alt Hacker NewsThere are too many new grads and the quality bar outside of target programs has dropped nor never existed to begin with.
And the target programs graduate around 15-20k EECS adjacent majors a year.
It's hard to justify hiring a (choosing random college) CS@Ouachita Baptist University grad for $140K TC (50th percentile for an entry level SWE) or even $100K TC [0] (25th percentile for an entry level SWE) unless they are truly an outlier.
For example, back in college I had a buddy who really didn't want to take our OS class because it was hard, so he used transferology and found an OS class offered by some random Christian university in Texas where the class assignments were either writing biblical analogies for system programming concepts like memory management or basic fizzbuzz level assignments. My alma mater's CS program ended up blacklisting that college when admin was working on transferring the credits for that class and began reviewing the class's curriculum.
While that is an extreme example, outside of target programs, the quality bar drops dramatically, and an entire generation of grads are truly unemployable at the current prevailing wages.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
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There wouldn't be too many new grads if all the capital wasn't locked up in a few Death Stars. A robust job market needs
oodles and oodles of dumb, doomed small businesses and start-up companies chasing stupid products and services that will never succeed long-term
not just top-of-class grads, but also mediocre grads and people who taught themselves from a few library books and even that one guy who can't build anything but is amazing at point out flaws and potential stumbling blocks
learn from their mistakes at these companies and grow into knowledgeable and diligent workers from the experiences they have actually working.
There is a temptation to declare a conspiracy against Millennials and Zoomers, but it's probably more likely that our "job creators" are just that stupid and self-interested.
Well, this is the thing. I was talking to someone a few days back, someone in Academia, and the conversation around the table was about how can we make it so we don't have to resort to increasingly more sophisticated ways to surveil students so they don't AI slop their entire degrees.
The problem is that universities, seemingly on a global scale, decided to run on economic incentives instead of academic ones. There are way too many people just doing degrees they have no interesting in learning about because university is just a way to a better job, and guess what, that "better job" no longer exists... and yet, year after year we have more and more people that have no clue what their credentials claim they should know by heart.