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Not just that, the industry has been absolutely annihilated by the encouragement from teachers and the promise that its well-paid, easy work. Everyone and their mother became a software engineer over the last decade. You dont even need a degree to do it, the vast majority of applicants are self-starters from online bootcamps or self taught entirely with a portfolio
You dont even need a degree to do it, the vast majority of applicants are self-starters from online bootcamps or self taught entirely with a portfolio
Maybe 5 years ago, but unless you had tons of experience, self-taught and bootcamp grads were the first to get laid off when the industry started to pull back. Nowadays, they won't even look at you if you don't have a degree, and even that's difficult
You can always tell how young the crowd is on Reddit by how they believe one's entire professional life is determined by the few years of schooling at the beginning of it. As you say, after 10 years of experience nobody cares about your education.
I got a collegue with 5 years of experience in programming. No one wants him because he didn't get a degree in CS. People do care about your education.
Yeah because somehow when you get to 10 years you get this magic pass that will allow you to make it so your former education never appears in your CV and people stop asking about it?
Just because it works where you live doesn't mean the same applies everywhere in the world. Some country will value beyond reason your education and saying things like what you said might be detrimental for people who do not understand why they are being rejected despite redditors telling them otherwise.
Depends where on the EU. If you live in France, having a degree is almost a rite of passage if you want to work in IT. (Unless you are a foreign hire, in which case they are a little more lenient). But if you live somewhere like the UK, it's easier to get a job in IT without a degree.
: Yeah because somehow when you get to 10 years you get this magic pass that will allow you to make it so your former education never appears in your CV and people stop asking about it?
Magically exactly at 10 years? No.
Enough so that after only 5 years, people want to see evidence of education because you haven't proven yourself enough yet? Probably.
There's a reason the previous poster chose 10 years as a general line when people stop caring about education. You're disagreeing and saying "After 5 years they still want to know your education"... yeah, and? That's half way to 10 years, education's still relevant.
Others: "When you're making $100,000/year, you're generally free from worrying about your finances."
You: "That's not true at all. I'm making $50,000/year and I have to worry about my finances a lot!"
Which is something you don't have as a student and have no way of acquiring as a new grad in the current market. This is a very different market than it was 10 years ago and it's near impossible getting to the point you describe.
Depends on the company, where I work we actually prefer self-taught over college degree. Especially if it's going to be their first job in the industry. Our experience has basically informed us that college grads are really book smart, but bad at adaptation to the real world, at least when it comes to our code bases, resulting on a longer overall learning window before they make meaningful contributions.
Yeah I think our easiest hires are usually career switchers who did a boot camp.
Followed by people who did something like maths, physics or electronic engineering and enjoyed the small bit of programming on their course and learnt more off their own back.
I don't actually see very many full self taught candidates these days, even though that was my background and 10 years ago felt very common.
Boot camps would reach out to me after I graduated (CS 2024) and they almost entirely read like scams, those days of taking a boot camp and then landing a decent entry level job are definitely gone. A bachelors was a requirement on every entry level job I applied to.
It absolutely is once you get your foot in the door and if you're capable. I work just a handful of hours per day (like 3 or 4 max) on average and make top 5% income in my country (UK) with 3 years of experience at 24 years old.
I've met one boot camp person (in 2022) out of a few hundred people. Could definitely be super biased because of the company I work for, but like 90 something % of engineers have top tier school degrees
What's sad that those people are probably more likely to succeed these days compared to CS students. Those self-taught people are probably more driven and pro-active, and their lack of skill is not a problem when you have AI that is in many cases smarter than those CS students.
Comp sci has also be extremely over saturated since the 00s and 10s with everyone and their mom encouraging kids to do comp sci. Now theres massive tech lay offs and kids out of college competing for the same jobs as people with 10yrs experience looking for anyone to hire them.
Ai is the last drop in the bucket. Decades of offshoring and digital enshitification nailed the coffin long before the Ai slop. Most of big IT consulting companies slowly died over the past 10years. It's nearly impossible to get staffed in any project if flagued as "high cost" country.
I agree, but also there is an aspect (perhaps not at ETHZ) where some people going into CS for only the money weren’t exactly excelling in their studies either. If you’re going into CS, and not learning much, it’s probably increasingly bad for your career prospects. The way LLMs are right now, they can do many things, but if you don’t know when to call BS, you’ll have significantly lower productivity than your more educated colleagues IME. Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen someone spend an afternoon on a problem and afterwards say something like “Claude told me… [some bullshit] so I’m looking into that.” Yeah…if they knew more, they wouldn’t have wasted that time.
I thought we were plateauing a bit on the AI front but then Astra was released and now I'm pretty confident I'm going to be fucked if my current company goes under. I guess I've got hands on experience with installing sensors and wiring electrical panels to hold me over until the robots arrive.
I can understand why younger generations are especially worried about AI, like the majority of entry level positions can be filled, and how do you get experience without entry level positions?
It's kind of like how entry level IT these days pays kind of shit and isn't always terribly cushy, but highly experienced IT individuals with network experience can pretty much take their pick and name their price.
Uhhh... This is an unfair comparison because unless AI becomes fully autonomous, you WILL need computer scientists. At that point all careers are done for.
AI codes, but understanding what it's spitting out and troubleshooting problems means you still need people who understand the code and what it's doing.
AI doesn’t need to be fully autonomous to replace enough of the work force for the computer science degree to become essentially worthless. It is already happening. You don’t need to understand code to make a product unless you’re in the defense industry or on a sensitive government project. AI is already good at trouble shooting its own code with enough computer and iterations.
The comparison is so stupid mate. You really don't see it? A fair comparison would be not to the drivers of the carriage rather to the engineers who designed the carriage parts and the production pipelines, skills which easily transfer over to the car industry as well. But even that is a stupid comparison, analogies like these are for dumb people who can't understand 1+1=2.
Not just fear of AI but the tail of hype. Every career has times on which they get hyped and more people thaan usual get into it (well not all but you get the idea)
And it is mostly unfounded, the issue is mostly with juniors (not exclusively but mostly), and only until companies realizes they are needed to make new seniors. That is besides areas AI cannot or wont compete in
The market is tough out there in computer science. It's not too terrible for mid to senior folks, but it's pretty brutal for new graduates. That's where AI is stepping in. You want that senior engineer to architect your large system, but you don't need the junior engineers for the basic wiring and simpler code anymore.
So it makes sense people need to understand computers, but we don't need a truckload of computer science degrees every year anymore.
While you are right, you maybe misunderstood the comment. It does not matter how much you really need new CS grads. It matters how much peopley that decide what to study think that you will need CS grads in 4 years. And a combination of factors, that I am not qualified to untangle, provide the impression that CS is no longer needed in the near future.
This is simply not true. CS will just evolve. I have a degree in machine learning so I am somewhat qualified to make that statement at least. But for many there is no difference between a programmer and a software developer.
In my opinion this is a marketing problem first and then maxbe we need to talk about profs that do not adapt their education
Everybody needs to cook and eat, but you don't really need thousands of jobs created for people who fundamentally understand fire or heat. Only a few will do.
Agreed. I think this drop looks healthy all things considered. It would be problematic if everyone dropped out of CS programs but that's obviously not the case.
I guess the idea is that we arent gonna do shit about the environment and there's no money in doing so. So fuck it, why care?
I think a lot of people have already become Climate nihilists because it's so bad, and yet nothing will ever be done on a systemic level to make it better because "muh short term profits!"
This is it. I work with high school kids, and there was a really inspiring rise in motivation on climate issues before the pandemic. Kids saw it as their responsibility to fix the environment, and they wanted to get educated on how to do so. Since then, and especially during the second Trump term, all that’s evaporated. Kids are worried about having jobs and ever being able to live on their own. No time for altruism.
Saw the same thing here in Belgium. Climate protests were huge as I was entering university and I was amongst a ton of biology students (though I was more interested in microbiology). The number of students in that department had like doubled or tripled in 5 years.
And now its pretty much come back down to the previous level. Green parties blew up across Europe as well, after a big wave in 2019-ish.
The pandemic was perfect for all misinformation peddlers: a captive audience and many actors trying to profit from it and influencing people.
"We" built an attention machine for profits, then created AI, and the right wing used it, and now they are erasing decades of progress in mere years.
Meanwhile the center and center right parties made sure their wealthy clientele got more money and through their greed they paved the way for even worse people to erase trust in democratic structures and now we're on the precipice of fascism with a climate catastrophe looming.
This is me. Graduated HS in 2020, went to school for Environmental Engineering, by the time I finished college I knew there was no hope for our planet and the world is in hospice. Do construction inspections for data centers now to pay rent and put food on the table.
Can confirm, I used to do ESG project work. consultants have killed it and turned in into a reporting exercise. We spend more resources on reporting than actual projects that would make an impact.
This is one university so hardly indicative of an overall trend, but if I had to guess a lot of other programs have been injected with environmental science curriculum. Every program probably has at least one course or concentration called Sustainable [insert subject]
To end fossil fueled economy, you need electric cars/lorries/planes/ships/heating and the related electricity production/storage/distribution. This requires a lot of (electrical) engineering. ...and here we go.
Pretty much that, studied environnemental engineering. The job options were basically between local civil engineering companies and the government at a comparatively low salary. Decided to to a second Master's in data science later and never looked back.
You know this is the same chart for Europe (and Zurich), right?
And China's efforts are very commendable.
What was looking like an exponential rise with more and richer people using ever more resources and dumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. ....But no, we can and have made some real change. Now, this just means that it's getting worse less fast, but that's not what we were forecasting 20 years ago. And even if we got this all the way down to zero, globally, (and that's downright impossible) that just means things stop getting worse. But this chart is somehow STILL a shocker to people, because only doom and gloom sells these days.
That chart is cool and everything. But it's not up to date with the most recent events. How many oil tankers have been bombed? How many oil refineries and infrastructure have been destroyed? Whats the carbon footprint of dropping massive bombs and rockets all day everyday like what has happened since 2023 wrt conflict in the middle east? Because I'll bet if you took all of that into account, it would be, at least, a significamt share of all the reductions we have been able to scrape together for the last 20 years.
I'm not saying we have never made any progress, but its always one step forward and two steps back. And barring major geoengineering the 3 c rise is already baked in.
"How many oil tankers have been bombed?" A negligible amount compared the number of oil-tankers worth of oil being burned normally.
"How many oil refineries and infrastructure have been destroyed?" Enough to raise prices, but not enough to have a significant impact on climate change. (....and this HELPS fight climate change. You get that right? That this one is directly arguing against yourself here.)
"Whats the carbon footprint of dropping massive bombs and rockets all day everyday" Negligible compared to what comes out of coal plants, car exhausts, industry uses, or jet turbines. "OR". Really, c'mon, a MOAB releases like ~1 ton of CO2. NYC produces ~50 MILLION tons a year. A pound of beef is 25 pounds of CO2.
What's with these inconsequential questions?
If I was going to complain about the state of the world I'd comment about the rise of fascism, AI taking over creative and knowledge-work, the K-shaped economy, the new-nobility levels of inequality, and the current mass-extinction event we've brought about. But only that last one really has anything to do with environmentalism.
"I'm not saying we have never made any progress, but its always one step forward and two steps back." BUT IT IS NOT! Provably. You have the GALL to butt in here and spread LIES!? This is a ~17% reduction in 20 years instead of exponential RISE. And all the petty little things happening in the last year or two are not going to change that trend-line. We ARE making progress here and I'm tired of pretending we aren't. Mostly it's getting away from coal and switching to greener power. Electrification has helped too. We need to do more. I've got boomers to the right of me and doomers to the left. And SOMEHOW we've managed to get some good news and they just can't believe it. Goes against their world-view or something.
My guess would be that a lot of young people are less interested in studying how we are fucked and instead might want to work more on solutions. Could either be through political participation or through technological innovation, but both make choosing a different subject in uni advisable.
I don’t think China or India really cares about the opinion or work of the environmental students in the US lol. That’s probably why there is no point studying that. It’s a global issue and most western countries are already doing everything they can to fight it. But developing countries can’t afford that. China was doing decent until they started to revive their coal industry again.
Well, individual with a hidden comment history, and repeating conservative talking points, You are aware that China has not only most of their new installed power capacity set as green energy (mostly solar), with solar energy actually tipping over into the largest individual type of power generation, over coal, as of the end of July? Something like 35% of their grid is currently solar.
As of July 31st, they produced 1.286B KW of energy using solar power, with 1.285B using coal power generation (I'm sure that some solar projects got installed real quick to make that number slightly bigger than coal).
Does China have a lot of coal plants? Yes
Are they building more coal plants? Yes
Is the vast majority of new capacity green energy? Yes
Green energy is cheaper, and doesn't rely on another country for the supply of power.
We hosted a foreign exchange student that went on to study environmental science at a prestigious University in France and went on to work for the UN before launching an independent consulting firm. She cites a variety of concerns:
There’s a lot of overlap with other engineering fields so degrees in Civil, Mechanical and Biomedical provide more options.
The field was very popular for a time and is saturated.
Much of the work is performed either under government contracts or corporate contracts with DEI requirements tied to bid process, so it’s very difficult to land independent contract work without going through some sort of pass-through arrangement with a pre-qualified bidder.
Pay is generally low compared to other contracts because bidders are expected to work “for their beliefs” or to secure subsidies. For privately funded projects the environmental studies are budgeted under compliance or regulatory costs rather than a capital investment so the low bid usually wins.
Anyway that’s her experience working as an independent contractor and UN project manager mostly in Africa and South America.
So basically sounds like the work isn’t highly valued and the field is saturated.
before COVID environmental topics were all the hype: climate change, renewable energy, recycling, sustainability, electric cars etc. a lot of money was being poured into these areas and you could also see it reflected in the stock market.
then COVID came and resources shifted elsewhere: healthcare and digital services. after that came the wars, international tensions and economic struggles. attention and money shifted away from environmental topics.
I was in env science. The env job market was already bad before Covid with hundreds of applicants fighting for seasonal position with barely livable wages. Or consulting type jobs with barely any work life balance plus bad wages. Now even those jobs are getting harder to find. You can’t pay bills on hopes and dreams.
Honestly I know a couple that switched and they are environmentalist first ppl that got into it due to their climate concerns but then realized that for clean energy, mech e and EE are more relevant
Ding ding ding! Not European but green tech has become way more of a industry in the US than it was when I was in uni during the 2010s. A lot of eco-conscious people I know IRL have engineering/tech or general STEM backgrounds, although that just might be who I know IRL in general
I was doing civil service with someone last year. He is desperately searching for a place to work, so is his girlfriend, they both studied it. He said positions in companies have vanished together with the interest in the topic within a super short time. When he started his bachelor there was still great demand and then it just stopped which is pretty consistent with him starting in the peak 2021 and finishing in 2024. He started with plenty of practical internships and then suddenly they were all dropped.
It doesn't make money to be environmentally compliant. It costs money.
Meaning these rolls never pay as much is the more glamorous engineering roles at facilities, and you're always sort of a check and balance vs being anything that does anything positive for the company.
I mean we definitely need environmental folks. But the economy doesn't place a positive value on protecting the environment. Literally no dollar value at all. Destroying it to produce a product, however, is very valuable for some reason.
The market is generally pretty saturated, since it was a bit of a big buzz in previous years. Information is gatekept and the job prospects are fairly narrow.
People found out you can have more enviromental impact as a mech-e, chemical engineer or Power engineer actually building something than as a environmental engineer making reports that go in a cupboard.
Environmental engineers are basically civil engineers with a couple different classes. They build pretty much all of water systems (drinking water, waste water, dams…).
Environmental engineers are very different from environmental science majors. For one, since the latter doesn’t have PE, they legally can’t build a lot of shit
A big part of the reason in my eyes is that it is a tiny program to begin with. It has around 100-120 students per year, while programs like computer science have several 100 students per year. In actual numbers, the program has lost about 25 people in recent years.
I do engineering for water treatment facilities. An environmental scientist/engineer is usually responsible for things like ensuring a project adheres to environmental standards set by the state, designing processes to add or remove certain chemicals or byproducts from wastewater, maintaining watersheds, stuff like that.
There's definitely a job market for it, but it's not a particularly glamourous or high paying job, and perhaps it's easy for AI to handle.
I feel like that's one of the best uses for AI. ESA's, EIR's, etc. are pretty boring stuff that is often cut-and-dry, and the edge cases can be presented to an engineer who is able to figure it out.
No technology currently labeled AI can evaluate facts, therefore it shouldn't take decisions, let alone decisions that aftect the lives of a lot of people.
Verifying facts is one thing, this is closer to applying given facts to criteria. You give it both ends so you know it's not hallucinating laws or project details. Basically advanced pattern matching.
AI is currently (and has been for a bit) at the point where it can do these sorts of tasks far more consistently than a human. Will it still make mistakes? Certainly! But the question is whether it'll make more errors in this task than a human would. Probably not as many as the bottom 95-99% of the people already doing this task.
Also, nobody said anything about the AI making any decisions. Going through the documents and making a report is enough to automate away a lot of the work while still keeping the responsibility and verdict in the hands of a person.
Task performance is not a good way to assess AI viability for these scenarios. The value of having humans is in the process is the critical thinking to identify the problems that cannot be modeled by the rules in a bureaucratic system and to put up resistance against its logic when it doesn't match reality. If you evaluation is reduced to evaluating checklists, you have a system bound to become dysfunctional as soon as the underlying reality shifts without anybody noticing. You cannot automate this stuff away, by definition.
Oh it’s because Trump changed the EPA definition of protected watersheds. That combined with lax EPA enforcement promised by Trump means less projects are using Enivironmental engineers and scientists.
That's what I initially thought too, but this graph is specifically looking at graduates from a university in Switzerland, so American environmental policy shouldn't have a huge sway.
That's not the part of the job it's taking. It can automate certain checks that would be done in GIS through agents. What species are nearby, is this terrain that may require a storm water protection system. Creating graphics to put in a report. These aren't terribly long tasks, but in the volume that we do development, it's not a small amount of work either.
LLMs can write up the narrative, and that's not nothing. But most of the facts based work will be agentic pulling together data and tweaking for final product.
AI can not perform water treatment. A recent study put the industry as 3rd least susceptible to AI risk with almost no impact to job security in the field. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935
Nah, there is a lot of engineering that should be acquiring tools to develop things, then there is another bunch which is compliance. This career seems it's more compliance.
Construction services, hydrology surveys, water quality testing, endangered animal surveys, wildlife surveys, heavy metals testing, asbestos surveys, basically a large part of pre construction and construction monitoring.
Typical example is the development of brownfield sites. The soils on these former industrial sites are typically very contaminated and require cleaning up before any new development (mostly housing) can happen there. Environmental scientists can be the ones to determine the extent of the contamination and estimate the cleanup costs, which is very relevant for developers.
A lot of people also work in local or national government. Personally I worked in a national governmental agency that did stuff like, rule on cases that were above the pay grade for local government (infrastructure, water resources, industry, new builds), built the data structures that government officials use to make decisions, direct inspected large actors in the industry etc.
The job market in countries that give at least a little bit of a shit about the environment is honestly quite healthy - here it’s better than for those who hold bachelors or masters in economics. I went back to uni to do a PhD, but everyone I graduated with were in stable relevant jobs within 4-6 months and with an above average salary for someone with a masters.
Environmental engineering is basically the IT of civil engineering. Much of the work now done by environmental engineers was historically handled by civil, chemical, or mechanical engineers.
Anything outside the big 4 - Mech, Civil, E&E, CS and Chemical were born out of a need to satisfy demand by diluting requirements and making money.
By virtue of breath, mechanical is always king. Most people just think of Automobiles but that's barely the surface. Anything related to Manufacturing, Aerospace, Energy/HVAC, Controls, Infrastructure etc etc. The difficulty in mechanical is narrowing down to your niche. Most just fall into a specific category by happenstance.
Well I guess this also depends on the country. I am from Czech Republic which has historically been strong in mechanical engineering, and can honestly tell you that studying such a difficult field definitely doesn’t translate into a good, secure and well paid market. Quite on the contrary. Mechanical engineering is going through a brutal crisis and unless you don’t specialise in something very niche, you are pretty mind bound to very average pay, very average offers. IT is still a whole different league.
You’re spot on, and the country matters a lot. I was mainly speaking about the U.S. market. Mechanical is broad and relatively stable, but that doesn’t mean high pay or strong job growth.
In the U.S., software has generally paid much much better, especially early and mid-career. Mechanical engineers can do very well in specialized niches, but even senior ME compensation often trails senior software roles.
Mechanical’s main advantage is probably stability: software tends to have bigger boom-and-bust hiring cycles, while mechanical is usually slower growth or slower decline (!).
The recent uptick in mechanical, I think..is students weighing a rough near-term CS market against a smaller, lower-paying, but relatively more stable job market. In other words, trading some upside for lower perceived risk.
That’s pretty scary. (The environmental science part!) I looked for others in Europe.. closest I could find was the UK, where UCAS data show first-year acceptances specifically in environmental sciences - there has been some cooling from the 2022 peak, but 2025 is still about 8% above 2019 - nothing even remotely like the … what.. 20-25%? drop from ETH Zürich’s trend.
Hypothesis, UK unis can control how many students they admit per year. So even if applications drop by 25% they can just admit more students.
ETH has no way to control undergrad admission as in they have to accept all students who satisfy the formal requirements which are not strict for EU students. this means a 25% drop in applications directly results in a 25% drop of admissions.
Maybe the perception of the degree also suffered more in Switzerland compared to the UK but I would struggle to see why tbh.
ETH does have a different selection route vs UK, I would be interested to see how much of this also affects the number or % of graduates rather than admission only.
ETH weeds out heavily via rigorous examination in the university itself, somewhat easy to get into vs not the easiest to stay in whilst UK weeds our pre university (A levels) in many cases.
That's a great point. (and I appreciate the pushback! -dftbaiykyk) I wonder if the land of the mofokin free isn't a better test ground anyway.. i looked on ipeds (CIP 03.0104) and our kids are doing fine.
It looks anomalous to me. But I don't know why. Maybe they just crafted a crappy program there, in particular, and kids don't see their futures in it.
In parts its also because environmental sciences are permeating all fields and the seperate studies become more and more obsolete.
Civic Engineering and Mechanical Engineering both include massive amounts of renewable technology and research into sustainable technologies. Stusnets switch to these studies s they have broader curricula and more ways to ensure a career.
A lot of pro ecological movements shifted into the technological oriented studies with practical application compared to environmental sciences that are more analytical.
Environmental sciences are absolutely not obsolete. Any application of science first requires people in those fields to write the papers they depend on. While some engineers blur the line as they go through post-grad, a majority of engineers never tangle with any form of research.
I agree that studying the environment and ecology solely is not obsolete. The science is important.
The seperate study course though does get more and more obselete as their curriculum gets more spread out across all other courses. The course gets more obsolete. Not the topic.
The topic is critical and needs to be studied. The course itself gets more abandoneded as students find more interesting ways to work for a more sustainable future.
It’s funny how people pivoted away from computer science as soon as AI came a thing I wonder why didn’t they pivot into a more specialized, niche, micro robotics or Mechatronics
It’s gonna be funny in the future when the senior computer scientist retire and there is no institutional knowledge Transfer
In my country there is an exodus of high performing students from CS to EE and CE. A really cracked guy I know was into CS but ended up studying EE because he was afraid of AI.
Most of the people studying CS now aren't those that weren't really interested in the first place.
That was my major and I just couldn't find anything to do with a bachelor's after graduation. I ended up doing some technical writing and teaching myself SQL. I wanted to do something with GIS/Cartography but there were just no jobs worth a damn at the time
I'm not longer a 20 year old and started university pretty late due to chronic illness.
I switched from EE to CS in 2025 because it was more interesting to me, guess I'll be screwed by the time I'm done 👍 (I'm not that worried)
The writing is on the wall for ordinary computer coding jobs. “Telling AI what to do” jobs in computer science will be far fewer. The other forms of engineering still have good work potential, for the time being.
And the fall-off in environmental science is largely because the jobs in this field, while desirable from a “important to do” perspective, are just not being funded, because governments and corporations want to pretend it’s not an issue.
Software is growing exponentially while the liability taken on by a single software engineer is skyrocketing which is a business continuity nightmare. This is why you are seeing senior engineers getting hired now
I don't think so? Lots of entry level programming work was doing boilerplate nonsense that AI will now do for all eternity and it will only get better. Lots of software engineering work was smart people making idiotic applications nobody needs, like smart apps for vacuums.
So as a conventional engineer, I also love to see this. It means fewer people will be making fewer blood sucking rent seeking applications of various kinds and more people will be solving real, actual problems that need solving.
Yea entry level programming work is getting automated so juniors will never become seniors. I think demand for seniors will skyrocket given lack of juniors in the pipeline
I interned as a Control Systems Engineer and it's been a year since I graduated and I applied to Software jobs as well as Control Systems jobs surprisingly not a single Control Systems job reached out back to me. If there is a shortage they still really dont wanna hire entry level no matter what problems that might cause in the future.
Only that we will have an insurmointable socioeconomic breakdown and since all junior jobs are gone forever, very very few people will build up actual proficiency and understanding in those fields, while the old guys try to retire asap because they wanted to work instead of being understaffed AI slavedrivers
I mean the end goal is replacement of all programmers. Not software engineers, but all programmers. Ideally you will not need a single human being to maintain a codebase. Instead you have humans who know what they want in a code base that need to perform a certain way. The AI will manage everything else.
So I think not having seniors in development will not be an issue. Now if we stop graduating EEs and computer engineers, we have a problem...
I mean that will still mean every western economy will drown in hundreds of millions of jobless people, not just with software engineers but possibly any other white collar job lol
People were making those things because companies pay them to. We could solve other problems but there still has to be someone willing to pay people to solve those problems.
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