Computer Science Grads Are Being Forced to Work Fast Food Jobs as AI Tanks Their Career

“It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying.”

/ Artificial Intelligence/ Ai Coding/ Computer Science/ Labor

Image by Getty / Futurism

Until very recently, studying computer science — or some variation thereof — was considered among the best bets an incoming college freshman could make.

Now, as the New York Times reports based on interviews with experts and recent CS graduates alike, those who did are struggling to find work in fast food, nevermind as entry-level coders, amid massive tech industry layoffs — 592 per day, according to the Tech Layoff Tracker from the Trueup jobs platform — and rampant use of AI coding tools.

Born near Silicon Valley, 21-year-old Manasi Mishra said she was told from a young age that “if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary.”

A precocious programmer herself, Mishra told the NYT that she made her first website as an elementary schooler and took advanced CS courses in high school before pursuing a degree in the field at Purdue. None of that seemed to prepare her for the AI shockwave that accompanied her graduation this past spring.

Instead of fighting off offers, the young programmer left college jobless — and in a now-viral TikTok video, admitted that she was interviewing at Chipotle, the fast-casual burrito chain, for a job she ultimately did not get.

In a NYT survey of more than 150 current college students and recent grads seeking to break into the tech industry, the youthful respondents shared similar stories of desperation and hopelessness. With an AI sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, these would-be tech workers are now forced to contend with a tech job market sucked dry by AI.

While some told the newspaper that they felt “gaslit” by the tech industry with its promises of massive “learn to code” investment returns, others said their primary emotion was one of depression when surveying the “soul-crushing” lack of prospects ahead of them.

It’s not hard to see why: recent statistics from the New York Federal Reserve found that CS grads have a 6.1 percent unemployment rate, up from the 5.8 average for all recent grads. (Computer engineering majors, meanwhile, fare even worse, with their unemployment rate at a whopping 7.5 percent).

One such recent graduate, 25-year-old Zach Taylor, told the NYT that when he started his CS program at Oregon State University in 2019, job prospects seemed endless. By the time he graduated in 2023, in the midst of the first wave of AI-influenced tech layoffs, that rosy outlook was but a distant memory.

Despite getting an internship at a software firm last year, Taylor wasn’t hired full-time. In the two years since his graduation, he has, by his count, applied to 5,762 jobs — and only gotten interviews from 13, none of which led anywhere.

Unsurprisingly, Taylor considers his post-grad job hunt one of the “most demoralizing experiences I have ever had to go through” — and given that he was rejected from a job at McDonald’s “for lack of experience,” it’s hard to argue with that assessment.

“It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying,” the Gen Z job-seeker told the newspaper. He has since moved back to his hometown in Oregon and is receiving unemployment benefits to keep him afloat.

Stranded in such an impossible scenario — one that seems to surpass even the trials and tribulations experienced by millennials, who were thrust into a similarly hostile labor landscape after the market crash of 2008 — it’s hard to say what will come next.

Unfortunately, until the AI bubble bursts for real, the prospects don’t look very good.

More on AI and labor: Applying to Jobs Has Become an AI-Powered Wasteland