Agreed. They do very well for CS recruiting.
@SamKumar, no disrespect to Rutgers but I wouldn’t bundle it with the other two schools in this regard.
It’s also more advantageous to be in the top quarter of the graduating class at a supposed “tier 2” CS school than in the bottom half of a “tier 1” school. The FAANGs for example, recruit from a very wide range of schools and they’re certainly not looking to fill all their new grad roles from CMU and Stanford.
Son is a sophomore CS/Math major at one of the colleges you mentioned. He will be interning at a small private equity firm this summer. He started applying to internships in July and applied to over 400. He has CS or CS/Math major friends who are interning for Quant firms (1 at Jane Street), defense contractors and 2 who have just recieved funding from YCombinator. He also has friends who haven’t started looking for internships.
I wouldn’t call these programs tier 2. Internships and jobs are harder to land in this current enviroment and students need to work harder, but students won’t be help back by attending any of these colleges. Gov’t internships and research are a totally different story, but that is not college specific.
Software development jobs…
When will college applications for CS majors start to respond to these demand signals?
If the experiences of the last twenty years are relevant- there is usually a 2-3 year time lag.
Even after the dot-com bust in 2001/2002, colleges were rolling out brand spanking new majors in “E-commerce” and kids were applying. The turmoil, glut, and then hiring freezes in the energy industry did not stop the petroleum engineer applicants (after all, “everyone” told them it was a rock solid “safe” career with high pay). And the tens of thousands of finance majors were not discouraged even in 2009 when it was clear that the shifts in hiring patterns in the financial services industry were not just the cyclical up and down- but a major reset. (not to mention all those unemployed professionals from Bear Stearns and Lehman).
So I don’t expect most kids- or their parents- to fully internalize what the possible downturn in tech hiring might mean. It could be a short term reset. Or it could mean that the various industries which employ tech talent have figured out how to do more with less. We saw how quickly companies off-shored their support functions (payroll, customer service, etc.) to Costa Rica, India, Eastern Europe to reduce costs… will be interesting to see.
The next disruption to occur will be jobs requiring data collection, sorting and base analysis as AI will be able to do this faster/cheaper.
I think many jobs will be impacted by AI. A close friend (double Ivy grad) is a an experienced programmer/developer who initially thought AI wouldn’t have a lot of impact on job opportunities but has since changed her tune. After working with some newer AI platforms she is convinced that the need for programmers/developers etc is going to contract significantly - especially at the more junior level. As two of her college-age kids are CS majors, it has become a real concern.
Thought this might provide a more data driven view of the trends from the POV of a top CS program
As someone else said upthread, the top quartile of the class is still getting plum jobs but the median CS grad is having a harder time everywhere and the bottom quartile is pretty much struggling.
Personally, S22 who is an EECS junior at Cal had a much harder time recruiting for an internship in his sophomore year than in his junior year. He was bracing for a very hard time and it is hard out there, yet internship search for the top half and specifically the top quartile has gone very smooth. S22 has 2 fintech offers, lost out on an offer from a Quant firm after a bad final interview and generally got a lot of callbacks. His peers in the top quartile landed internships pretty quick but this year has been a slog in general across the board.
Weirdly enough, since early 2025, hiring actually seemed to have picked up pace and he has gotten unsolicited calls from FAANG and Quant firms to see if he is interested. There seems to be an emerging thesis that AI can code but not code well enough to solve production quality hard problems. Its a massive productivity boost though and those gains are likely to shave off the job market for the bottom half of the CS grads.
I don’t think we know yet what this all means for the CS grads in the long term since AI investments continue to balloon while at the same time some of the big tech firms seem to be scaling down, and further more traditional big tech like Salesforce and Workday seem to be meandering towards irrelevance as competition heats up and their moats aren’t holding.
The bottom half* of any job category is most at risk if that job category contracts, or moves up in terms of required or desired skill levels.
*Note that it is not just skill at the job that is relevant, but also sales and marketing skill, since people applying for jobs need to sell themselves.
Interesting that the NACE survey of a few months ago points to robust hiring vs last year. It was revised January 2025.
It’s interesting - i didn’t drill into job types but all the comments seem to think a shrinking overall market but this makes it seem different.
Of course, how will the leadership change of the country change things I’m not sure anybody knows. How much hiring is typically done by the government that could skew these #s if it doesn’t happen I don’t know.
Just to throw out there that what students consider “top half” and what employers consider “top half” doesn’t always coincide!
GPA may or may not be used as a pre-interview screen. But even when it is…it’s a screen and then it’s moot. Nobody is sitting at a decision meeting advocating for the kid with the 4.0. once the interviews start, it’s all the other stuff. Communication skills. Empathy. Ability to describe technical stuff to a non-technical audience (this is critical right now in tech. Investors may or may not have a PhD in the subject, but you need to be able to explain what the company does in a succinct and accurate way without jargon). Team skills. All those hours you spent resenting the dumb kid you had to work with in your engineering lab? Your interviewer doesn’t want to hear that you can’t work with people you consider your inferior.
Etc. When the market is tight, all those relationships-building skills become critical!
I generally agree but at least at the top schools there is massive correlation between good GPA and skill match. Most coverted firms ask for GPA +/- SAT data in their apps and they even pre-define which list of schools to show in the school picklist. You neither want to be in the “Other” school nor in the GPA group that’s below the top category (most cases its 3.7+).
Once you clear these filters, then yes the softeer skills make a big difference assuming technical skills are comparable. I know of many firms both in tech and high finance that place significant emphasis on behaviorial interviewing. Success in the Google team match process is very much focused on your marketability but getting to that stage significantly depends on your school and hard skills although GPA is less important.
Similarly Citadel tech interviews are 45-min long but you get only 20-minutes for coding/problem solving and the rest of the time is focused on behavioral interrogation.
Soft skills are always important but particularly in CS hard skills are the biggest driver of employment outcomes. At the same time there are always situations where GPA is not the same as hard skills.
It may be hiring is slow on top end roles but insurance claims adjusters and manager trainees for luxury gas stations (Bucees, QT, etc) and engineers and whoever are hiring.
The job market is so much bigger than the small # of roles we talk about here.
No question.
But for small or regional companies, you often have to wait for the payroll data from the Fed to ascertain whether hiring is up or down. The 14 property hotel chain which operates in Maryland and Delaware isn’t getting covered by the WSJ when they have a layoff.
So I understand using large and often global companies as proxies for where the rest of the employment market may be heading.
Meta has a layoff- it’s international news. That hotel chain decides it doesn’t need another financial analyst this quarter, and that it can let its event management team go because the event business has been soft- how are you going to hear about it?
The post below reminded me of this thread. This is the exception rather than the rule, but there is still the potential for a strong salary.
There are many jobs that pay obscenely well that people may not think about or thumb their nose at.
Becoming a car salesman for a good organization and working your way up - can one day easily lead to a $500K-$1 million + salary assuming the current payplans hold.
Some car sales man make $50K - some $300K.
There’s fleet people in the commercial segment - big money, etc.
Retail in grocery store and luxury gas stations.
Lots of Publix millionaires out there.
There are paths - but people need to open their minds.
Just like you showed here - a paramedic making bank - although likely a ton of extra hours.
Would love to know what the specifics of that are. D19 looked into it a while ago and average paramedic salaries were somewhere in the $50k’s with as I recall top earners around $75k. Even with substantial overtime it’s hard to see $350k; and his base salary was way higher than what is supposed to be a top salary too. Seniority? Or what?
It usually involves a ton of overtime to get that high.
