Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates • Hacker News Board

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#91

Post by km144 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

cs_throwaway wrote: post #3

CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…

I'd argue it is actually more of a broad trend i.e. the boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing a better return on investment in the increasing cost of the average four-year degree, and software pays better than the average four-year degree. I do think that college being cheaper on average would help at least somewhat with CS being such a popular major.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#92

Post by _aavaa_ » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 1:34 PM UTC

pintxo wrote: post #82

_aavaa_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

University departments do not always have the kind of autonomy your post implies. It is common for the university’s central administration to dictate how many students they must let it, how much money they get per student, and hence how many they can fail without going into the red.

What could possibly go wrong making education a for-profit business? /s

None of this has to be for-profit. It just requires the university administration to put its wants, priorities, and head count (!) above the interests of the individual departments and of the students.

Making the whole thing a non-profit or a charity won’t solve this.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#93

Post by jaybrendansmith » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

glimshe wrote: post #87

If we're around in 2000 and 2009, you've seen this before. Our field has ups and downs and every time we hit the bottom people say it won't come back. It will. We had some cleaning up to do. I was a hiring manager during COVID and the resumes I saw were unbelievable. People with "web" boot camps being considered for 6 figure salaries. People who had absolutely no business being in this field were being hired. It was…

Well put. And this happened back in 2000, and 2009. I had people who I knew from direct experience to be non-technical slackers tell me about their IT Director jobs. I knew it wouldn't last then, and I'm not surprised now. Just get out of your comfort zone and start looking, and if you are in a bad situation don't be cowed. If you are truly technical this is always valued, despite the easy answers from ChatGPT, you must understand what it is telling you to really make use of it.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#94

Post by giantg2 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

dpflan wrote: post #66

giantg2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When most jobs just want you to be a ticket completer, the cheaters will do just fine if they can do it faster. The rest of use will be considered slow and discarded. It's happening to me.

Yes, they can be ticket punchers more easily, kind of trained to do that. But there are certainly levels of achievement that are not as possible with such a foundation that lacks grounding and true understanding. Do you mind elaborating here on what is happening to you? It seems worthwhile information to add to the discussions ongoing for this post.

The short of it is that the team just wants high throughput but doesn't care about improving the system health or process efficiency. I tend to consider multiple aspects of the work including those areas. But if you just want someone to turn out tickets, I tend to be slower unless the task is simple or repetitive. I have a disability and graying hair, so my options are limited. I'm going to fail my PIP later this month and I'll probably end up working at Walmart.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#95

Post by dagw » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #33

Maro wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you get a job at McDonald's while having a civil engineering degree That would be under_employment (vs un_employment). Un_employment refers to people actively seeking work but unable to find it, while under_employment encompasses individuals who are working but not fully utilizing their skills or working fewer hours than they would like

Bad term. If I get employed as a quantitative trader on Jane Street after completing a philosophy major am I underemployed because I'm not writing papers on ontology? Why do other people get to say what my "full utilization" is without even knowing me? Underemployment as "not working as many hours as you'd like" is the standard definition, and that one actually does seem to respect people's interiority.

If you want to get technical and read the small print, in this study "the underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree"

Since most people working at Jane Street have a college degree, you would not be considered 'underemployed' in this particular study.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#96

Post by dpflan » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #94

dpflan wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they can be ticket punchers more easily, kind of trained to do that. But there are certainly levels of achievement that are not as possible with such a foundation that lacks grounding and true understanding. Do you mind elaborating here on what is happening to you? It seems worthwhile information to add to the discussions ongoing for this post.

The short of it is that the team just wants high throughput but doesn't care about improving the system health or process efficiency. I tend to consider multiple aspects of the work including those areas. But if you just want someone to turn out tickets, I tend to be slower unless the task is simple or repetitive. I have a disability and graying hair, so my options are limited. I'm going to fail my PIP later this mon…

Hm, I see. Do you use a coding assistant? Do you see value in keeping up or your morale is diminishing? Can you change teams or positions or focus?

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#97

Post by dpflan » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

km144 wrote: post #89

vintermann wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary isn't traditionally what motivates people to study medicine. It's prestige. The difficulty is part of the prestige, which is probably why they still do things like memorize long lists of cranial nerve names. I haven't heard that they have a problem with dropout rates. A good CS education only gives you prestige with fellow nerds.

I actually think prestige is a contributing factor for CS as well. People assume you must be smart to be a software engineer, and FAANG companies are prestigious to normal people because they have name recognition. Definitely not on the same level as a Doctor/Surgeon/Lawyer or whatever but certainly could be more than a typical 4-year degree will get you. And I suppose there's also the fact that those companies were…

Absolutely, and the _prestige_ of being a CS person that has a high salary. Society admires those with wealth.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#98

Post by paxys » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #65

cs_throwaway wrote: post #3

CS professor with 15 years experience. The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled. If this weeds out the p…

I think CS departments are at least partially responsible for this development. They know that most of the students applying care nothing about Computer Science, have no interest in Computer Science and will never learn Computer Science, yet they keep accepting (and graduating) them. If CS departments actually wanted to teach CS, then they would advocate for setting up a new series of departments/degrees with names l…

When education becomes a business students become your customers. And the last thing you want to do is piss off your customers by failing them.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#99

Post by ramesh31 » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

Borealid wrote: post #46

giantg2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be relatively few C/C++ jobs, so they went with what the market wanted (Java). They still exposed you to other other types of languages such as assembly, JS, and even COBOL. I really don't think going with python except for an into/cross-major class is a good idea since it's so simple and there aren't that many jobs with it.

I recently heard someone say "I've never had a job that didn't involve at least some Python". I think that's true of almost all computer science jobs in the current market. Python is the primary language for scientific computing and the secondary language for a good number of other tasks.

>I recently heard someone say "I've never had a job that didn't involve at least some Python".

Tell me you've been in the field for less than 10 years without telling me.

Python is a joke language with a joke name. The only reason it ever caught on for AI is that someone wrote a few good math libraries for it in the 2000s, and its' rise is entirely incidental to that.

Re: Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates

#100

Post by dagw » Mon, Jun 02, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #98

dagw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think CS departments are at least partially responsible for this development. They know that most of the students applying care nothing about Computer Science, have no interest in Computer Science and will never learn Computer Science, yet they keep accepting (and graduating) them. If CS departments actually wanted to teach CS, then they would advocate for setting up a new series of departments/degrees with names l…

When education becomes a business students become your customers. And the last thing you want to do is piss off your customers by failing them.

But if you can sell those customers a better product at the same price, then perhaps everybody will be happier. As it is now no one is happy. CS staff are annoyed that the students don't want to learn CS, and the students are annoyed since most of the CS they are forced to learning isn't relevant for the web developer job they want to apply after graduation.