[le-mark]

> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming.

Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?

[shagie]

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (note: Latest Release: February 4, 2026, based on data from 2024)

Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%.

Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment.

The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree.

    The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor's degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job.

Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree.

Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest).

If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job.

Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate.

There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.

[Schlagbohrer]

I'm glad you pointed this out because I think the difference is due to philosophy grads being ready and willing to enter the workforce as a welder or an au pair or a restaurant manager, whereas a CS grad is gonna hold out for a CS job.

Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.

[keiferski]

Philosophy major here that went from working in a bakery, to sales at a large apparel printing company, to writing and marketing at startups.

I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.

[bluGill]

Software tends to be complex enough that you need a lot of people and thus a tech company. It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally. Many non tech companies makes their own software but it is shipped to customers as part of the product

[saturn8601]

>It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally.

From my understanding China operates this way. They supposedly have such an oversupply of software engineers that every company just build all the software they need internally. Now with AI they have supposedly been super aggressive in adopting it that its probably even more of the case that everyone is building most of what they need internally.

[keiferski]

Eh it depends. I’ve worked at / with a lot of more traditional non-tech companies and you’d be amazed at how a lot of the software looks like Excel circa 1995.

I guess they could be using third party software but it seems like often they are just using an ancient thing they built themselves.

[saturn8601]

Sounds like you are picturing WinForms in your mind (Was so awesome to create forms and ship really customized usable software quickly). Does business software really need to be super pretty?

[bluGill]

That tends not to be written by software people so we can ignore it even though you are correct.

[Suppafly]

Isn't a philosophy also a popular pre-law degree? A lot of these sorts of articles neglect to account for the actual reality of how these degrees are used.

[shagie]

If you are referring to underemployment...

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

    What is your definition of underemployment?

    The definition of underemployment is based on the kinds of jobs held by college graduates. A college graduate working in a job that typically does not require a college degree is considered underemployed. This analysis uses survey data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) Education and Training Questionnaire to help determine whether a bachelor’s degree is required to perform a job. The articles cited above describe the approach in detail.

47.1% of people with a philosophy degree are working in a job that does not require any college degree.

[Suppafly]

>47.1% of people with a philosophy degree are working in a job that does not require any college degree.

Theoretically. I know tons of jobs that claim to not require a degree, but actually won't hire anyone without a degree.

[killingtime74]

I mean I have both arts and tech and it doesn't magically make you more interesting.

[RealityVoid]

There is an image crisis. Yes, it's not a badly paid profession. But the perception that it's a dead end will lead to a sharp drop off in the student numbers.

[rockskon]

Oh good lord not that statistic again.

Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take.

There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.

[frollogaston]

The article mentions this. Unsurprisingly, the CS grads are more likely to get jobs that require a degree.

[SoftTalker]

Philosophy and history majors are for people who have no idea what they want to do. So a decent job in any field is as good as any other.

CS majors are working towards employment in a specific sector, and aren't likely to accept anything else very readily.

[rienbdj]

Cut juniors for AI

Save money

Invest in market share

Increase market cap

Hire the last remaining seniors at higher rates but only where needed

Great time to be a shareholder or staff level engineer. For everyone else, the ladder has been pulled.

[deadbabe]

I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it.

What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI.

So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway.

Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.

[musicale]

> juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI

this does not seem to be an argument for requiring junior employees to focus on using AI tools

[vanuatu]

thats interesting, the HMs where I work love hiring juniors (who pass the bar) because they are so AI-native

the more experienced engineers can help with setting guardrails and mentorship, but the juniors come unconstrained by priors on how to use ai in creative ways to solve all sorts of business problems.

[deadbabe]

That just sounds like a good way to end up with solutions like AI agents for parsing a text instead of a deterministic regex.

Juniors have no advantage over seniors in AI skills.

[mxkopy]

I love how the basic expectation of having a job and the life altering circumstance of not having one factors into this not even a little bit

[deadbabe]

Not sure what you mean, juniors are a poor ROI these days.

[JesseTG]

They mean that juniors have bills to pay, too.

[gottorf]

> Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry.

In my (admittedly vibes-based) opinion, this is just a result of there being a huge supply of CS grads in this country due to it being popularized as a path to a stable, high-paying job. Those degrees are now more often than ever held by people who aren't necessarily passionate about, or good at, the field.

The signal-to-noise ratio in hiring, therefore, is worse than ever. AI exacerbates the problem, of course. But I don't think this is an existential crisis; I think the market will sort itself out, as those less-qualified entrants leave.

[upbeat_general]

I think that figure (haven’t verified it but assuming it’s true) isn’t complete. It hides who and where those people are - for example, I imagine art history skews towards higher ranked schools in the first place.

[toyg]

Such a correction was always going to happen. Coders always were the blue-collar workers of the 21st century, and capital ruthlessly optimises for profit. Where you once needed thousands of workers to run an assembly line, you now have dozens; where you once needed hundreds of programmers to run a big SaaS, you will now have a handful. It was always inevitable.

That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.

[VBprogrammer]

> They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.

I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted.

As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause.

I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out two of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally.

I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.

[Larrikin]

In your example you knew the issues with the original fix, had some ideas to the cause, even if they were wrong, and generally knew where to look.

In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.

[rienbdj]

Can’t sustain six figure salaries because current prompts are wrong.

[timoshishi]

I heard prompt engineer is the six figure job of the future

[jayd16]

Unemployment is based on the amount looking. I gotta say, how many philosophy students do you know actively looking for jobs? Now ask yourself why you think it's zero.

[mixmastamyk]

Decades of experience here, and have not worked in over two years. Tell me again how I have nothing to worry about.

[aduwah]

Experience does not really matter. What matters is a few shiny corp names and titles in your CV. No-one cares with merit these days

[JCTheDenthog]

I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.

[LastTrain]

A few major failures will scare the risk mitigating bejesus out of some kinds of businesses, but maybe AI will be better than us at fixing those kinds of problems by then.

[genxy]

It is, but that isn't how it will be used. The problem isn't the tech, never was, it is how the greedy and stupid deploy it.

[ekidd]

COBOL was mostly outsourced to India, and it's a terrible professional path for anyone in the EU or US, and has been since the Y2K bugs got fixed at the last minute.

(And probably a bad path in India, too, but I have no data one way or the other. It's just that all the excellent Indian devs I know use almost exactly the same tech stacks I do.)

[dyauspitr]

You know that’s not going to happen. Most of us are past the denial stage now, come join us…

[otabdeveloper4]

Remember OpenClaw?

You know why nobody talks about it anymore? Because the project has been vibe coded to death in the span of a few months.

Not only will it happen, it's literally happening right now in front of our eyes.

[aroman]

Do you have any evidence that the code quality of OpenClaw is to blame for its decline in popularity?

I would say far more likely is that its creator was acqui-hired and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage.

The reality is that AI is both capable of producing sloppy code and capable of cleaning it up, if directed to do so, just like humans.

And, just like humans, code quality is very rarely the make or break factor between success and failure in business, much less popularity.

[otabdeveloper4]

In the case of vibe-coded slop like OpenClaw it's not a question of some vague notion of "code quality", it's a case of the software shitting the bed and not working anymore, with no recourse of fixing it. (Neither humans nor LLMs have the context window to analyse and fix tens of millions of lines of code slop.)

> and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage

If OpenClaw wasn't broken it would just use a standard token API.

But see above - as software it is fundamentally broken and unfixable.

[JCTheDenthog]

Then why did it take Anthropic over a year just to fix the flickering issue in one of their main products when they have internal access to the latest and greatest models?

[vlod]

ThePrimeagen just talked about it on his podcast:

"I Think They Are Lying To You": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfYsSFY4l18

[SoftTalker]

And since big-name companies will be dealing with this, nobody will get blamed for not seeing this train barreling down the tracks towards them.

[bluefirebrand]

I sure hope you're right

I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent