Coding students whose jobs were taken by AI forced to work at Chipotle
When Manasi Mishra began studying computer science, she envisioned a future writing code for major tech companies, not rolling burritos.
But the recent Purdue University graduate has been unable to land a job in her chosen field as tech companies increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to perform entry-level tasks.
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“I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle,” the frustrated Mishra said in a TikTok video earlier this summer, which has been viewed nearly 150,000 times.
Mishra’s experience underscores a jarring shift in the job market for new coders.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent computer science graduates is 6.1%, and 7.5% for computer engineering majors — both above the 5.3% average for all recent graduates and roughly double the 3% rate for majors like biology and art history.
“I’m very concerned,” Jeff Forbes, a former program director for computer science education and workforce development at the National Science Foundation, told the New York Times.
“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.”
For more than a decade, tech leaders, billionaires and even US presidents encouraged young people to “learn to code,” promising that programming skills would all but guarantee a six-figure starting salary and job security.
While there have been a handful of winners in the AI economy, with some commanding enormous paychecks as valuations of AI firms skyrocket. the majority of those companies employ relatively few people.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI developer Anthropic, has warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next one to five years.
The arrival of AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, CodeRabbit and others has accelerated the decline for entry-level programming roles, which are among the easiest for companies to automate.
Economists and industry executives say the hiring slowdown is also tied to post-pandemic overstaffing, aggressive cost-cutting, high interest rates and widespread hiring freezes.
While experts debate how much of the current downturn is directly caused by AI versus the business cycle, there’s little disagreement that junior coding positions are under intense pressure.
The result is a labor market that looks very different from a few years ago.
Zach Taylor, a 2023 graduate of Oregon State University, told the Times he’s applied for nearly 5,800 tech jobs, leading to just 13 interviews and zero offers.
Even the company where he interned couldn’t take him on full-time.
After trying to land a role at McDonald’s and being rejected “for lack of experience,” he moved back home to Sherwood, Ore., and began collecting unemployment.
“It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying,” he told the Times.
For many job seekers, the application process has become a gauntlet: online coding assessments, live technical tests and multiple interviews, only to be turned down or ignored.
Some describe the experience as “bleak” or “soul-crushing.” Others say they feel “gaslit” by an industry that once told them software skills were a golden ticket.
In San Francisco, billboards advertise AI coding tools that promise to write or debug code faster than humans.
CodeRabbit, while not as widely used as Copilot, is praised for features like real-time collaboration and context-aware code reviews. These tools, coupled with a glut of applicants, mean companies can produce more software with fewer junior engineers.
Audrey Roller, who recently graduated with a degree in data science from Worcester, Mass.-based Clark University, told the Times she writes her own applications without AI tools in hopes of standing out from the automated crowd.
But when one company sent a rejection email just three minutes after she applied, she suspected an algorithm had made the decision.
“Some companies are using AI to screen candidates and removing the human aspect,” she told the Times.
The downturn has also gutted a parallel pipeline into tech: coding bootcamps.
For over a decade, these intensive programs offered a route into high-paying engineering jobs for people without traditional computer science degrees.
Now, many are seeing their job placement rates collapse, Reuters reported.
Jonathan Kim, who paid nearly $20,000 for a part-time program at Codesmith in 2023, has applied to more than 600 software engineering roles with no offers.
He now works at his uncle’s ice cream shop in Los Angeles while continuing to code on open-source projects.
“They sold a fake dream of a great job market,” he told Reuters.
At Codesmith, just 37% of students in the 2023 part-time cohort landed full-time tech jobs within six months, down from 83% in late 2021, according to the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting.
Placement rates at other bootcamps have similarly fallen into the 37–50% range for some cohorts.
The company told Reuters that the market is “tough” but notes that 70% of its full-time graduates found jobs within a year.
Industry veterans say this environment is pushing tech companies back toward a traditional hiring model that favors graduates of elite universities such as MIT and Stanford, reversing some of the diversity gains bootcamps once supported.
“They’re sending their recruiters to MIT and Stanford and wining and dining the top students,” Michael Novati, co-founder of Formation Dev, which trains experienced engineers for interviews, told Reuters.
With Post wires
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