It’s the night before I give my semester career talk, and I felt that my usual advice needs some change. In preparation, I wanted to reflect on the state of the world, the industry, and the worries of my students.
Table of Contents
My Typical Advice
At the end of every semester, I steal a class out of the schedule to give my students a career day. Mostly, I do this because so many classes are too obsessed with covering content to address what young impressionable folks actually need: guidance.
Historically, that career day talk goes something like the following:
- Purpose: I talk about why I give the talk (e.g., academia is bad at preparing students for careers, you shouldn’t have to learn the hard way, and there are more career options than you think)
- Qualifications: I talk about why I feel qualified to give the talk (e.g., I have professional experience, I work with a lot of students looking to get into tech, and I’m a great source of letters)
- Paths: I lay out the various paths that students can go down (e.g., industry, academia, government, and non-profit)
Most of the talk focuses on industry because that’s where the vast majority of my students plan to end up. Usually, I kick the industry portion off by having students talk to each other about what they want to do with their lives.
Next, I present a few “domains” like software development, data science, and information systems. Then, I share some tips for how I would prepare myself for industry. For instance, I talk about picking a “subdomain” like web development, figuring out what tools are popular in that subdomain (e.g., HTML, CSS, JS), and getting to work!
I also give some optional tips like finding a mentor, joining a community (e.g., dev.to), and sharing your work (e.g., GitHub). After that, I share a few example paths, like how I might get into game development or machine learning.
Finally, I round out the talk with a few options that most folks never consider. For example, I talk about fields like technical writing and product management. More recently, I’ve been trying to convince tech folks to go into law and government, so people who are actually knowledgeable can make some change.
What Has Changed?
This semester it seems really silly to have the conversation I would normally have with students, and I feel like there are a lot of reasons for that.
For one, a degree is not enough to get you a job. When I was interviewing for jobs about a decade ago, I just had to handle a behavioral interview. These days, a lot of companies are requiring technical assessments, usually in the form of LeetCode-style problems. In other words, in addition to getting good at your craft, you also have to grind puzzles in your free time. This makes securing a job a bit more challenging than in the past.
Likewise, it’s becoming really difficult to land an interview now. The vibe I get is that students are applying to as many jobs as possible, which could be a number in the hundreds. They go to career fairs. They message recruiters on LinkedIn. They’re doing all the right stuff, and they’re not getting interviews.
Part of this could just be a competition thing (i.e., there are more people looking for jobs than there are jobs), but I think there are a few other issues at play. For instance, there are now ghost jobs, which are job postings for jobs that don’t exist. In addition, recruiters are using automated systems to rate resumes now, which means applicants need to know how to make resumes that can be processed by an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
Once you land an interview, it might not even be with a human. Recently, I’ve seen an uptick in AI interviewing. In some case, that could be an interview with a ChatGPT wrapper. In other cases, that might mean you just record yourself answering interview questions, and an LLM reviews the transcript. Or worse, some haphazard facial recognition system rates your “vibe.”
Ultimately, that leaves computer science grads with one of the highest unemployment rates. Currently, it has the eighth worst rate at 6.1%, with disciplines like anthropology, physics, and computer engineering rounding out the top three.
What Else Has Changed?
It may be surprising to read one of my articles and not see me complain about generative AI, but that’s because I’m saving a whole section for it. See, generative AI is here, and every employer in tech is salivating at the idea of saving a few bucks by replacing their junior developers with it.
If you think about this idea for more than a few seconds, it’s absurd on its face. You don’t get senior developers if you don’t have junior developers (unless they plan on, like, poaching them from other companies?).
If the hope is that AI tech gets so good that you can eventually replace senior developers, then that’s even more short-sighted. You can’t sell a product if no one makes any money.
Also, if AI somehow ends up being good enough to replace most “skilled” labor, then what’s even the point of a CEO? Surely, it could also do the CEO’s job, right? If not, does the CEO then just sit around and prompt all day? Like, I don’t understand the end goal.
To me, attempts to replace junior roles with generative AI seems unsustainable long term. In the short term, it’s not looking good for college students trying to find internships, let alone a full time job.
So, What Should Students Do?
If you’re a computer science student right now worried about the future, I don’t think there is anything I can tell you. In fact, I think anyone who thinks they have the next five years—let alone the next 12 months—mapped out is lying to you. We live in some turbulent, almost dystopian, times.
My advice? If I’ve learned anything in the last ten years of my life, it’s be opportunistic and have a backup plan. When I had a gig locked up at GE, I still took a stab at a few interviews with Google. When I was applying to graduate schools, I was working on my Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certificate. When I failed my qualifying exam, I found a new department.
Even now, while I’m on an annual teaching contract with phenomenal annual reviews, I’m still trying to find ways to protect the life that I have. I write an article here every week. I try to maintain a handful of GitHub repos. I’m learning Japanese and running a study abroad program. I’m even submitting academic papers to conferences. I don’t think you need to be incredibly busy, but I don’t think you should ever get complacent.
The last thing I’ll share is a quick story. If you’ve ever been to my office hours, you’ve probably seen me talk to students about their careers. Many of those students right now are delaying their careers by going to graduate school, which I think is a pretty decent recession indicator. In fact, I’ve written 25 letters of recommendation since July of this year.
Recently, one of those students has been stuck. Basically, she wasn’t getting many job interviews, and the few interviews she was getting weren’t turning into offers. She was burnt out, and she had lost motivation to apply to grad school. At one point, she asked me if I thought it was wise to take a gap year. All I really asked in return was if she had the means (i.e., could she afford it?).
See, I don’t think there is a correct decision to be made. She could go into industry and be laid off in the next year. She could go to graduate school and find it even harder to find jobs later. She could stay home and find that the gap in her resume causes her to be rejected by automated systems.
It’s not that all the decisions are bad. They could also have good outcomes. Maybe she gets a job and has it for life. Maybe the two years in graduate school is enough to outlast the AI bubble. Maybe staying home for a year helps her build out a portfolio that lands her a good job.
I can’t see into the future, and, again, anyone who claims to is lying (or a time traveler). Therefore, all I’ll say is that there are no bad decisions right now: you just need to make them.
As always, thanks for reading to the bottom! If you found this article valuable, I’d love it if you took a look at these related pieces:
- Inside the Mind of an Engineer: How to Make Societal Issues Worse
- 9 Things I Wish I Knew About Doctoral Programs
- There Has to Be a Better Way: Reflecting on My Automation Catchphrase
Of course, if you want to take your support a step further, you’re welcome to check out my recently updated list of ways to support the site. It includes links to my GitHub, Patreon, and LinkedIn. Otherwise, take care, and I’ll hopefully see you back here soon.
Side note: usually, I sneak these directly in the text, but since the audience of the article are my current students, I didn’t want to bother them with too much unhinged ranting. Anyway, this was meant to go just before the “What Else Has Changed Section,” if you want the unfiltered experience.
At what point are graduates no longer responsible for student loans? Like, if universities have assumed the role of jobs programs, when do they become responsible for job placement? Is it when 20% of graduates are unemployed? How about 50%? Is there a line? Because 6.1% is already a nontrivial amount of graduates. If we assume the 134,153 number in 2023 is correct from this source (which I think is just the number of American graduates), then that’s over 8,000 unemployed graduates in a single year.
To me, it seems a little irresponsible to saddle people with debt and not also ensure they are able to pay off that debt, right? I’m not saying universities are necessarily at fault here, but they bear some responsibility for serving as the training pipeline for corporations. Like, this personal responsibility obsession we have as a society has to eventually collapse, right? The mindset that “you took out the loan, so you must pay the loan” wouldn’t last a second in court if you were scammed.
Recent Posts
Despite all the pressure since the pandemic, I have not and will not record my lectures. Here's why!
Should You Use Git on Personal Projects No One Will Ever See?
Recently, someone in one of my software-related Discord servers asked if others use git on personal projects. After reading some of the responses, I kept racking my brain for the "right" way to...