CHANGE: “Learn to Code” Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment.
It looks like the “learn to code” push is backfiring spectacularly for those who bought in.
As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired.
In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless. Comparatively, the New York Fed found, per 2023 Census data and employment statistics, that recent grads overall have only a 5.8 percent unemployment rate.
While folks who majored in fields like anthropology and physics fared even worse, with unemployment rates of 9.4 and 7.8 percent respectively, computer engineering had the third-highest rate of unemployment on the New York Fed’s rankings, while computer science had the seventh — a precipitous fall from grace for a major once considered an iron-clad ticket to high earnings and job security.
(Those numbers, notably, are worse even than the outcomes for journalism grads. Despite being accurately advised that their chosen field is dying, recent grads who majored in journalism are only experiencing unemployment at a rate of 4.4 percent, per the NYFR’s analysis.)
The first line of the above Newsweek article links to a 2019 New Republic article with the headline, “The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins of ‘Learn to Code.’ How an online swarm has developed a sophisticated mechanism to harass and gaslight journalists—and to get mainstream media outlets to join in.”
Yes, that “fetid right-wing origin” of paying attention to and quoting the things that leftist politicians and journalists were telling Americans. Or as Matt Vespa wrote in January of last year at Townhall: They Created This Term to Smear Average Americans. Now It’s Come Back to Haunt Them.
Liberal media outlets are starting to get pinched. While it’s sad when anyone gets fired, these folks were at the forefront of shaming those whose employment they determined was less-than, archaic, or not in keeping with the ways of the new world, whatever that means. In other words, if it required manual labor, the media, Democrats, and the coastal elite viewed it as a state of serfdom. Coal miners were a popular target. Whole communities that dot Appalachia were subjected to what some would call a regional genocide under the Obama presidency. His agenda took a hatchet to coal jobs, and most of these towns seldom recovered.
That’s when the “learn to code” smear was tossed into the mix by liberal reporters to coal miners and other workers who lost their livelihoods. The labor was viewed as inferior if it didn’t require a college education. Even worse, reporters mocked these newly unemployed workers, blaming them for being uneducated. The job retraining programs were a publicity stunt. Even labor unions knew this was a ruse. So, it was delicious revenge to see LA Times employees essentially saying that “learn to code” is heartless and unoriginal amid the layoffs. No, you don’t get to play that game. You created it. Now, sit there like good children, be wrong, and shut up. You lost your job—you don’t have a right to say anything.
And right around that time: Ex CNNer Chris Cillizza Community Noted AND Ratioed After Denying Biden Ever Said This.
Flashback: Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s #LearntoCode Purges. As Steve noted in 2019, “Dorsey claims that #LearnToCode is coded language for some kind of threat, when in fact it originated with asshole members of the press who somehow didn’t get purged when they used it against ordinary Americans who had lost their jobs to Obama’s anti-coal regulations.”
QED:
And Frank J. Fleming’s irony is going right over the heads of the many Twitter users who would love to use journalistic tools to destroy someone for having different political beliefs:
In January of 2023, Glenn warned: The Coming ‘Symbolic Analyst’ Meltdown.
And thus:
