Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs (latimes.com)
- Reference: 0180426081
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/236259/stanford-computer-science-grads-find-their-degrees-no-longer-guarantee-jobs
- Source link: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-12-19/they-graduated-from-stanford-due-to-ai-they-cant-find-job
> "Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs" with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. "I think that's crazy." While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers. Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates -- those considered "cracked engineers" who already have thick resumes building products and doing research -- are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.
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> "There's definitely a very dreary mood on campus," said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. "People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it's very hard for them to actually secure jobs." The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees. [...] Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study. [...]
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> A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need "two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents," which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidovic, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. "We don't need the junior developers anymore," said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. "The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there." [...] Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing. As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-12-19/they-graduated-from-stanford-due-to-ai-they-cant-find-job
Buying Your Degree No Longer Guarantee Job (Score:1)
Finally employers are looking at what students can do instead of looking at the silly paper that mom and dad bought for them.
Re: (Score:2)
> Finally employers are looking at what students can do instead of looking at the silly paper that mom and dad bought for them.
If that were the case, the article title would be "Employers choose to hire community college graduates instead of Stanford"
You think they are hiring more non-Ivy-league students instead?
Elite computer science degrees don't give hands on (Score:2)
Elite computer science degrees don't give hands on skills for all tech job and we don't need ALL theory loaded coders.
we also need hands on people doing the system admin work / helpdesk / desktop / data center work / networking / etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Who is going to volunteer their own money to fix that?
those considered "cracked engineers" (Score:3)
Really?
What a difference two extra letters make.
Re: those considered "cracked engineers" (Score:2)
Would you believe I was once a crackhead engineer?
Re: (Score:2)
> Would you believe I was once a crackhead engineer?
Were you a crackhead who was also an engineer or did you engineer crackheads?
'Cause that seems more ambiguous than, say, electrical engineer. :-)
OR (Score:2)
As our AI overlords proclaimed us, humans formerly qualified/needed to learn this trade.
The worst part is.. (Score:2)
They'll never even get the chance to quiet quit.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like they're making a loud whining noise already before they even have a job!
Just a few years ago (Score:2)
It used to be that recruiters/companies would get their hands on a list of Stanford CS 106B students and start offering them jobs (part time, summer, or even full time). Note: That class is laughably basic. I'm talking like "what's a linked list?" type questions on the final exam.
Re: (Score:2)
> It used to be that recruiters/companies would get their hands on a list of Stanford CS 106B students and start offering them jobs (part time, summer, or even full time). Note: That class is laughably basic. I'm talking like "what's a linked list?" type questions on the final exam.
Some years ago, my boss, who had a PhD in EE from Stanford, told me that he didn't have a high opinion of undergrad CS students at Stanford. The grad students were top notch, but he thought less of the undergrads. In a way, it makes sense. The undergrads at Stanford are smart, but they earned their way there based on high school work. The grad students competed at the university level.
Re: (Score:3)
If they were smart they would have changed their major or double majored. This was a predictable outcome from a year ago, maybe two.
Re:Just a few years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in various positions in two FAANG companies for the last decade.
We used to have "intern season" where we would compete to bring the best students in for internships and hopefully call dibs on the brightest. This is no longer happening, and the change was so sudden it left many nothing short of shell-shocked. C-suites all in a sudden think they can do without any workers, no matter the level. Headcount increases are systematically denied, vacancies are not backfilled. People are burning out like cinder and leaving in droves. Hell, my own manager resigned two days ago. I'm also interviewing to leave this hellhole.
And all of this because some rich moron interacted with a chatbot smarter than them.
Re: Just a few years ago (Score:2)
No. The job problems are not because of AI. The "replaced by AI" is an excuse the Suits are using to distract from the actual reasons why hiring has stalled and layoffs are picking up.
Re: (Score:2)
One thing doesn't really exclude the other. They're still investing billions in AI (I develop power delivery control systems for datacenters, and I'm going nuts), that would be a very expensive smoke and mirrors.
This is more an indicator of bullshit companies. (Score:2)
Previously companies making bullshit products had to bid hard to acquire developers to write their stuff. Now they are saving on the developers by sending that money to AI companies ... but it's still bullshit products. We're due for another economic downturn to take the tide out and see who isn't wearing trunks, as Warren Buffett once put it, so that the developers left over can aggregate into fewer companies that are trying to do actual things.
Who's fault? Big Tech or the Graduates? (Score:3)
Whenever I've been asked to mentor acquaintance's kids in school underway on their last year, basically any industry, I've hammered in the point that as a student, nobody wants to hire them fresh out of college without relevant experience. Folks in tech typically will hire almost anyone w/ an internship under their belt as well as a number of applicable personal projects that demonstrate skill and the ability to complete projects.
The irony is tech jobs just out of the market aren't exceptionally glamorous and typically focus on a single feature and a very menial task to boot that basically any college graduate in the relevant degree could perform, but candidates with internship experience easily edge out those with prestigious degrees sans any relevant work experience.
The internship is commonly the free or low cost method of determining whether or not a new grad has the ability to sit down, shut up, and do the work, eg work as a team.
Team work in any business is incredibly important.
Being able to listen to your peers or those just above you in terms of experience (not only expertise) and simply submit to the process that is professional work. Then there's also the part about learning how to talk to one another w/o unintentionally undermine one another's work because you might not know all the background to a situation. Oftentimes at work there're forums, opportunities, to learn the lore on why things are the way they are, but new students w/o previous work experience might be missing out on social etiquette or simply not have the awareness needed from those who actually go out of their way to pursue an internship.
The thing is, this isn't a new problem. Students, even from my day, always thought that they could just get a job w/ a college degree. With assumption, a lot of them ended up getting jobs where they could and ended up sticking in those industries. Sometimes in Finance/Accounting, some in Admin, some just working in service industry labor. The assertive bunch always found a way to network, make their name known, and get a decent job.
Re: (Score:2)
"some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before."
yeah, I also remember this moment when I graduated 30+ years ago. I came out of college with a list in my head of about three famous companies that I wanted to work for. Thing is, 99.99% of people don't work for those companies. Leaving college is a hard reality check for sure.
Of course, I didn't work in software - since we're talking about Stanford grads and software engineering, there has been a 25 year
get your name out there (Score:2)
folks looking for jobs: get your name on a published project. if you can’t find a team, then publish something yourself. get your name on an App Store project (any app store). if you can’t get your name on something, then honestly, you’re probably not worth a potential employer’s attention.
No problem, There will always be SBUX (Score:2)
And when don't you need Baristas!
You're in a fucking recession (Score:3)
And it wants to Democrats win big in the midterms we can expect it to become a depression.
Right wing trickle down economics not only don't work but they do active harm. Normally we go through a cycle where we elect a republican because they are better at messaging than they wreck the economy and we come to our senses briefly and then we elect the Democrat and then have eight years of relatives stability and then flip back and forth between chaotic destruction by people who know how to push our buttons and boring ass administrators who know how to run a country...
We only got 4 years of those boring ass administrators and it was not enough time for them to fix the mess. It actually is never enough time to for them to fix the mess there's always a bit left over and is always a bit of resentment because they didn't fix things fast enough. This is typically because in between major elections we put the Republicans in charge of Congress and they sabotage any attempt by the Democrats to fix the damage their policies caused.
You would think after a 40 or 50 years Americans would have figured out this pattern but nope.
Re: (Score:2)
It's difficult to know how many US voters have figured-out the pattern because first they have to recognize the lack of resistance to dishonesty, disinformation and not-so-secret pro-billionaire propaganda. When they do, who do they vote for: The party that refuses to criticize, punish or highlight the bad behaviour of rich people? Assuming the do-nothing party will now, do something, is itself, insanity.
Of course, voting for any minority party will create some measure of political correction but that t
Re: (Score:2)
In the elections we've been seeing so far it's been large swings leftward, the current polling from Atlas Intel who was pretty accurate in 2024 has Trump at 39% approval and negative on every issue, even immigration.
[1]https://atlasintel.org/poll/us... [atlasintel.org]
Right now, which is absolutely too early to tell, the top 3 candidates in the poll were Newsom, AOC and Buttigieg. Way to go Republicans it would be sweet justice if any of those end up President, you earned it.
[1] https://atlasintel.org/poll/usa-national-2025-12-19
Re: (Score:2)
Stanford is no different than any other C.S. majors. The market is over saturated with C.S. graduates and has been for many years. Take a look at the YouTube "Coding for Everyone" video and it explains the situation.
Commission as an officer (Score:2)
American rewards with money what it truly values, and it truly values war.
A stint in the Space Force, Air Force etc can open DoD and many other doors via the human network officers naturally acquire. It's an instant career or a useful stepping stone. The security clearance won't hurt either.
The Guard and Reserve are options for those wanting to hold civilian employment but active duty retires much sooner. An officer makes enough to fully retire at twenty years and never need to work again.
What could go wrong? (Score:1)
How are juniors supposed to be mentored and gain on the job experience to become the seniors of the future then?
Re: (Score:2)
won't need them they think, AI will do it
Gonna be hilarious when this AI bubble pops and the suits finally get it through their skulls it's 80% bullshit.
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They know it's bullshit, but they have FOMO.
Re: What could go wrong? (Score:2)
What else is not? Wasn't it all BS always?
Re: (Score:2)
This quote from the summary about two engineers with an AI assistant being more productive than ten engineers without one just doesn't add up. I have done vibe coding both on hobby projects and at work, and it doesn't make me anywhere near that productive. I spend so much time asking it to re-do what it did wrong or manually fixing its bugs myself that I wind up only a little ahead in productivity. Not even double my usual pace.
Maybe if I am starting from scratch working on a relatively simple tool, it d
Re: (Score:2)
> How are juniors supposed to be mentored and gain on the job experience to become the seniors of the future then?
I suppose many companies are thinking that other companies will hire these juniors and that the best of the juniors will be filtered out through those experiences. Sort of like how major league baseball teams think of the farm teams. These companies likely realize that long-term employment, even at the most sought after companies, is becoming more and more rare, so many of the juniors trained at a company will mature and then join a competitor.
Re: What could go wrong? (Score:2)
Well from TFS, that isn't even what the concern is:
> As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before.
They went into it with this idea that their pedigree guaranteed they'd have a cushy job somewhere. That has never been the case. I still remember about a year ago slashdot ran a piece about a construction worker who went to a coding bootcamp expecting that he'd get a high paying programming job, and the narrative is that it didn't happen because AI.
But that's just downright false, not to mention really naive and stupid, as any experienced developer will tel