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NYT Podcast On Job Market For Recent CS Grads Raises Ire of Code.org (geekwire.com) 71

Posted by BeauHD from the only-time-will-tell dept.
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn't Follow, a New York Times podcast episode discussing how the promise of a six-figure salary for those who study computer science is turning out to be an empty one for recent grads in the age of AI, drew the ire of the co-founders of nonprofit Code.org, which -- ironically -- is pivoting to AI itself with the encouragement of, and millions from, its tech-giant backers.

In a LinkedIn post, Code.org CEO and co-founder Hadi Partovi said the paper and its Monday episode of "The Daily" podcast were cherrypicking anecdotes "to stoke populist fears about tech corporations and AI." He also took to X, tweeting: "Today the NYTimes (falsely) claimed CS majors can't find work. The data tells the opposite story: CS grads have the highest median wage and the fifth-lowest underemployment across all majors. [...] Journalism is broken. Do better NYTimes." To which Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi (Hadi's twin), replied: "I agree 100%. That NYTimes Daily piece was deplorable -- an embarrassment for journalism."
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NYT Podcast On Job Market For Recent CS Grads Raises Ire of Code.org More

NYT Podcast On Job Market For Recent CS Grads Raises Ire of Code.org

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  • Err, NYT is right. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bloggerhater ( 2439270 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @08:16AM (#65700664)

    Unless you're S -Tier, you're not breaking six figures without putting in years of work with the same org. Gone are the days of a $10k pay bump for a lateral move to a different organization.

    The fact is that these days if you're not a talented developer that knows how to leverage LLMs, you're eventually going to be out of work. This is happening right now.

    Five years at most is all the professional life LLM haters have left.

    Oh, and good luck fighting for WFH in this ecosystem.

    • How are you so good at predicting the future?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by PDXNerd ( 654900 )

      Unless you're S -Tier, you're not breaking six figures without putting in years of work with the same org. Gone are the days of a $10k pay bump for a lateral move to a different organization.

      The fact is that these days if you're not a talented developer that knows how to leverage LLMs, you're eventually going to be out of work. This is happening right now.

      Five years at most is all the professional life LLM haters have left.

      Oh, and good luck fighting for WFH in this ecosystem.

      There's *plenty* of remote work out there. It might just not be with Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or Alphabet. Which are the ones paying newbies six figures+.

      • You say this as if they are starting everyone over six figures. Unless you've got a masters or better and you're very well connected, good luck with that.

        Entry is going to be more like $60k in the US for less desirable hires. Much less if you happen to be offshore. Which many devs are. That's another trend thats increasing, with many more US domestic organizations currently in the planning phase to open data centers in India and hiring more off shore workers.

      • There's *plenty* of remote work out there.

        If you live in Northern California, perhaps. But pretty much everywhere else, people are being told to get back to the office of find another job. In my area, the job notices are explicit about remote work not being available, and mandating an office presence.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        There's *plenty* of remote work out there.

        There is. There are even companies founded in the pandemic that were never anything but remote work. And some of them are doing really advanced things.

    • There are plenty of places (outside California / NYC / Boston / Seattle, even) where the floor for junior devs is around $90k. Not hard at all to crack six figures with just yearly cost-of-living raises.

      • Note: you said junior devs... what about the 'kid' who just graduated college with some coding degree with no job history in coding?

    • Re:Err, NYT is right. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by memory_register ( 6248354 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @08:36AM (#65700732)
      I am a professional coder who works with LLM tools every day. I can say that the tools are very helpful, but they have plateaued asymptotically in the past six months. We are getting about all the juice we're going to squeeze out of random token guessing machines. Coders need to learn to use the tools but aren't being replaced by them.

      New hires in the field are coming in at a premium here in the Midwest. Manufacturing is roaring back and a lot of companies are making capital expenditures to modernize, or are buying up little mom-and-pop manufacturers in the 2nd or 3rd tier and modernizing them. All these companies need coders and can't find them. They're advertising to grads in major cities and the coasts and wooing them to midsize cities and towns.

      You won't make six figures right out of school, but you also don't need to. Median housing prices for 3 bedroom 2 bath starter here is like $200k.
      • Don't tell them about how nice the midwest is, please.

      • So about manufacturing (Score:4, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @11:40AM (#65701206)
        The numbers overall in the economy tell a completely different story. In your specific area you might be doing better but across the country as a whole the trade war is just crushing manufacturing.

        The first problem is the trade war has disrupted supply chains so companies can't get parts and when they can get them they have no idea what they're going to pay for them from one week to the next.

        And then the obvious second problem is it turns out just slapping a tariff on a bunch of stuff so you can have a sales tax doesn't actually bring back manufacturing. In fact the other countries respond with counter tariffs and suddenly you can't sell your product overseas anymore in your manufacturing goes down not up.

        If you want to bring back manufacturing, which I cannot stress this enough is pointless because it's just going to be robots, you need to do a long campaign of careful government subsidies carefully managed by expert administrators who are not corrupt lackeys. It is a slow and steady process and even with good administration it's going to involve a lot of waste and even a bit of corruption.

        It's the kind of thing you do for critical infrastructure like chip fabrication but not so much for making dinner plates and Simpsons toys.

        Remember those Capital expenditures you're talking about are just robots. And even with that not a lot of companies are making those expenditures overall because they have no idea what's going to happen in three and a half years. And there is no way they can compete with China because China has slave labor and allows companies to poison groundwater.

        As for those companies advertising coders I mean that's literally what the article is about. Companies will happily hire somebody who is an expert in a technology that can make them hundreds of millions of dollars and is willing to work for 100k a year. So would I if I could get them. The jobs that aren't available are for somebody with a bachelor's in CS who doesn't have a masters or doctorate level understanding of mathematics.

        Basically you're seeing a bunch of jobs for companies that are trying to hire way above their league relative to what they're paying on the off chance they blunder into somebody long enough to make a ton of money.
        • I get the impression that you have not spent a lot of time around manufacturing, because the need for it and especially the need for it to be done by humans is not going away anytime soon. There are some aspects of the manufacturing process that can be automated, but most cannot do to the very specific and complicated nature of manufacturing.

          A good example here is the boat industry, which has a significant presence in my area. Making the cylindrical pontoons for a pontoon boat is boring for a skilled wel

    • Re:Err, NYT is right. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @08:41AM (#65700746)

      a talented developer that knows how to leverage LLMs

      LLM usage is hardly a demanding talent in and of itself. Being able to judge and make the use/salvage/discard choice when the LLM presents the material it does is more about coding and less about 'talented with LLMs'. Anyone good at coding can add LLM without a huge challenge, so you don't *need* to find someone with 'LLM' experience and lack of it doesn't make you unemployable.

      The whole damn point of LLM is, to the extent that it works, it's easy. Just the hiccup is that 'to the extent it works'.

    • Re:Err, NYT is right. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @08:44AM (#65700756) Homepage
      If LLM-powered coding is going so well, where are the productivity stats to back it up? Where are the open source projects that are rapidly adding functionality to meet the feature-sets of their closed-source competitors? Answer: they don't exist. It's almost all hype.
      • Correct. Where's the Shovelware? [substack.com] is a very effective point. Put another way, let's say someone claims to invent a machine that makes coffee out of thin air. One would then expect that coffee prices would crash due to oversupply. If coffee prices stayed the same, I'd we'd call bullshit. I'm not sure how this "revolution" is any different.

        Also, I'm a systems programmer and I do use LLMs. I look super suspect at anything longer than about 30 lines because it's constantly full

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        There is some research to the contrary, finding that LLM use in coding costs you, in average, 20% in productivity. They also found that most developers are in denial about that: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-... [metr.org]

        The whole thing about "LLM skills" is really just complete bullshit, at least for code production on a non-amateur level.

    • I'm just going to respond here with multiple comments misinterpreting or just.. re-spinning my words.

      By leverage LLMs, I mean utilize them to help increase your productivity. Dont conflate what I'm saying with vibe-coding or some other pseudo development c-suite daydream.

      Real developers are seeing real benefits in their work flow. Orgs are also releasing internal LLMs for general use among non technical employees and trust me when I say, they are paying attention to who is using them and who isn't.

      • I use them daily. I'm not sure how much they've helped at all for actual coding tasks. They make too many rookie mistakes and cannot keep large codebases in context at once. We pay for accounts on all the big LLMs and are always testing them to see if they live up to the hype. So far, that's a big "no fucking way". They do other things pretty well, though, like create Doxygen summaries for new functions etc...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The fact is that these days if you're not a talented developer that knows how to leverage LLMs, you're eventually going to be out of work.

      These two things do not go together. Yes, you may have some trouble finding a new job for a year or two, but as soon as the LLM insanity collapses, "I never took LLMs seriously as a coder" will open doors.

    • There has never been a time when fresh college grads could make six figures in coding, at least, not in most of the US. Those days of $10K bumps for a lateral move, never existed. Sure, some people got lucky, but this kind of pay increase for a job move, was never common.

      If you're a talented developer, you already know how to leverage LLMs, and you know their limitations. If you're not a talented developer, why are you coding in the first place? Go find a job doing something you *are* good at!

      No, I think th

  • Org backed by tech corps profers propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Goat of Death ( 633284 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @08:27AM (#65700700)

    Is it really any surprise that a non-profit primarily funded by tech companies would say this. Their funding and existence are at stake if people shift to other majors, so of course they are going to push a counter narrative to try to keep people flowing into tech. Tech companies want maximum amount of choice in the labor pool so they can continue to pit us against each other push salaries down. None of them will give two cents about replacing any of us with AI once the tech is sufficiently advanced. Then they'll find some new way to try to gaslight us about it.

    • Yes, why not react to any jab of their business model, which is to feed drones to the machine?

      No doubt they're as mad as wet hens. Journalism does that. Facts and truth to power is the dynamic. The NYT is not immune from influence, but the article citation has factual basis.

      Countering capitalism is dangerous stuff.

  • Big Tech told kids to code specifically to suppress wages in the tech sector. This program is working precisely as designed. That they now have AI to suppress wages with further is just a bonus to them.
    • Totally true. Imagine how much of those stock gains could be simply paid to employees as salary if the folks had enough juice to demand it? The problem is those C-suite weasels want the gains in their pocket, not growing the company or being redistributed to people they despise. They have ALWAYS hated us and do everything they can to keep a lid on our salary. That's why anytime I hear "Coding is dead. XYZ killed it. Uhm, I mean XYZ WILL kill it." I think "Another corporate psyop"

  • Scoff (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @08:58AM (#65700790)
    Speaking about job markets, what is America going to look like when 750,000 people who have started families and have always had a steady job are suddenly on the street and without healthcare? When I said that Trump wanted to turn the population of the US into desperate servants people scoffed. But here it comes. Oh and have things gotten cheaper yet?

    • what is America going to look like when 750,000 people who have started families and have always had a steady job are suddenly on the street and without healthcare?

      Ummmm, are you really that young and unacquainted with history?

      Remember when textiles went away? It will look like the South. Remember when steel went away? It will look like the Rust Belt. Remember when manufacturing went away? It will look like all the small abandoned towns mixed throughout the entire USA. Remember when coal went away? All of those small towns abandoned with citizens suffering from Black Lung.

      What happened to all of those people? Many suffered and died in their foreclosed homes. That is w

  • One hand and the other (Score:3)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @09:10AM (#65700810)

    "to stoke populist fears about tech corporations and AI."

    On the one hand, these chud chokers wanna continually preach, "AI will replace all jobs within $x years." On the other, they want to call anyone repeating their bullshit spewing nonsense a fear monger. Which is it, shitheels? Are you going to replace us all? Or is, "we're going to replace you all," just populist fears about tech and AI? Maybe, if you don't want people scared, you should stop continually spewing, "We're going to replace all jobs with AI/automation. Fuck the working class," if you don't want people to be scared by your messaging?

  • I'm a pretty smart guy. And I don't know about anyone else, but I have felt quite crucified for being smart for a good part of my life. The world is not kind to people who are too smart to ignore what a shitty world the much-less-intelligent have made.

  • It got really popular to promise "a six-figure salary for those who study computer science", without also requiring that the student be talented and work hard
    As a result, we got a tsunami of not-so-talented grads who ineptly cobbled up stuff by cutting and pasting
    In boom times, they were employed. Today, they learn the meaning of the word "oversupply"
    The excellent continue to have no problem

    • Damn straight. If you have a passion for computing and coding, nothing will stop you. If you go to school and just get a nominal degree and major you don't care much about you're going to think IT is very harsh because when you interview in a room full of guys who know what they are doing, they are not going to ask you questions about ML, LISP, or whatever other lame shit out-of-touch professors taught you in College. They want to know that you won't cause them more work and drag down

  • False premises (Score:3)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @10:40AM (#65700992) Journal

    (falsely) claimed CS majors can't find work. The data tells the opposite story: CS grads have the highest median wage and the fifth-lowest underemployment across all majors

    The ability to find a new job and average salary are very DIFFERENT things. This stupid is logic, they should apologize to NYT.

    Companies rarely suddenly cut salaries when a field slumps, they prefer to use attrition: no raises, longer hours, no new hires.

  • ...is whether the current hiring slump is just another cycle, like the ones that we saw around 2001, 2008, 2013... or whether it's the start of a long-term trend where the demand for people who can write software really does fall monotonically.

    Given how eager companies are to attribute layoffs to AI, and given how often AI hallucinates garbage, I'm guessing that the job market will pick up again after another year or three.

    Graduating into one of these downturns really sucks, but it's not the first time and

  • A coders who performs mundane and repetitive coding tasks for minimum wage.

  • 'learn to code' was always stupid. (Score:3)

    by fredrated ( 639554 ) on Friday October 03, 2025 @01:31PM (#65701480) Journal

    It should be 'learn logic and critical thinking', then coding and everything else will follow.

  • https://www.finalroundai.com/b... [finalroundai.com].

    While 6.1% isn't quite "full" employment (about 5%), it's not far from it. And if you're a recent college grad, and you can't beat out the bottom 6.1% of candidates to land a job, you probably should go into a different field.

    This unemployment rate is far from disastrous.

    Now, if these grads were hoping for a six-figure salary out of the gate, yeah, they will be disappointed. That has never been a thing, at least not outside of the Bay Area.

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