Coding Boot Gamp Graduates Find tough Prospects In an AI-Powered World (msn.com) 42
An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times:
Between the time [construction worker Florencio] Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a "golden ticket" to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting. Mr. Rendon says he didn't land a single interview.
Coding boot camp graduates across the country are facing a similarly tough job market. In Philadelphia, Mal Durham, a lawyer who wanted to change careers, was about halfway through a part-time coding boot camp late last year when its organizers with the nonprofit Launchcode delivered disappointing news. "They said: 'Here is what the hiring metrics look like. Things are down. The number of opportunities is down,'" she said. "It was really disconcerting." In Boston, Dan Pickett, the founder of a boot camp called Launch Academy, decided in May to pause his courses indefinitely because his job placement rates, once as high as 90 percent, had dwindled to below 60 percent. "I loved what we were doing," he said. "We served the market. We changed a lot of lives. The team didn't want that to turn sour."
Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent. "I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech, period, that I've seen in 25 years," said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
A Stack Overflow survey of 65,000 developers found that 60% had used AI coding tools this year, the article points out. And it includes two predictions about the future:
Coding boot camp graduates across the country are facing a similarly tough job market. In Philadelphia, Mal Durham, a lawyer who wanted to change careers, was about halfway through a part-time coding boot camp late last year when its organizers with the nonprofit Launchcode delivered disappointing news. "They said: 'Here is what the hiring metrics look like. Things are down. The number of opportunities is down,'" she said. "It was really disconcerting." In Boston, Dan Pickett, the founder of a boot camp called Launch Academy, decided in May to pause his courses indefinitely because his job placement rates, once as high as 90 percent, had dwindled to below 60 percent. "I loved what we were doing," he said. "We served the market. We changed a lot of lives. The team didn't want that to turn sour."
Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent. "I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech, period, that I've seen in 25 years," said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
A Stack Overflow survey of 65,000 developers found that 60% had used AI coding tools this year, the article points out. And it includes two predictions about the future:
- Armando Solar-Lezama, leader of MIT's Computer-Assisted Programming Group, "believes that A.I. tools are good news for programming careers. If coding becomes easier, he argues, we'll just make more, better software. We'll use it to solve problems that wouldn't have been worth the hassle previously, and standards will skyrocket."
- Zach Sims, a co-founder of Codecademy, said of the job prospects for coding boot camp graduates" "I think it's pretty grim."
This will be a problem in 10 years (Score:2)
we will hire for seniors at the jr pay rates! (Score:2)
we will hire for seniors at the jr pay rates!
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we will hire for seniors at the jr pay rates!
Good luck with that.
It’ll be the first and last time you hear a retired GenX’er identify by their preferred pronouns; Fuck/You.
Re: we will hire for seniors at the jr pay rates! (Score:1)
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"Shovel ready" often get jobs faster, but they are usually just the jobs that involve shoveling. Eventually one might want to do something better.
India (Score:2)
The thing you need to understand is that the people who are working to screw you over and take everything you have think 10, 20, 30 years out. So they are going to make sure that they have the cheap labor they want and they're going to make sure that they get what you have from you.
I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it because people are just so fucking s
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...The thing you need to understand is that the people who are working to screw you over and take everything you have think 10, 20, 30 years out...
Wow, first time I've every heard somebody say that.
Usually managers are criticized for not thinking beyond next quarter's earnings report.
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When the senior devs retire and there's no one to replace them.
Yes it will. and already is a big issue.
The present day accountants suck up all the overhead with no money left over for development or training paradigm has already been a problem.
When I retired in 2011 at 55. I had given them 5 years notice, and they'd better get a replacement trainee for some of my work. They didn't believe me, because the mantra then was no one could retire at that age any more. I even showed them my financial situation. But no trainees showed up.
Then I put in my notice. Two wee
What's Next? (Score:2)
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Remember when all the politicians told the coal miners to learn coding skills... what's next for them now?
Tell the next group of laid off workers to learn coding skills? Or did you mean the coal miners?
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Remember when all the politicians told the coal miners to learn coding skills... what's next for them now?
I'm pretty sure most of them just voted to bring back coal.
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Remember when all the politicians told the coal miners to learn coding skills... what's next for them now?
I'm pretty sure most of them just voted to bring back coal.
Are they going to go back to manual labor with pickaxes and black power?
What used to take an army of men is now done with a few demolition people, a few dragline operators and a few dozer operators. Most all of the jobs in the mines are lost to automation. I live in coal crackin' land, they are still mining, but it doesn't take long to work a highwall and load the train cars, then doze the dirt and rocks back over and send a plane over to seed the reclaimed land.
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The typos in this submission and the associated comments are hilarious.
I didn't know you could mine coal with black power, but hey why not?
So, you build houses for (Score:2)
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Yip, I doubt the slump has anything to do with AI.
Here's my prediction (Score:3)
Senior programmers are not currently replaceable by AI. AI is too shit to produce high-quality code, and it's not gonna change anytime soon.
Junior programmers however, who are typically used to piss boilerplate and gradually move on to dicier, more complex code projects as they advance in their careers, are mincemeat: AI is good enough to code the shit they code.
Therefore, here's my short term prediction: senior programmers will keep their job until they retire (at least those who are senior enough, i.e. old enough) and junior programmers will never get a chance to enter the computer programming field at all and build a career like we did.
And here's my long-term prediction: eventually there will be no more competent programmers left, and nobody will understand what the hell code AI is spewing out. And if you think "standards will skyrocket" when nobody understands what they compile anymore, you're delusional.
Long term, I predict a total code quality catastrophe across the board. Fortunately, I'll be on a boat in the middle of the lake spending my time fishing by then. But I pity the youth who chose that cursed career path and now find themselves being phased out before even getting a chance to get phase in, and the adult fools who gave up a paying job to become an unemployable code monkey.
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Look at Cobol. Already 'obsolete' back in the early 90s, there was such a demand for it that you could get non-credit courses just so you could find a job. And a few old timers either stayed in the market or came back for $$$.
So my prediction is that short-sightedness will lead to a lack of good future senior programmers in the career pipeline, but those who make it anyway will be in high demand because of their low supply, and they will be paid very well.
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Look at Cobol. Already 'obsolete' back in the early 90s, there was such a demand for it that you could get non-credit courses just so you could find a job. And a few old timers either stayed in the market or came back for $$$.
So my prediction is that short-sightedness will lead to a lack of good future senior programmers in the career pipeline, but those who make it anyway will be in high demand because of their low supply, and they will be paid very well.
Exactly. As an olde fart that was enticed back to work - not in COBOL, but in my field - electromagnetics - the education system and expectations screwed up.
Everything on earth was going to be digital only. No Analog, and definitely no radio or electromagnetics.
Now the prognosticators found out that at some point, Digital becomes RF, and that analog, while diminished, is still critical, and that if its electronic, electromagnetics are deeply involved.
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Hundreds of years ago, people worked far closer to their meals than they do today. With the advent of force multipliers, we don't need as many of us to work directly in food production. Don't underestimate the ability of a force multiplier to drastically reshape society just because it doesn't entirely cut people out of the loop.
They have programs to turn Indians (Score:2)
What we should be doing is focusing on making sure that we all get a piece of the action
Assembly Language (Score:1)
Perhaps the situation is a bit like how the introduction of high level languages displaced the need for people who could write programs in assembly language or machine code. It's not that programming stopped, but more ambitious programs now became easier and quicker to write. The demand for assembly language programming skills decreased, and programmers took on what would have previously been seen as a more design or architecture role, combining set pieces, rather than building them from scratch.
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Boot Gamp. (Score:2)
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So, boot gamp is an umbrella mounted sloppily to your, uh, footwear?
Marketing vs. Reality (Score:2)
Marketing, is a mere half dozen Slashdot topics ago bragging about “Code” being Saturday-morning-cartoon hip and cool.
Reality, is you trying to find a job with that cartoon replacement.
Being good at programming requires... (Score:2)
...a special kind of mind, and not all can be good at it. Talent is real.
The profession got a reputation for being well paid, so the wannabes got excited.
Others saw a willing pool of customers and opened "boot camps", selling the illusion that any random person could take a few lessons and make big bucks.
Reality bites back, hard.
Hopefully you just did a boot camp (Score:2)
There was always going to be a time where commodity programming jobs dropped off. It was always past the horizon though. It took some fundamental developments to converge.... but here it comes. Remember back in the 1999s when anybody who could wrap their head around html could briefly get a job as a designer? That bubble was a tiny version of the one unsophisticated CRUD developers are facing now.
One problem is that the education ecosystem will gladly milk applicants long past the viability of their offerin
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Hell the H1Bs did a number on IT and grunt code monkey jobs years ago. It's deja vu all over again.
See? Never listen to employers about education. (Score:2)
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Their one and only goal to cheapen labor just long enough to not need it at all. If you have access to an education, and have a choice in the matter, pursue something that enriches you as a human being rather than enriches your bosses.
Not so sure your pursue-what-you-feel advice is as wise as you assume..given the tax-paying citizens in the Educated States of America are now left holding the bag for a couple trillion dollars of unpaid educational enrichments, because choices.
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What kind of dumbass (Score:2)
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The kind of dumbass that realizes the market for lawyers is oversaturated.
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Spends 4 years in undergrad, 3 in law school and then decides they want to be a code monkey?
Probably one of those “odd” humans who couldn’t divest themselves of a conscience or moral compass enough to be a lawyer.
Even the AI code monkey compiling humanity’s employment away, can sleep better.