In the boom times people get too cocky and in the retrenchment they get too pessimistic.
Bill Gates came to my university in 2001 or 2 urging people to major in computer science because the dot-com bust was bad and everyone was convinced coding was going to move mostly offshore. People who followed his advice did well.
Now everyone is convinced coding will be taken over by AI… and move offshore. It seems like ai will change things more than offshoring but once again not as much as everyone seems to think. We still have offshoring but it didn’t stop programmers ramping toward and beyond seven figure salaries.
To the author’s credit this doesn’t read like panic, it’s level headed, but it is inevitably quite dark. In the 90s recession people temped, worked in coffee shops, and made or listened to amazing music. Not to be flip but maybe for a college grad (no kids) getting sidetracked from a tech developer job for a while is a blessing in disguise.
Where the "panic" part starts to set in is that the people who are educated in the discipline aren't going anywhere. Suppose the trend does eventually reverse. In 5 years you will still be competing with the people who graduated alongside you today, most people who graduated over the last few years, and people who will graduate in 2030. The supply side will continue overflowing with candidates, so anyone who graduated a long time ago and has no job experience after that will be left behind - this is the group that's graduating today. It truly feels like not being able to find a job under a certain time limit will basically make your education irrelevant for hiring purposes.
And even if you manage to find a job after that indeterminate amount of time, it seems like anything but a blessing in disguise. Putting everything you've worked for on hold to work some soul-crushing, minimum-wage, abusive job while the rest of the world moves on without you. Even if you find a job in your field after this, you would've missed out on years of development that people who graduated during a boom would have acquired by now.
Did you manage to get out of it? Do you have any advice? I just finished my undergrad recently, and I'm scared of aging out of the relevance of my degree if I don't manage to secure a "real" job in a year or two. At that point, my options will be to continue desperately trying to get into absolutely anything in tech, or get some other job while pivoting from CS entirely.
Bill Gates came to my university in 2001 or 2 urging people to major in computer science because the dot-com bust was bad and everyone was convinced coding was going to move mostly offshore. People who followed his advice did well.
Now everyone is convinced coding will be taken over by AI… and move offshore. It seems like ai will change things more than offshoring but once again not as much as everyone seems to think. We still have offshoring but it didn’t stop programmers ramping toward and beyond seven figure salaries.
To the author’s credit this doesn’t read like panic, it’s level headed, but it is inevitably quite dark. In the 90s recession people temped, worked in coffee shops, and made or listened to amazing music. Not to be flip but maybe for a college grad (no kids) getting sidetracked from a tech developer job for a while is a blessing in disguise.