A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over?
A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over?
I'm not sure that works. There were 20 shillings to the pound.
So £0.75 a week.
This inflation calculator:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
£75 in 1843 is equivalent to £8,310.96
So 15s then is equivalent to £83.11 a week, £4321.72 a year.
40 hour week (which is implied to be too low). ~£2.08 an hour
So if he worked over 40 hours you're talking a sub £2/hour wage. Around $2.70 in US money.
I suspect the stat relies on converting to dollars before applying inflation as GBP to USD was about 1 to 5 then instead of about 1 to 1.33
It's fun but I wouldn't want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.
It's fun but I wouldn't want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.
I think they're actually making the opposite claim- American wages are just that fucked, rather than Dickens being wrong
While the idea behind AI was that it would automate manual tasks and help workers focus on more value-added activities, some workers fear it will outright replace them — and that’s already happening
Yeah, it already happened to the journalist that would have written this article. I find it a bit funny that the picture caption is just the prompt they used to generate it
6 figure jobs are still common, but not at the entry level. The companies that used to offer such thing are taking that money and investing in AI, thinking that they won't need new blood.
They're wrong, but that's what's happening.
This is bang on.
Yup. We pay six figs (not high six figs, but still double the local median wage) for decent talent. We don't pay top salaries for our area, but we are about median for a comparable role. The problem is people seem to expect the top roles straight out of college, when they're really junior level, if they're competent at all.
It’s not just grads. I have 1 open senior position, 100 applicants. A good 10% of them with 15+ years of experience have had no job in the last year, or have things like “Amazon fulfillment center” as their most recent job. Shits rough if you find yourself laid off or if the company you’re working for went out of business.
This has why I’m happy to work in public service. It’s very stable but the salaries aren’t as high.
On the flipside, we had a senior position open for something like 2 years before we finally got someone we're happy with. We fired two before we found someone would would actually do work and not cuss out our external partners.
We're still having trouble hiring mid-levels. Most of the candidates are surprised when we ask them questions about React when the job position clearly states it's for React, and they're also surprised when we ask them to write a few lines of code in an interview (nothing crazy, should take a competent dev 5-10 min, and a nervous one 15, so we allocate 20 min). I don't think our expectations are unreasonable, here's how we delineate between tiers:
But all the senior applicants are mid-level at best, mid-level applicants are recent college grads, and junior applicants just finished a coding bootcamp and think they're hot stuff because they built a rails app by following step-by-step instructions.
We're not a flashy tech company, we manufacture niche products for a niche field, and our software does simulations and reports. It's a complicated product, and we're totally willing to train people, we just want people who can demonstrate that they can ask proper questions and translate that into easy to understand code. The interview questions aren't hard, but they are intentionally incomplete because we're not testing coding ability but instead the ability to recognize vagueness and ask clarifying questions (i.e. ask before you assume).
We're not anyone's top pick, but we do have a lot of interesting problems to solve and people tend to really like it here. So the candidates we tend to get are desperate people who aren't getting bites at the flashier companies, which often means they're not all that competent. During COVID, we'd get maybe 5 applicants for a role after it has been open for a month, and now we're getting 200-300 in the first few days of the position being open. A lot of those applicants are incompetent and I'm surprised they were offered their previous role, but there are some diamonds in the rough.
I feel you on a lot of that. Big FAANG and Covid lockdowns changed the landscape hard in the favor of the inexperienced. In late 2020, I had a junior position to fill with a 90k salary. The guy that has accepted called me back a few days later to inform me Disney+ just offered him 220k. I couldn’t even be mad he was taking their offer after he had already accepted mine. I’m sure a lot of that resulted in incompetent people with higher paying jobs and titles than they deserved. Note that it’s setting the other way, well, no one can afford to take a pay cut, so they’re of course applying to jobs they don’t qualify for. My current role clearly says PHP, but I’ve dumped maybe 10% of the candidates already for not even having the term PHP on their resume.
Maybe if people hadn't pushed everyone in the entire fucking world into my field we wouldn't have this problem
Do you mean to tell me it wasn't a quick get-rich scheme and people who aren't interested in the field will have issues after doing math puzzles 8 hours a day in front of a monitor before going home to do more on github?
But the rich non-programmer guy told me so!
Maybe if the field hadn't pushed everyone else out of business...
Skill issue /s
Yea bro that’s what they do. See you making a living wage, then flood the labor pool. Welcome back to the barrel Mon crab
So old man time. In the early nineties things did not look great. Almost any college degree was not bringing in a salary one could like think about having a family with. Then came the late nineties and dot com and tech jobs were like the only thing that paid to possibly have what was, in many peoples mind, the typical middle class life. You know own your own home thing eventually. Since then its been tech or bust and now tech is bust and there is no go to field for people to run to.
Homeowning and paying a mortgage, especially now, is the single most important thing maintaining my quality of life.
A neighbor recently sold and it is now a rental. Paying that rent would effectively raise my housing costs about $20k a year.
It's almost exactly the same house and lot. It's insane.
Have you done the math on it though? Yeah, a mortgage stays constant, but to get a mortgage, you need a down payment, closing costs, and whatever you're paying your real estate agent. And then there's maintenance costs, utilities (most purchasable homes are larger than what you'd otherwise rent), probably extra costs to get around, etc.
If you instead took that down-payment and additional costs and invested it in a diversified stock portfolio, how would they compare?
I'm in a similar boat where my mortgage is now less than half of what rent would be, but my house is growing in value far slower than stocks. Here's a nerdy video discussing rent vs buy, and the result is that it's more of a wash than most people assume. This is extra true if you properly account for repair costs (i.e. if you DIY, what's the value of your time?). The decision to rent vs buy is far less consequential in terms of long-term financial impact than most people assume.
Is it fixed? although interest rates are likely to go down so even a non fixed is helpful currently.
I honestly think this is a lie because it's because people are mainly going for SWE or Game Dev. But literally everything else in the computer bubble is still doing fine
To some extent, yeah. I work in web development and there's no shortage of opportunities for someone good at reactive front end development and JSON APIs. But I think there is a shortage of grads who have the necessary skills.
I've been trying to grow my business, and it's frankly depressing how many people graduate with computer science degrees without learning the basics of the field, the volume of vibe coders is too damn high.
I find the jobs are super picky. Had one with a laundry list except for one job scheduling software and I had experience in the one they wanted but the feedback I got back was that the other one was real important even though I had the other and everything else. So I had experience with job scheduling software in general. including one they used. but not the other. and in that laundry list is software way more complicated than job scheduling. Through most of my career having about half of what they wanted was fine and they got that picking up the rest was not going to be a big deal for anyone who had experience in the field.
Tech is kind of all based around SWE though. What are these other roles you are referring to?
The government should give the people jobs, or money if it fails to provide meaningful jobs.
The secret of the CS and IT job is that it has always been the Neuveaux Blue Collar job.
For every IT exec and formerly-technical middle-management douchebag making really good money, there are 2 to 10 actually technical resources making "okay" money relative to their skill and the insane hours and scenarios they are expected to work.
Oh and let's not forget they're constantly trying to outsource as much of that support and engineering talent as possible.
If your job can be automated. Your job will be automated. Even if the work it produces is hot runny shit.
They would rather pump out pure garbage than pay an honest wage for honest work. It doesn't even have to work. They'll just put an arbitration clause in the EULA. Then sit back and count their money.
That's not how companies work. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize company gains, so they have to invest in AI, because it's more profitable. They don't even have a choice, if they want to keep their job.
The current crisis has nothing to do with the individual decisions of a single CEO. It's a legal issue, i.e. CEOs could only act differently if there was a significant and serious change in the way that the law requires them to operate. Which, all things considered, is unreasonable in this case.
They wouldn't act differently. Watch 1 hour of CNBC. Those people only technically qualify as human.
Tech is much more than programming / software
No.
They would like it to be. We're really expensive because they can't do it. As soon as all shit hits the fan guess who starts earning more.
As soon as all shit hits the fan guess who starts earning more.
A tech farm in insert developing country who will vibe code a patch for half the cost? (h/j)
Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)
What matters isn't whether you think that AI can replace you. What matters is whether the CEO thinks that AI can replace you.
Does anyone from Europe recognize this? Because it isn't what I'm seeing.
It took one year to find a replacement for a colleague who left the company. He was a senior in his field.
This is because there isn't a job shortage. It's offshoring. The company I (thankfully willingly) left 2 years ago has shifted all of their software hiring to Europe. And since I left has had multiple US focused layoffs. All while the Euro listings keep popping up. And I get it, the cost of living is much lower and the skill set is equivalent. So yea, get your bank. But, this is companies exploiting Europe/Asia, rather than it being something Europe/Asia is immune to.
I haven't been actively job searching lately, but based on the recruiters cold contacting me about job offers I'd say no, I don't recognize this at all.
Europe has a much more stable job market, stricter rules for hiring / firing.
Of course it is. Your employer will replace you with an immigrant or AI as soon as they can, that's how capitalism works.
I fully believe they will try and replace us as soon as they can. But as a software engineer, companies are fooling themselves if they think AI can replace good engineers. I work with some extremely talented engineers, and they would laugh at me if I said AI is going to replace them. I think people spend too much time on tech twitter listening to vibe coders. The ceiling for how complex of a project a human can handle compared to AI is at least 10000x higher with a human.
But I agree if they could replace us they would. And that’s why we band together with the people who are being replaced, because it’s bad for humanity as a whole.
Says / asks an article in a media spin-off created by a big fintech company, which has been funded by, among others, Peter Thiel by a big digital finance publisher / SaaS and advertising company with a history of not disclosing their investors, probably laying off people and heavily investing in AI themselves.
Yes, the tech sector is in a harsh condition, but we will go on. Don't let the AI hype / lay off waves for an overhired tech workforce from covid break your minds. There will be a need for smart people building and maintaining ecosystems, as long as a rising tech oligarchy won't gatekeep us all out, which should be the headline here.
Edit: I can't find a link between the fintech wise and the publisher wise. I still don't like this type of sensationalist headlines as all technology gets allegedly obsoleted every other year.
Maybe…? This just seems like a massive over-correction here, and an over-correction to something other than the existence of LLMs at that. They shovelled so many people into IT via boot camps to correct the perceived overvaluation of software professionals that now there’s nothing to be seen for all that investment, and the market has snapped back. Actual experienced engineers became even more desirable a resource due to overseeing all the boot camp kids, and now we’re less than months away from a massive mess of instant legacy code everywhere due to CTOs who saw $s in their eyes from the low low cost of Claude versus a junior.
No, but yes too.
I’m sorry no software engineer right out of college should be getting paid 100k plus. You have <1 yr of professional experience. Okay I’ll give your inter/“extern”-ship and land you a whopping 50k - 60k.. it is and was overly inflated wages..
That's absurd. Many other jobs should pay that much too.Take it from the billionaires.
Exactly. Fucking mcdonald's should be a 6 figure job.
If their work brings in > 100k in revenue then they should.
Cool story grandpa. Or maybe you're just underpaid? Try adjusting for inflation. $50k doesn't cut it for starting salaries anymore, and a chocolate bar now costs more than a quarter.
$60k a year is not enough to live comfortably in most of the cities with tech hubs. Rent alone would be 60+% of your paycheck, plus utilities and a car to get to work, you might be going hungry.
"six figure career" might refer to a career in which you get there eventually.
Agreed, but bump the internship up $10-20k for my area. In CS, you should be getting median household income more-or-less for a junior/intern role ($70-80k in my area), and double median income for a senior role ($140-160k in my area), or at least that's how it works out in my area. There are roles above senior, and those should get paid accordingly.
Okay I should’ve added regional based, like major cities should add above, and against inflation. Like obviously after the first year you can make more dependent on ones performance, bonus etc.. I’m just saying like you enter with a lesser salary, and get more. Or you just hop around till you get a better salary with more experience
I graduated in 2002, just as the dot com bubble burst. Similar scary headlines abounded then. I'm not employed in it, but I don't recall the tech sector disappearing and us all going to live in caves. Maybe I missed it?
The problem this time around is that companies think junior developers can be replaced with AI. This is delusion. Some think they can replace senior developers with AI. This is LSD heroic dose delusion.
These delusions will work themselves out in a few years, after a very painful burst bubble, but right now it means junior developers aren't getting hired. In 10 years, there will be a shortage of senior developers because all the missing juniors now will translate into missing seniors then.
Yeah the same thing happened with the dot com bubble.They didn't try to replace junior developers with ai, they just gave them pool tables in lieu of having any plan at all! When I graduated there were very few jobs in programming at all, and those that were were flooded by people with a lot more experience than a new graduate.We'll get through it this time too
10 years from now I’ll have 16 years of experience. Bring on the senior shortage, I’ll milk it for a decade and retire at 50 hopefully.
Same, 2001 comp sci grad, and these are the same things I heard back then, still in tech and honestly theres been many boom and bust cycles I've lived through in this industry.
Tech and software aren't going anywhere, anytime soon but there will be a salary correction just like back then.
I graduated in 2001 in a tech-adjacent field, and my first job was as a security guard making barely over minimum wage. Things get bad. Things get better.
CS jobs have been scanrt for the past 10years, biotech similarly have the same issues as well.(biotech research, but not people who for bio>health), i like to add biology has been mostly geared towards being female dominated as well, at the expense and neglect men who wants to be in bio.
Recent data analytics masters degree grad trying to do a career pivot. After almost a year, man does it seem like 2 years ago me made a dumb ass choice. And I'm not even tryna for 6 figures or anything. I'd be happy with 60-70 lol
Edit to add trying to pivot into some kinda data analytics. Not away from
Just curious, what do you want to pivot into?
I'm coming from healthcare and trying to get into some form of data analyst type position. Realize my comment wasn't clear which way I was trying to pivot
I don’t like my job so I went back to school for tech. Not for the salary, but because I genuinely enjoy it. After 8 months of applying, I got 1 phone interview.
The job I hate went fully remote around that time and I just gave up entirely. I’ll just keep doing a job I hate but at least I can work at home.
Hey look, it's the late 90' and early 2000's again.
Same crap that was talked about after the .com bust.
This was the start of my career. Then 2008. Then now. There’s never been a good time.
This once in a life time recessions seem to happen quite frequently.
Do project managers and vision directors next
Probably.
Ultimately the problem is an over saturated market and universities letting their programs grow too large.
No, the problem is greedy corporations.
There is an active need for many developers, think of every time you've used terrible software, every time a program crashed or you found yourself manually doing something and thought "there should be a tool for this", every bad search and broken social media site.
Hell, we're supposed to be in the middle of an "AI boom" and someone has to actually implement all those pie in the sky "automate away everyone's jobs". While AI can, debatably, write the code for that, it still takes a person to design, architect, implement, test and validate those systems.
No. The entire technical foundation on which "computer science" is built is crumbling due to lack of maintenance and funding and desperately needs people to fix it, however corporations are doing their what they do best; devaluing, destroying, and parasitizing their surroundings.
Just like AI can write code, it can also design, architect, implement and test...badly
No manager cares about validation. Today's mindset seems to be "ship now, fix later"
The guy says he couldn't get a job at McDonalds due to lack of exerience.
Thats your problem dude. I can't imagine a company hiring someone for a six figure job who has zero work exerience.
Get a helpdesk job for little while while you keep applying.
I believe the problem is that people feel entitled to a job with a six-figure salary just because they paid for an expensive college education. College has this air of excellence.
But then, reality sets in. Knowledge is nice, of course, but practical experience is key. You need to know how to act in the real world.
This sorta cracks me up. If your monthly expenses are 6k a month you might be able to be just in the black if you make just under six figures. Look at rents anywhere that can be described as in or around any city and remember recent grads have no savings and student loans on top of other expenses. Throwing around six figures as a large number in 2015 meant something, in 2025 its laughable.
The first sentence of the article shows the problem.
The problem wasn’t ever “bodies,” which people have always misunderstood. It’s qualified workers.
I worked in tech for a long time, at a bunch of different companies, and I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
The people going into these careers includes a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.
Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of "shortage of workers" while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where "entry level" is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.
Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don't get too many ideas of independence in their heads.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. A lot of college grads I've interviewed come out expecting to be senior level when they don't even have a basic foundation of IT. Don't expect to get paid 6 figures right out of college when you have 0 experience and can't even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know. Colleges have lied to them that we(the IT industry) needs them and that they're special. Show me you have the foundation before telling me how the industry works.
I knew of a company that listed an internal tool as a job requirement so they could claim a skill shortage and hire foreign workers. They coached them to put that tool on their resume.
It doesn’t help that conpanies lie on their requirements in job postings. Even entry level retail jobs are asking for 2-3 years of retail experience. That’s just insulting to those with retail experience and an impossible “entry level” requirement. Leads people to just ignore any requirements.
It's not just that. HR departments (who, let's be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they're busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.
Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It's the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.
Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you'll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be "cloud" but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they're looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don't want that.
It's super fucked.
How much is it that these companies don't want to train. I have a hard time believing your job is so advanced and technical you couldn't find someone qualified at any point.
Training people up would be a great idea when you have the attitude that you're going to keep working there for 30 years. Those old "company man" jobs are all but gone. If you stay at a job 5 years, people start to wonder if there's something wrong with you. That's just starting to be enough time for training to be worth the investment.
If tech was unionized, and the union had the attitude that they are basically a trade guild that will build up your skills, that would change things.
In my experience there is a huge gap between those that are smart and enthusiastic and those that are just average. I consider myself part of the former group and I can't blame coworkers for just doing their job and go home. But it means the gap just widens.
I have. My first job wasn't the worst at this but it happened to some extent. My last company had such a huge disparity between work and employees that every single one of their IT projects (dunno about the rest) was in constant state of delays, hotfixing and putting out fires. Things were so bad people were moved between projects on daily basis and at one point management decided to throw everyone in the department (including folks who just joined the company and newbies with little to no programming experience) to triage one of them.
That's not to mention poaching team members from projects they promised more bodies to (only informing the client about the latter decision) and many other issues. They absolutely needed more people but the way the company is run does little to help with that.
The worst party? They're still growing as a company while their burnout rate stays unchanged. So yeah, it's a thing.
One issue is that you can’t just take a person and train them. Not everyone will excel, so you want proven people instead of playing the lottery. It’s great because now only senior engineers get hired and nobody trains more of them, increasing the shortage so now they want to stay importing them.
This is SO true. I'm hiring for a software engineer position right now. We've been looking for MONTHS. Recently, we've finally managed to fill the first head.
So many applicants just can't even code. My company is not a place where you learn how to code, it's a place where you learn all the stuff which you didn't think you'd have to do as a software engineer.
We still have a qualified applicants shortage.
This to me is actually the “secret” of software engineering: it’s frequently doing the stuff you didn’t think you’d have to do as a software engineer.
The hard part is often finding someone who can do both while also wanting to work at your company.
And this is why I'm not worried about my job, but I do recommend people stay away unless they really like it. I've interviewed far too many people who just can't hack it, yet they have multiple relevant jobs on their resume.
Job shortage? Or too low pay?