Too Many Techies are Applying for Jobs that Don’t Exist

The tech world is buzzing with the idea that one doesn’t need a college degree in computer science to land a job. While it’s true that tools like Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT have lowered the barriers to entry for calling oneself a “developer,” the reality is more nuanced.

Securing a job still requires a level of expertise and experience that only seasoned developers possess. So, while anyone can claim the title, the path to meaningful employment remains accessible primarily to those who have honed their skills through education and practice.

The job market is really skewed right now with a lot of applicants and very few available jobs. Most of the techies and graduates are looking for software engineering jobs and the applications for a single job have increased multiple times, and graduates are not able to land good enough jobs. The advent of AI tools are allowing skilled developers to leverage them, and possibly do the job of 10 developers all by themselves. 

This has been the case for a few months, or even the last year. Recently, a 25 year old graduate shared their grief on Reddit that they were not able to land a decent enough job and had to settle for a generic SDE role at a small company. 

“It’s a very tough market right now, especially for juniors. A degree, leet code skills, and the ability to discuss a past project in depth are huge plusses right now,” said Matt Harrison, Python and Data AI Trainer, in a LinkedIn post.

Many of the coding and engineering bootcamps are not able to help candidates land jobs and equip them with the necessary skills. Many of the graduates are pursuing fancy engineering courses which are not helping them land jobs as the employers are not looking for them.

One of the reasons for that is that Indian universities are not able to equip students with the necessary skills required for the job market. In an earlier discussion, several students from universities pointed out that their professors do not have any understanding of programming, and thus are also not able to keep up with the latest requirements of the industry. 

Speaking with AIM, Amit Sheth, the chair and founding director of the AIISC and Professor V Ramgopal Rao, BITS Pilani Campuses group vice-chancellor, had earlier said that there needs to be more industry and academia collaborations to make the graduates ready for the market. 

But guess who is getting a call back for the job when 100 people compete for a job?

It’s those with years of experience, relevant skills for the job, and most importantly, and the bare minimum is a college degree in computer science. While talking about the trend of putting down college degrees, Santiago Valdarrama, said, “Zero interest rates confused people into thinking that owning a computer was the only ‘skill’ needed to get a high-paying job,” highlighting how important it is to actually get a degree in CS to land a job. 

AIM had earlier said that an entire generation is studying for jobs that won’t exist because of automation tools coming up in the market, a lot of which is now turning out to be true. Though there are still jobs for 10x developers, there are not enough jobs left for all the other developers.

India Taking a Big Brunt

When it comes to the Indian IT industry, instead of hiring freshers, all of them are manically upskilling their existing workforce with generative AI. Most recently, Accenture has partnered with NVIDIA to train 30,000 professionals with generative AI. 

Though all of this sounds like a noble cause, the quality of this upskilling is still questionable as it is mostly about clicking “next” on a number of PowerPoint slides, as it was revealed earlier by an engineer working in one of these IT firms.

This case is even more evident in India with a record number of STEM graduates coming out of college which are not adequately trained with even decent enough skills for getting a low-paying job in any of the Indian ITs as well. To give an example, one of the most prestigious universities of the country, IIT Bombay left around 8,000 plus students without jobs. 

The reason in many of these cases was the graduates were demanding 3x packages looking at salaries in the West, that the employers in India were hesitant to offer. This sounds similar to the news a few months back about TCS being unable to fill 80,000 job openings as the freshers demanded high salary, but came with sub-par technical skills. 

This is also because colleges are not able to train the students with the relevant skills for fighting in the job market. Admittedly, it is also the fault of the techies for not upskilling themselves well enough to land jobs, which needs to be faster than any other profession in history. 

The criteria for being an eligible software engineer has increased so much that a lot of current CS graduates are ineligible for the job market. In an interesting anecdote, Colleen Farrelly, chief mathematician at Post Urban, said that a lot of PhD graduates are getting into entry-level jobs and the technically experienced folks with degrees are finding it difficult to land these jobs. 

Hold On, What About More Jobs?

According to Open Doors data, for those heading into tech, approximately 50,000 to 65,000 people will soon be job hunting in the tech sector that’s cooling off with startups looking to maintain a leaner team with a focus on profitability, which was booming a few years back.

Despite global economic uncertainties, the Indian IT sector is projected to see an 8-10% increase in hiring in 2024, with a strong focus on roles in AI, ML, cybersecurity, and full-stack development.

In 2025, India will churn out approximately 88,500 MS graduates. Many of these students (41%) specialise in computer science and maths, and another 27% are in engineering fields. That’s the highest percentage of CS majors for any country. 

Infosys also recently made headlines for finally issuing offer letters to 1,000 engineering graduates after two years’ wait. Other IT giants like Wipro and TCS have also delayed the onboarding of around 10,000 freshers. 

It is extremely important to clear the air that developers won’t become redundant in the next five years because of generative AI tools. Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras, has already predicted that there would be 10 million more coding jobs in the future for developers that would require coding skills in Python, C, and other programming languages, not just prompting. 

That is why existing developers should focus on developing engineering skills to land a job in this difficult market.