved in pure software engineering is much more shallow than the math involved in pure computer science.

> Reasoning about large and imperfect systems can be so much harder than finding average publishable CS results.

x doubt...

[wakawaka28]

>x doubt...

Ah so you are an academic. I have been in both places. Industry people have to not only think of ideas but implement them with real computers. In some cases the computers must be built specifically to solve the problems. Millions of lines of code, broken shit, backward compatibility, stuff that can only be found through years of use. I suppose one can try to make an academic problem out of any industry concern, and therefore appear to be "more sophisticated" but inferior, partial, and broken proposals are regularly published. To get published, even a sketch of a possible solution with no implementation often flies. In industry, a lot of inferior stuff is accepted out of necessity, but it's often do or die with deadlines and real budgets to be concerned about.