Technology

0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.

This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.

I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.

The one and only time I took compsci at a junior college just taught the basics of Office

An unfortunate but completely predictable result of the debt manufacturing industry. Widespread and getting worse.

In case anyone is not aware:

Are you currently employed?

Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?

If the answer to both of those questions is 'no', then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!

You just aren't in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.

So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them...

( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )

... and you just give up?

You are not 'unemployed'.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed

You are likely a 'discouraged worker', who is also 'not in the labor force'.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged

.........

Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and... you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?

Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely 'underemployed'.

But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs... you may also be 'overemployed'.

.........

But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.

In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers... did not make a living wage.

https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf

(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn't.)

You've also got measures like LISEP...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2025/05/27/stunning-unemployment-survey-says-millions-functionally-unemployed/

Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are 'functionally unemployed', by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.

Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.

So basically this is a way to try to measure 'doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job'.

https://www.lisep.org/tru

.........

A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of 'did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?' would be 'are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?'

Something like that.

It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.

• sincerely, a not unemployed but technically 'out of the the labor force' econometrician.

If businesses continue believing they can vibe code some intern into success while drop kicking talent to the curb to save a buck, those CS unemployment numbers will fall off like a lemming!

Yep. Been saying it for years because I was laid off over and over. Do not enter computer science.

Become an welder, electrician, etc. ANYTHING but a computer scientist

To the quote in the summary - might be because debugging dozens of layers of bullshit is hard. Anyway, debugging is about sitting for hours and reading logs and looking for weirdness, and looking at dumps, and what not. It's a very different skill from "being the next Zuckerberg". Also Zuckerberg is a psychologist most of all, his computing knowledge is not that unique. Network effect is more important than skill and knowledge here.

The fairness meter at the bottom of the article is absurd. “Unfair left leaning” like yes, how dare the libtards use statistics to show how broken our economy is

Hearing advice on how to get into software dev made me I realise really don't have enough passion for it. And given that its hyper competitive historically speaking, decided to move the adjacent job (that being a data analyst). Enjoying it so far. Now I just use my programming skills to just make cute little projects on my laptop, and of course a little bit for the data analyst stuff but.

Give it a minute. Pretty soon, they're going to need a lot of people to fix all the vibe-code that's currently being spewed out by AI. That'll be a monumental task.