Published earlier this year, but still relevant.
Yep. Been saying it for years because I was laid off over and over. Do not enter computer science.
Become an welder, electrician, etc. ANYTHING but a computer scientist
The trades will ALWAYS be in demand. No matter where society goes, as long as it doesn’t collapse we will need running water, electricity, toilets, transportation, etc. I went to college for bio, switched to CS, graduated with business management degree and now I’m a mechanic. The hope is one day run my own garage perhaps, but untill then I love comfortably enough and know I can walk out tomorrow and find another job before I make it home.
Also consider a healthcare career. As a teenager, I wanted to do computer science/engineering, and sometimes I do wish I had stayed on that track. But now, as a nurse, I could get a job in any state in the US by tomorrow. I dare you to try to find a hospital that doesn’t have open nursing positions. Even when the economy goes down, people still get sick. Even if society collapses, the knowledge/skills will be useful.
And if you don’t want to change diapers or deal with blood, there are still options; I’m in psychiatry and rarely have to deal with either.
Me reading this as a computer scientist
Chat, are we cooked?
If businesses continue believing they can vibe code some intern into success while drop kicking talent to the curb to save a buck, those CS unemployment numbers will fall off like a lemming!
I’m halfway through my bachelor’s CE, but really thinking about dropping and doing a trade instead.
I’m probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you’re thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you’d definitely be better off doing a trade.
Good luck either way.
If there’s no hope for getting a job, it doesn’t mean they’re not passionate.
It’s really not like that, programmers will always be extremely sought after. Just not bad programmers that haven’t really coded anything yet. Those are in quite an abundance. After giving the thirtieth intern a try and some lessons, it starts to feel hopeless when they turn in something that is using divisors on tick to solve a problem the engine already does and doesn’t notice the cpu cap because they are on a monster beefy developer station
The most important aspect is motivation to improve and do cool shit. That can, also, be said about a lot of professions. The best thing you can do is to find what is most interesting to you and spend at least a few hours a week learning about it or engaging with it. It could be new features of a language you know, a programming methodology that is new to you, learning about/contributing to a FOSS project you like, or anything else.
School and work will almost definitely force you to engage with the parts of development you don’t like, as well will give you an opportunity to engage with the parts of development you do like. It’s on you to keep yourself engaged and improving in your skills.
Even if you don’t get a CS job you should still get your degree anyway, it will make getting other jobs easier. A degree is better than no degree.
Might not be the best use of that time and tuition money though
I’ve never met anyone who regretted getting their degree.
I have met people who regretted not getting one because it closed doors for them (including talented people who were otherwise doing well at their jobs) so if someone is really going to forgo their degree, they should acknowledge it’s a risk.
✋ Now you have.
Hi there, now you have my curiosity.
Which degree was it, why do you regret getting it?
Computer Systems Tech with honours and a Computer Sci advanced degree with honours.
I would have been better off just working, my 3 years in school (including being on the board of governors and student union) was a waste of time and money. Not saying school is always a bad choice but watching people who drop out of high school make double your income from working in retail (since oddly there is potential upwards movement) once you do get a job in the industry feels bad. Then continues to feel bad when you bust your ass off for no advancement or additional pay while those same people are now working less then 4 hours a day in a middle management position. Then it gets downright frustrating when you have been in the industry for over a decade and shopped around to find out all the companies are shit and when you realize you have made a poor choice in career those same drop outs are entering into lower executive roles while being paid to take college courses (I have 3 examples of this sadly) and telling you that you should “go to school and get an education”.
And to see the money being made in oil and gas… or some of the trades?! Urgh, I should have just started my own buisness instead of going to school. I had the same skills before and after I graduated anyway.
I don’t think going to school prevents you from transitioning into a management role, nor does it seem to have prevented you from obtaining a career in the industry.
I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to blame your degree for a lack of management positions, you could always transition into management like others have done. I don’t think those others got hired into management specifically because they didn’t have a degree, or because they were high school dropouts. It’s entirely possible they only got into their roles through nepotism, which would have nothing to do with a degree or a lack of a degree anyway.
With that said, yeah, the money being made in the trades by business owners… yeah, that would have been nice, but even then there’s no guarantees that everyone can start their own successful business and make well into 6 figures and beyond.
I don’t necessarily regret getting a degree, but I would have perhaps focused on a more in-demand degree if I knew how the economy was going to change.
Don’t. Just finish it and join an electrical union with your math skills. After you complete your degree. I went into electrical after getting laid off from a malware defense software oem. Get your degree. It carries you further than without it. You can always join the Electrician union nearest you right after you graduate. Check for their sign up times for the year.
I’ve never met anyone in the broadly tech fields (and I’ve been through quite a span of them) who regrets completing an even somewhat relevant degree. I’ve met, many, many people who lament not starting or finishing one (and many of these were very competent, capable people, good at their jobs).
It’s expensive and difficult, sure was for me, but it is very useful (and the learning is fantastic too if you do it right).
Can’t agree more.
CE is neat because most companies will treat you as if you had a CS or EE degree. Can always pivot to HW or FPGA
Laughs in AI
This person thinks what we have is AI and that it is actually good. Funny
So, i’ve been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I’m glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it’s not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
The miners thing is insane; as if we dont still need fucking minerals.
Correct, and the other problem is that if you live in a house with 6-8 other people, and don’t even have anywhere to park a vehicle (as in, not even on the road outside) then it’s never going to work. I imagine what it’d be like if I did a trade, but I couldn’t get to work in the morning because another tenant decided to sleep-in and block my vehicle from leaving the drive. Just ridiculous.
and trades are usually only employing a specific demographic and they have
Also trades have boom and busts too
Plus the ones making really good money take a good amount of time to get there and really good money means starting your own business but either way, you won’t escape long hard hours and weekends until probably at least your 40s, that’s if you manage to scale up the business enough with numerous staffed work vehicles. Like a 22 year old software developer can be making what a master plumber does in their first year out of college. Not super common but the $130k+ a year plumber is the top small percent of the field too
CS education is notoriously prone to boom-bust cycles.
It’s called an oversaturated market. And capitalist fucks replacing people with AI
I don’t think this is even the big effect we’ll be seeing from AI. think that’ll occur over the next 12-24 months, as LLM operationalization occurs and matures the implementations.
This.
At my jobs, AI is just scratching the surface. But they’re slowly implementing entire coding bot swarms, so a Product person can report a bug, it gets reviewed by an agent, assessed by an agent, fixed by an agent, and tested by another agent - then PR’d for a dev to review.
This hurts the junior level.
Hurts everyone except the very top
It’s finally happening, tech jobs are suffering the same unemployment that the trades had been suffering for years if not decades, only this time around it’s probably self-inflicted by the AI bubble.
biotech is like this too, bio itself is such a saturated major in most uni, unless your going into health with good marks (you need grad school) , research side you likely wont find jobs if you arnt a good student going to grad school. biochem, o-chem, physics, gen chem, gen bio all will wreak havoc on your GPa.
AI hasn’t really taken much, if any tech jobs so far. If anything demand for building and using AI has taken up a good share of the job market in tech.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very, if any, few fresh graduates.
It’s short term thinking that’s going to fuck the industry in a generation when all the old school guys die or retire, the senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers move up to fill their roles and you don’t have enough Jr engineers to become the seniors, leads and managers. They’ll be trying to manage entire teams from overseas, trying to replace people with AI, which will never be a true replacement, and they’ll suddenly see the value in hiring new graduates, but there won’t be enough by then because they made the major useless. The few that exist will probably make bank straight out of school, though, as companies become desperate for them.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very few, if any, fresh graduates.
Again that thing with union pressure and outsourcing, the latter exists because the former in practice doesn’t.
Everything would work better with unions. Unions-unions-unions.
Socialism was intended as a solution to a real problem. Some its parts turned out to be deadly poison, but that’s about those making immobile hierarchies and using force. Unions and associations and artels, - all these are a system of tools solving some problems, and the best part about them is that they are not hurting market mechanisms, just adding better response times and organization to their sides.
I was laid off from my charger oem. Now I work at a grocery store till I find a new job. Needed the cheap insurance plus its union. This won’t last for long.
That’s what happens when everyone rushes to do the same qualification - you get too many people for that area of work. More graduates doesn’t magically make more jobs - it just makes more people applying for the same amount of jobs.
And most of them are shit at their jobs because they just do it for money. No care for the skill.
When you like your profession, your job you still do for money. Otherwise you’d be playing with similar things at home to much more satisfaction.
So here I won’t agree and say that tech needs unions. Union pressure would solve the problem of labor organization and on-job education, so that they wouldn’t be shit at their jobs.
Skill and such things are practically important for scientists, maybe.
Shades of dotcom days. Everyone hopped on the bandwagon. Most lured by the high salaries and gold-rush mentality. Nowadays, just having a CS degree isn’t enough. You want portfolio pieces to set you apart. Start by having a damn portfolio. You can set one up for free on GH Pages or CloudFlare. Or pay a few bucks and set one up on Wordpress. If you can’t figure out how, that CS degree was wasted.
You want stories that show you bring value. Show that you can build things beyond school projects. Even if you do school projects, document them and push them out. Show why they’re cool and what you can do. Throw up screenshots, diagrams, or animations. No walls of text.
Also, learn to sell yourself. Not in the oily LinkedIn way. Just be out there. Contribute back. Educate others and have a voice. Blog, newsletter, social media, book, or video channel. They’re dead-easy to set up and free so there’s no gatekeepers to go through, other than your ideas.
If in a big city, go to Meetups or demo days. Meet people and ASK WHAT THEY DO. Help connect them to others. Anyone just sitting there cranking out resumes is going to get filtered by the LLM screener. Might as well pin up your resume above the urinal at the pub.
Finally: everyone can low-code or vibecode. Those are table stakes now. You want to do better.
Yeah, no. Once I saw this kind of bullshit was needed for programming jobs I just pivoted to IT and cybersec.
These days the pay is just as good, and chances to find a job are even better, the environment is much lower pressure and this gross techbro exploited/exploiting attitude that somehow programming is special and not just a modern day 9-5 factory job is non-existent. With dev jobs, the goal posts are ever shifting. No I’m not doing a portfolio, no I’m not doing your “take home assessment”, no I’m not doing a live coding exercise for your £20k ass minimum wage job where “we measure work by effort, not time” and I’ll somehow end up on call. I love programming, but not enough to let myself get fucked by corpos every which way.
You do have to deal with corpo boomers though, but if you’re lucky they mostly realize they’re just cogs that got lost and they better not make too much noise or they’ll be let go.
I take it there are not going to be many autistic new devs in the coming decades over there, with such requirements.
As an undiagnosed autistic dev, I am starting to realize there are not many good non autistic devs. I wonder what is the reason.
Great advice. Also make a PR to an open source project, have some public discussion of trade offs you considered, and get it merged. That’s an awesome differentiator. I’ve seen thousands of developer resumes without this. It shows you can work effectively and productively on good code and with a team.
I’d love to hear your experience around this and what sector or jobs this assisted, because more data is great.
But in my experience across 25+ jobs ranging from startups to fortune 500/250/100…I have never encountered a hiring process that would care about this.
I would love to be proven wrong though.
We do look at GH history and activity - can’t say, out of about 50 candidates in the past two months that I reviewed, have any meaningful activity on GH.
Not saying I am proving you wrong, but finding a candidate that has anything to show publicly is hard. Hell, even I, having a very well paying job, have much to show off publicly. I can, however, share my personal stuff. I’ve got tons of opened issues tho 🤣
I appreciate your perspective here. There is an element of whining and negativity among job-seekers lately. I’ve seen some people buckle down and hustle, and I’ve seen others give up in frustration. The truth of this is that there are going to be a lot of people who never even get to use their CS degrees, and there will be people who “win” and get jobs like this without one. It boils down to what you can do and whether or not a company in your area finds value in it.
It’s not fair. It’s just what we have to deal with.
In the 90s everyone was getting “web certified”
In the 90s “web” was about knowing FTP, HTTP and HTML. Should have stayed this way. Scripts in browsers were a mistake.
I blame social media and this perverse need to display notifications instantly. Technically very interesting problem to work on, but basically useless to a customer.
We had a button for that, on demand - it was called F5
I remember that those were used for games like Travian (displaying time and resources), dynamic content (like blasting music on a webpage) and web chat (that’s what I blame the most, because it was in demand).
Well, they didn’t do that, but I can imagine another “standard and convenient” way could have been taken to add realtime notifications to a webpage - a set of tags for displaying messages of an IRC channel, sending a message to an IRC channel, and so on, with maybe associating actions (going to an URL? or maybe updating part of DOM, but without full agility of JS, just add/remove/replace tag by id) with events. Like refreshing a page on a message in the channel, but no more frequent than N seconds.
Combined with iframes (I’ll admit I consider iframes a good thing, burn me at the stake), this could give you a pretty dynamic experience.
IRC is, of course, not secure, but maybe if such functionality were present and if it became popular, IRC over SSL would become normal earlier too.
Or maybe something like WS could have been standardized far earlier. For pushing events to client.
I agree about F5, but the effect of realtime changes was psychologically very strong.
In the 1970s companies started “Stack Ranking” all their employees and firing the bottom 10% in order to replace them or simply using their wages to pay CEOs more.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
Now the media will jump past all this to blame anything but the CEOs and failure of Government to reign in the wage gap via the force of law.
they are using the right wing blaming strategy: blames the student for choosing a “useless” degree, and not having ‘CONNECTIONS’/networking, these basically are a form of Nepotism to be honest, not many people can get connections like that, and its based on “knowing a person of a person with said company that is friendly with a HR manager” i guessed correctly in another forum(indeed) that its around half when they decide if they want to hire you.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
… There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.
One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.
Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.
That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.
The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.
just learn to code
There were recent CS grads in my coding boot camp 8 years ago.
Computer Science is not learning to code.
In fact, most high end University Computer Science departments do not at any point teach a coding language. Coding languages are taught, in Canada, at Community Colleges and such.
Computer Science is all about developing, perfecting, and discovering the algorithms that are then transcribed to computer code by the junior IT technicians (code junkies). Coders are a dime a dozen. It is the Computer Systems Designers, project architects, and project developers that make the big money.
A coder can only make good money if they have mastered a computer language that is not very common, like Kubernetes, [Kubernetes,] (https://kubernetes.io/) And you will not learn that from a 'Kubernetes-for-Dummies book borrowed from the library,
Thank you for pointing out that CS <> programming.
CS is mostly math, cryptography, signal processing, image processing, information theory, data analysis/storage/transformation, etc.
Kubernetes is not a programming language. It’s a program written in a programming language called Go. Working with Kubernetes involves writing in a data serialisation language called YAML but YAML is not a programming language (IIRC) because it’s not Turing complete.
(I’m just a “code junky” btw)
Kubernetes is just yaml
Kubernetes produces yaml using AI techniques from extremely complex procedures. The goal of Kubernetes is to generate the yaml that will allow a teenager to port the entire NASA launch operation system onto the device of her choice so her technophobe brother can completely operate the ISS including all resupply launches and docking procedures from her smart phone.
I feel like I need to point out, just in case anyone is reading this and falling for the smug tone, that the entire content of both these messages is embarrassing bullshit. I have no idea what drives any human to teach others their uneducated guess on topics and dress it up to make it look like they are a mr knowledge professional. When I think about it, it’s not even passable as a troll joke, it’s just feeble attempts to seem relevant… which is kinda sad. Hope you find human connection soon. I don’t imagine you want my advice now, but try to be more honest to the world, you will be automatically more honest to yourself then.
Most of what is written about Computer science by computer scientists is embarrassing bullshit to the uninitiated. But the ones that usually refer to it as bullshit are the ones that have absolutely no idea what the entire field is about, not even an inkling of how the resident gurus think, nor even of what is being talked about. It is the ones who call it ‘bullshit’ that are the ones trying to pretend they understand in depth what it is all about. You do not want us to be honest, you want us to speak in terms that you might have a chance of understanding. Unfortunately, the language of Computer Science, like science in general, has to be absolutely precise so as to not be misinterpreted. It can not be ‘dummed down’ without losing much of its utility to other scientists.
I could have said "Kubernetes defines a set of building blocks (“primitives”) that collectively provide mechanisms that deploy, maintain, and scale applications based on CPU, memory[29] or custom metrics.[30] Kubernetes is loosely coupled and extensible to meet the needs of different workloads. The internal components as well as extensions and containers that run on Kubernetes rely on the Kubernetes API.[31][32]
"The platform exerts its control over compute and storage resources by defining resources as objects, which can then be managed as such.
“Kubernetes follows the primary/replica architecture. The components of Kubernetes can be divided into those that manage an individual node and those that are part of the control plane.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes
But that is just a very fancy way of saying that Kubernetes developers look at a very complex computing environment consisting of many hardware vendors, several operating systems, several architectures, (some incomparable) but one common application outcome, and integrating them all together into one centrally controlled and managed interface using a common instruction set and command structure…
I should clarify that ‘YAML’ is used facetiously and generically to refer to the concept of ‘yet another markup language’ as an allegory, without specifically meaning Kubernetes produces the true implementation of ‘YAML’ the formal system. Maybe we should coin a new term ‘YAMLized’. That is, 'reduced to ‘yet another markup language’.
But no, and it reads like you just read about that (even keeping the references) and then hot swap yaml, which is definitely more than a “concept”, so I kind of don’t understand still why you think that is generated by AI and why it would help anyone deploy nasa architectures, like at all? Do you mean it helps to create the deployment package that the student uses? Among the overwhelming number of assumptions you make, the worst and root of the issue, I think, may be that you think the recipient does not want the truth. They want a dumbed down version so you can change literally everything about it to express the exact opposite and gaslight interested learners on a goose chase? If someone wants to know or understand what you mean, dumbing it down just patronizes them - that is, if you don’t do it in an effort to teach. Like, if the goal is to highlight the complexity of Kubernetes, ok. Just refer to YAML, and remember to be ambiguous with what exactly you meant was not the industrial wide term for what YAML is…?
Frankly, I am now of the opinion that you are an AI chatbot. stringing randomly associated thoughts together to simulate some sense of intelligence.
Industry vulnerable to lack of investor money does badly when there is no investor money
Kinda glad I took the community college IT/infra route when I went back to school a little bit ago, but still scared for the future lol.
