Natasha Singer

And so there was what I would say is kind of a magic beans jobs narrative that the tech industry campaigned on.

And you saw big companies like Google and Microsoft and nonprofit education groups funded by them lobbying to get more computer science in schools, developing their own company branded computer science lessons and teaching teachers to teach them.

Computer science is interesting and important, but it came with this promise of learn to code and you'll be rich and powerful.

You'll be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah, yeah.

And that was part of what we believed culturally.

Coming up... There are many people whose identities are wrapped up in their jobs.

And I think we're in the beginning of a profound shift about what work is and how AI tools will affect it and what kinds of jobs are going to go away.

Stick around.

One is that if you went to a top school like Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, it was always much easier for many kids to get jobs at Microsoft or Google because you were at a top computer science school.

And even with this learn to code and you'll get a six-figure job at a fancy tech company and change the world, that was always hard for students at lesser-known state schools or kids at historically black universities or other places that don't have reputations for being top computing schools.

So, like, this narrative of we'll magic you into money and power if you can code wasn't true for every college student even before this.

I think what's changed is, as Raya pointed out, even some students at top computer science schools are having trouble.

And first of all, you know, I talked to dozens of students last year about this, and they said things like, you know—

I feel gaslit about my career prospects.

I think it's also different for them than for students who majored in something else that didn't maybe have this narrative.

They feel more disappointed because they feel they were promised something.

In terms of what's happening, tech companies now want employees who are familiar with coding tools because it can make you a more efficient software engineer.

And the students who graduated this year and last year and the year before were not trained to use these tools because they just came up.

And now we see universities scrambling to train kids how to use these AI tools.