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.
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.
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.
I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.
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.
I guess they could be using third party software but it seems like often they are just using an ancient thing they built themselves.
Accountants and marketers didn't build the legacy tools teams are stuck with.
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.
CS majors are working towards employment in a specific sector, and aren't likely to accept anything else very readily.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
"I Think They Are Lying To You": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfYsSFY4l18
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
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.
this does not seem to be an argument for requiring junior employees to focus on using AI tools
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.