Natasha Singer

I went to visit Anthropic when I was in San Francisco.

You know, they make the AI tool Claude and they have Claude code, you know, which generates code.

And, you know, they were talking about everybody coming to terms with the fact that being a software engineer is changing and that producing the code yourself is no longer the backbone of some of these jobs.

And, you know, that is a particular hardship for kids who've just spent the last decade learning how to master computer programming.

So as part of my reporting on this, we asked recent computer science grads around the country to share their experiences with us.

And we heard from more than 100 recent college computer science grads.

And I'm just going to read you some of their responses.

They said, it's extremely discouraging.

It's incredibly frustrating.

It is soul crushing.

It seems like my degree doesn't matter.

Some of my skills are now worthless.

It's too demoralizing.

Some students told us that while they're looking for tech jobs, some of them are applying for fast food jobs at Chipotle.

One student was working as a clerk at Walgreens.

It's not the kind of job they envisioned when they were told if they just learned to code, they'd get six-figure jobs.

It's no longer the golden ticket.

It's the tarnished ticket.

And some of these students ended up moving back home, rich in degrees, poor in employment.

And when I called them, they were applying for jobs out of their childhood bedrooms.