Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort.
I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming.
I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret, unbeknownst to anyone else... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was hated just for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they always seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
People only seem to hang out with other people who have similarly distorted perceptions of life in terms of luck and opportunities.
You only miss a bad job market entry and low salaries, you need every meagre advantage you can get.
100% agree on a degree being a strong signal, by the way.
Maybe, but the degree has to be paid for, with time and money.
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?
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.
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.
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 to 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.
I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
Very scary for the future, unfortunately.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
Idk though, really seems like the "AI layoffs" are just corps shedding headcount bloat accumulated in 2020-23.
I never understood why software engineers were so excited about open source and teaching everyone to code.
Why aren‘t we more like doctors or lawyers?
I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth.
> Do you not care about global warming because you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live in your lifetime?
Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
I suppose that makes a change from it's not happening or it is happening but it isn't man made or it is man made but we can't do anything about it.
That is a really interesting admission upon which to evaluate your other comments here…
If I decide you're having a negative impact on my net worth, can I come to your home and shoot you in the head?
It seems we need a remedial class in morality here, where we work up to you understanding the golden rule. But perhaps you're not capable of understanding that. Is euthanizing you then the only option?
Hope you like being overworked!
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
That country never ceases to astonish me lol.