Yes, Supply and Demand Applies to Computer Science Degrees
it's still a great field, but "learn to code" has created headwinds
For a long time, I’ve been talking about the importance of supply and demand in the labor market. It was a key part of my first book; the effort to push everyone into college is a bad idea, among other reasons, because flooding a market with something (like college degrees) inevitably degrades the value of that thing. We know that this applies to degrees in general. For like the twentieth time, I’ll share this paper from the NBER. Apologies to people who’ve gotten this shpiel from me before, but I really see it as something of a skeleton key for the past 50 years of higher education and the labor market. Looking at 115 years of data, the authors conclude, “Overall, simple supply and demand specifications do a remarkable job explaining the long-run evolution of the college wage premium.” The more jobs for college degree holders out there, the higher the college wage premium; the more degree holders out there, the lower the college wage premium. Which, duh.
I think it’s clear that this also holds for specific degrees. If there are more workers with veterinary science degrees graduating, they will compete against each other in the labor market and drive down entry-level wages. The poverty of the “practical major” idea becomes clear when you look at outcomes for business majors. It’s hard to think of a major that better satisfies the vague criteria of practicality than business. And yet business majors only do alright in terms of employment rates and income, not great. Why? Because a major’s value is not the product of some Platonic ideal of practicality, but of supply and demand! The trouble for all of those business majors is that we graduate like 350,000 of them a year. All of those young workers compete against each other for the same jobs. Employers therefore have little incentive to raise entry-level salaries too much, as there’s always another potential worker to hire. “Practicality” makes no difference.
For a long time my go-to example of this phenomenon was pharmacy. Now, finally, I can go after the “learn to code” crowd, at least a little bit. This New York Times article details an increasingly competitive labor market for recent comp sci graduates, with many tech companies slashing jobs at the exact same time as more and more graduates pour into the field.
Over the last decade, the prospect of six-figure starting salaries, perks like free food and the chance to work on apps used by billions led young people to stampede toward computer science — the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms — on college campuses across the United States. The number of undergraduates majoring in the subject more than tripled from 2011 to 2021, to nearly 136,000 students, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks computing degrees at about 200 universities….
…cutbacks have not only sent recent graduates scrambling to find new jobs but also created uncertainty for college students seeking high-paying summer internships at large consumer tech companies.
In the past, tech companies used their internship programs to recruit promising job candidates, extending offers to many students to return as full-time employees after graduation. But this year, those opportunities are shrinking.
Let me say this right up front: computer science majors still have enviable outcomes in the job market. A skilled and experienced coder will enjoy employment conditions that are among the best in the economy. Someone who really knows how to program is going to get a job somewhere. I’m not denying that. I am saying that dramatically increasing the number of computer science graduates we pump out will inevitably result in headwinds for applicants, making it harder to secure a job and reducing their initial wages. Yes, it’s great to be a professional programmer, I have no doubt. But contrary to what some hackers have angrily demanded in my comments section, computer science is not exempt from the supply and demand considerations that affect all educated labor. And as the interviews in that Times articles show, there’s been a culture in the field that has created a sense of entitlement among some, an expectation that good economic times are preordained.
Again, because people get very sensitive about this topic, this is about headwinds; it’s about salaries and employment rate on the margins; it’s about a very strong employment market that’s still very strong, just more competitive. And there’s a natural cap on the number of people who can enter the field: it’s hard to code. Not everybody can do it. It takes a certain degree of talent, and most people don’t have it. It’s a cognitively-loaded field in world where not everyone has the same cognitive gifts. (This was the other major reason sending everyone to college is a bad idea that I discussed in the book.) Certainly getting a computer science degree is a high-percentage play when it comes to getting a good job. But tripling the number of people you’re sending out onto the job market each year has consequences. It just does.
I’ll ask the people who’ve been shouting “learn to code!” for ten years again: what did you think would happen once people actually did?
Please check out my appearance on the Converging Dialogues podcast.
The galling aspect of "learn to code" was when it was thrown at unemployed older workers. Like it's an easy retraining option, and tech firms are just racing to hire 53 year olds.
Meanwhile the competition is every programmer in India and China: one element of work from home since covid is firms realizing "home" can be Bangalore.
There is so much more to a career than just having some hard skills. There are so many soft skills required to be successful in your career, and over the years, I've seen more and more people coming into the job market without these skills. This applies to programmers and engineers (and other positions requiring technical skills) as well as people with business degrees, or non-technical backgrounds. In my experience, the people that have these soft skills do better (relatively) than the people that don't.
When I was a kid (late 70s/early 80s) there were all kinds of jobs that I could do - mowing lawns, shoveling walks before I was 10, paper route from the time I was 10 through 17. I got paid to do these jobs (good for me), but more importantly, I learned the soft skills needed to be a successful employee.
I had to get paid by my customers face-to-face, and most of my customers were not shy about criticizing my performance. I learned that I could be resentful of the criticism and have to listen to more complaining every week (ugh), or improve my performance and start getting praise (yay), but more importantly more work or better pay.
By the time I had my first real job (with a W2 and a pay check) I already knew how to work. I didn't have any hard skills yet, but I knew what work meant. It was not super fun playtime - it was work. I went to work, did my job, and got paid. If I did my job, I got more hours, and more money. If I didn't do my job, my hours were cut, and I got less money. (Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of the anti-work movement).
After college, in my first professional job (1985 or so), I started seeing a pattern. People that had worked through high school and college were much more prepared for their career than the people that didn't have jobs before.
And this is not a "kids these days" rant. This is an "adults these days" rant. Part of the problem is that we as adults made it virtually impossible for kids to get the kinds of experiences I was lucky to have.
There are no paper routes for kids any more, they are all car routes done by adults.
For the most part, kids can't mow their neighbors lawns anymore because we have landscaping companies that have taken on all of that work - same with shoveling snow. Even if that's not the case, there is a reluctance to let kids do things like this on their own.
I was able to work for a couple of different businesses when I was 13 and 14 (light janitorial work -emptying the trash, vacuuming the offices). That is nearly impossible these days.
The only opportunity that I see for young kids these days are the mandatory "community service" hours required for school. Unfortunately, most of these opportunities result in a bunch of kids pretending to contribute, while some adults do the real work.
And again, it's not the kids' fault, the adults won't let them do anything by themselves, and immediately take over if they see anyone struggling, so the kids never get to learn anything.
This is something that I think we need to figure out.