The Collapse of $165K Tech Jobs: Why Student Coders Are Turning to Fast Food Work

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Since the early 2010s, a parade of billionaires, tech executives and even U.S. Presidents have urged young people to learn coding, arguing that the tech skills would help bolster students’ job prospects as well as the economy. Tech companies promised computer science graduates high salaries and all manner of perks.

“Typically their starting salary is more than $100,000,” plus $15,000 hiring bonuses and stock grants worth $50,000, Brad Smith, a top Microsoft executive, said in 2012 as he kicked off a company campaign to get more high schools to teach computing.

The financial incentives, plus the chance to work on popular apps, quickly fed a boom in computer science education, the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms. Last year, the number of undergraduates majoring in the field topped 170,000 in the United States — more than double the number in 2014, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data annually from about 200 universities.

But now, the spread of A.I. programming tools, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code — combined with layouts at companies like Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft — is dimming prospects in a field that tech leaders promoted for years as a golden career ticket. The turnabout is derailing the employment dreams of many new computing graduates and sending them scrambling for other work.

Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.

“I’m very concerned,” said Jeff Forbes, a former program director for computer science education and workforce development at the National Science Foundation. “Computer science students who graduated three or four years ago would have been fighting off offers from top firms — and now that same student would be struggling to get a job from anyone.”