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I used to work in data science, paid well but it was saturated by grads by the end and then you’d have to perform way above in order to prove why they shouldn’t just hire a cheaper grad instead of you. Constantly had to justify my salary. Glad I got out tbh

We taught a generation of kids to code and then invented a bot to do it for them

Demand for developers is still growing, but it’s not the feeding frenzy it was in ‘21-22. You should still expect a starting salary of $150-200k at Big Tech if you have a CS degree from a good school and can pass the interview process

I've had several cases against these programs and associated financial companies. shocker: many don't bother following regulatory requirements. another shocker: many operate on the model that many young people will get a job no matter what, and just want to claim a part of that future income

A team I was on contracted by half after the 2022 hiring boom. Floating the idea of hiring one more dev got some chuckles more than once.

Thanks— I know nothing about the industry so it’s good to hear from those who do. It’ll def be interesting to see where things end up. Seems like there will always be a need for humans.

Thanks. Hoping AI conts to disappoint.

Certainly coding is not some magic profession, but let's not forget: Endless shoddy camps and courses, with little idea about how to educate people, turned out tens of thousands of people with no practical skills for working as a developer and often only shoddy skills as a writer of code?

junior dev roles have been essentially nonexistent for a while now. this is of course a terrible trend from an infrastructure maintenance perspective, but since when has capitalism budgeted for that

Parent of a HS junior here: I’d love for him to major in humanities or liberal arts. It’s very difficult to find schools that are a good fit, most kids are studying engineering or business.

It's not idiotic, it's just outdated. For most of the 20th century you could do that.

It's more accurate to say that they just abandon the skillpath because their life priorities just don't align with having that much formal schooling/training. Unless you think there's some unknown mass of unemployed but competent doctors.

I was saving this . en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vartan_...

it’s grim but there is going to be an increasing disparity between people who can read a paragraph (and so should be less susceptible to a society filled with cons and scams) and those who can’t

Preach it, brother.

I have a degree in aerospace engineering but was always really interested in writing, just did STEM because I was told that was how to get a job. Being able to write as an engineer gives you a massive leg up.

As an English/creative writing prof who has also taught a bunch of career development courses (basically helping English majors see what jobs they can do), I just wish this message could get like 1/100th the attention that coding stuff gets

Have a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Masters degree. BFA has been very beneficial. Developing the ability to intensely observe details, ability to compose objects in an interesting way, ability to give and receive constructive critiques, have all been business critical skills in my software product job

Agree, with one request: include a rigorous probability/statistics course in the required curriculum.

I have a double major in history & media studies and the history education is much more useful for my career in communications

What’s discouraging is how hard it is to convince hiring managers (or automated applicant tracking systems) that these skills are valuable when they all want to hire someone who’s already been doing that exact role at that exact company for 5 years.

Yes, but: when young adults are taking on potentially 10s of 1000s of dollars in loans (even with scholarships!), you really can’t fault people for trying to figure out how to get the best return on that investment as directly as possible. My English degree was mostly useless for that.

People can and should do both if they have a chance, a hiring bubble is one of those chances. Unlikely the skills they acquired go unused or don’t open some other doors.

I have a degree in anthropology and a career in IT infrastructure working with things that didn't even exist when I graduated in 1994

I keep telling my 20-year-old to go ahead and major in fucking Art History if that's what she wants, it's not a job-training program. But it's hard for her to hear, what with all the screaming to the contrary.

Hubby and I got degrees in English as well. Many thought that was ridiculous (“what can you even do with that?”), but we learned to problem-solve and communicate well. Also, literature inspires curiosity and creativity. Both have been instrumental in my adult life.

a degree with curiosity for the world is better for your brain but you know what's better for your wallet? one where you have to only learn the input-output process and go work at Amazon.

I work in IT but have an international relations degree and the skills that my degree taught me for understanding the dynamics of systems and organizations are way more important than the actual technical skills

My dad once told me that when hiring lawyers for his firm he liked seeing English degrees in undergrad. Turns being able to write well is important in the legal field.

yes, I was a religion major and yet became a Nurse Practitioner (some years after deciding a music career wasn't for me...)

cannot overstate how well a theater degree has served me in corporate training and communications. it sharpened my communication skills, which have served me through at least two mid-career pivots. choose a degree which plays to your strengths!

The goal of education (on top of making you well-rounded as you say) should be to teach critical thinking, work ethic, and a desire to learn which makes one a valuable employee no matter what industry you end up in

Transitioned from political organizing to corporate banking due in no small part to my speaking and presentation skills learned from my liberal arts degree!

Also, while the education requirements for nursing are not as onerous as many other fields (especially other healthcare fields like pharmacy), direct care nursing is an incredibly demanding job physically, cognitively, and emotionally

I'm going to guess the reason some of these comp sci jobs paid well is because they are also pretty complex and most people can't get in. Sure there are some frameworks that are easier to learn then others, but it's not like bootcampees are learning how to make their own compilers

Yeah, no job is immune, but I feel relatively safe as a chemical engineer simply because the field is so complicated. It also has a mix of pure knowledge work with physical work in labs/plants that would be very challenging to replace with AI.

It's also missing the point of an undergrad degree: a BA isn't vocational training! There are things I did as an undergrad that have one-to-one equivalents in my professional life (e.g., write emails, use Word, read a lot), but mainly it's just a framework for critical thinking.

A while back a friend who works at a college told me that current students are terrified of debt in a way they weren't in years past. A few decades of horror stories about student loans have really warped kids relationship with higher ed.

(This was kind of a fluke but you never know)

“Advanced” snippets is all these AI tools are, for the most part, as it relates to coding.

Will this news stop the “teach coding” lobby?

The problem with “learn to code” is that the challenging parts of engineering—the parts you pay people big money to solve—aren’t the code writing parts. Hell, writing code isn’t even the most time-consuming part of the job.

..university should prepare students for a life and a career so they can remain employed their entire working lives. Doing narrow job skills training for current employers is just a subsidy to companies that should do their own training.

I didn't look at that, but I write code for a living, and I tried using an AI tool a little bit, and I think there's more hype than substance to all this. People who talk about knocking out a whole system in an afternoon are not used to working in real production environments.

IMO, that is why people were encouraged to learn to code.

This hasn’t filtered down to young people at all as far as I can tell. A high percentage of kids at my kids’ high school want to go into CS and see it as the quickest way to get a high paying job.

I went into data management decades ago and it's never failed me. There is always a need to organize data and a method that can be used for Business decisions. Still true today. AI can't change that.

Anecdotally, my employer was virtually unwilling to hire *anybody* stateside...until somebody had an AI project. It's not that programmers are somehow not needed; it's that corporations are unwilling to invest in the continuity of their core competencies because that doesn't have immediate returns

Do math courses make sense in a world full of calculators?

But it was never this cut-and-dry even before AI took over. I've worked in tech for decades now and those "placement" metrics for code boot camps were always dubious. Being a developer, like all jobs, is way more than basic API knowledge and a passing familiarity with TypeScript.

Learn to code was always bullshit, same as STEM. Flood the market with people so companies can drive down wages.

I mean, I think that magical thinking framing was never so much the assumption as that we were nowhere close to meeting the expected demand… which as recently as the big tech hiring sprees of a few years ago didn’t seem actively wrong.

This is your most anti-immigrant tweet yet

When do politicians start talking “re-training” truck drivers and factory workers displaced by tech/automation as social media influencers?

Huh, it's almost like "learn to code" was Silicon Valley trying to bring their labor costs down!

Skills wise, MBA isn't anything special but I wasn't doing it for skills, it was for signaling. And much better for that than undergrad in history.

Also feel like Econ is “complicated” as we will see in the next four years as certain “iron clad” principles are tested in real time

*elated in english b.a.*

Kids. Major in math and history in undergrad. Those two subjects give you the keys to unlock everything else.

Coding boot camps that make good use of and teach good use of AI coding tools and other use of AI could make sense for some folks. Some people benefit from human contact. Might take less hours to achieve equal skills, allowing price to be cut so to split benefit between students and the providers.

I guess all those crypto guys were wrong. Crazy.

Frustrating that the piece focuses so heavily on AI (which has basically no measurable impact on hiring) and not on actual reasons boot camp grads can’t find work. The macro environment has worsened, but most of the placement numbers from before were cooked!

It's hard for graduates with CS degrees. Coding camp grads can't compete unless they're elite.

Before that it was “machine learning” and what mostly happened was recommendation engines that gave ppl a worse UX.

Ooh, shiny object! must chase! Will catch the car! Ruff Ruff!

What will replace the code boot camps?

It's true! The coding world isn't a magic bubble. As more developers enter the field, supply and demand come into play, impacting wages and job availability. It's a reminder that every profession has its cycles. Adaptability and continuous learning are key! 💻📈 #DevLife #CodingReality