The job of the future might already be past its prime. For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled.
未来的工作可能已经超过了它的主要原因。多年来，敦促寻求有利可图的职业的年轻人全力参与计算机科学。从2005年到2023年，美国的COMP-SCI专业人数三倍。
All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs. At Stanford, widely considered one of the country’s top programs, the number of comp-sci majors has stalled after years of blistering growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, the chair of Princeton’s computer-science department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduating comp-sci majors at Princeton is set to be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The number of Duke students enrolled in introductory computer-science courses has dropped about 20 percent over the past year.
所有这些都使最新的数字令人震惊。根据教授和系主席的访谈，今年的入学人数仅在全国范围内增长0.2％，在许多计划中，它似乎已经在下降。在斯坦福大学（Stanford）被广泛认为是该国最高计划之一的斯坦福大学（Stanford），随着多年的增长，Comp-SCI专业的数量已停滞不前。普林斯顿计算机科学系主任的主席Szymon Rusinkiewicz告诉我，如果当前的趋势保持，普林斯顿大学的Comp-SCI大满贯赛的同伙在两年内将比今天小25％。在过去的一年中，参加入门计算机科学课程的杜克大学学生人数下降了约20％。
But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren’t waiting to find out whether that’s true.
但是，如果下降令人惊讶，那么它的原因相当简单：年轻人正在对入门级编码人员的严峻工作前景做出回应。近年来，科技行业因裁员和招聘冻结而震惊。减速的主要罪魁祸首是技术本身。事实证明，作为计算机代码的作者，人工智能比作为单词的作者更有价值。这意味着它非常适合替换建造它的人的类型。皮尤（Pew）最近的一项研究发现，美国人认为软件工程师将受到生成AI的影响。许多年轻人没有等待找出这是否真的。
“It’s so counterintuitive,” Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies AI’s effect on the economy, told me. “This was supposed to be the job of the future. The way to stay ahead of technology was to go to college and get coding skills.” But the days of “Learn to code” might be coming to an end. If the numbers are any indication, we might have passed peak computer science.
“这是如此的违反直觉，”研究AI对经济影响的布鲁金斯机构研究员莫莉·金德（Molly Kinder）告诉我。“这本来应该是未来的工作。保持技术领先的方式是上大学并获得编码技能。”但是，“学习编码”的日子可能即将结束。如果数字有任何迹象，我们可能已经通过了峰值计算机科学。
Chris Gropp, a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has spent eight months searching for a job. He triple-majored in computer science, math, and computational science at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and has completed the coursework for a computer-science Ph.D. He would prefer to work instead of finishing his degree, but he has found it almost impossible to secure a job. He knows of only two people who recently pulled it off. One sent personalized cover letters for 40 different roles and set up meetings with people at the companies. The other submitted 600 applications. “We’re in an AI revolution, and I am a specialist in the kind of AI that we’re doing the revolution with, and I can’t find anything,” Gropp told me. “I found myself a month or two ago considering, Do I just take a break from this thing that I’ve been training for for most of my life and go be an apprentice electrician?”
田纳西大学诺克斯维尔大学的博士生克里斯·格罗普（Chris Gropp）花了八个月的时间来寻找工作。他在罗斯 - 霍尔曼技术学院的计算机科学，数学和计算科学领域进行了三重评估，并完成了计算机科学博士学位的课程。他宁愿工作而不是完成学位，但他发现几乎不可能找到工作。他只知道两个最近将其取消的人。一个人发送了个性化的求职信，涉及40个不同的角色，并与公司的人们开会。其他提交了600份申请。Gropp告诉我：“我们正在进行AI革命，我是我们正在进行革命的AI的专家，我找不到任何东西。”“我发现自己一个月前考虑了，我是否只是休息一下我一生中一直在训练的事情，然后成为学徒的电工？”
Gropp is contending with a weak job market for recent college graduates in general and the tech sector in particular. Although employment for 22-to-27-year-olds in other fields has grown slightly over the past three years, employment for computer-science and math jobs in that age group has fallen by 8 percent. Not long ago, graduates from top comp-sci programs—such as those at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon—would have been fending off recruiters from Google and Amazon. Now, professors at those schools told me, their graduates are having to try much harder to find work. Gropp’s dad, William Gropp, runs the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I can say, as the father of a computer-science master’s degree holder with expertise in machine learning who is still looking for a job, that the industry is not what it used to be,” he told me.
Gropp与最近的大学毕业生尤其是技术领域的工作市场竞争薄弱。尽管在过去三年中，在其他领域的22至27岁年轻人的就业人数略有增长，但该年龄段的计算机科学和数学工作就业却下降了8％。不久前，来自Comp-SCI课程的毕业生（例如Stanford，UC Berkeley和Carnegie Mellon的毕业生）将抵制Google和Amazon的招聘人员。现在，这些学校的教授告诉我，他们的毕业生不得不更加努力地寻找工作。Gropp的父亲William Gropp在Urbana-Champaign大学的伊利诺伊大学经营国家超级计算申请中心。他告诉我：“我可以说，作为计算机科学硕士学位持有者的父亲，具有机器学习方面的专业知识，谁仍在寻找工作，这不是过去的行业。”
In the ultimate irony, candidates like Gropp might be unable to get jobs working on AI because AI itself is taking the jobs. “We know AI is affecting jobs,” Rusinkiewicz, from Princeton, told me. “It’s making people more efficient at some or many aspects of their jobs, and therefore, perhaps companies feel they can get away with doing a bit less hiring.”
在最终的具有讽刺意味的是，像Gropp这样的候选人可能无法让AI上的工作工作，因为AI本身正在从事工作。“我们知道AI正在影响工作，”普林斯顿的Rusinkiewicz告诉我。“这使人们在工作的某些或多个方面都更加有效，因此，也许公司认为他们可以摆脱招聘少一些。”
Derek Thompson: Something alarming is happening to the job market
德里克·汤普森（Derek Thompson）：就业市场正在发生令人震惊的事情
The best evidence that artificial intelligence is displacing tech workers comes from the fact that the industry that has most thoroughly integrated AI is the one with such unusually high unemployment. Tech leaders have said publicly that they no longer need as many entry-level coders. Executives at Alphabet and Microsoft have said that AI writes or assists with writing upwards of 25 percent of their code. (Microsoft recently laid off 6,000 workers.) Anthropic’s chief product officer recently told The New York Times that senior engineers are giving work to the company’s chatbot instead of a low-level human employee. The company’s CEO has warned that AI could replace half of all entry-level workers in the next five years. Kinder, the Brookings fellow, said she worries that companies soon will simply eliminate the entire bottom rung of the career ladder. The plight of the tech grads, she told me, could be a warning for all entry-level white-collar workers.
最好的证据表明，人工智能是取代技术工作者的目的是，该行业最彻底地整合了AI的行业是失业率如此高的行业。科技领导者公开表示，他们不再需要那么多的入门级编码员。Alphabet和Microsoft的高管表示，AI写信或协助书写其代码的25％以上。（微软最近解雇了6,000名工人。）Anthropic的首席产品官最近告诉《纽约时报》，高级工程师正在向公司的聊天机器人而不是低级人类雇员提供工作。该公司的首席执行官警告说，AI可以在未来五年内取代所有入门级工人的一半。布鲁金斯研究员金德（Kinder）说，她担心公司很快就会消除整个职业阶梯的最底层。她告诉我，技术毕业生的困境可能是所有入门级白领工人的警告。
Not everyone agrees that AI is causing the turbulence in the job market. The tech industry frequently goes through booms and busts. The biggest companies exploded in size when the economy was good. Now, with high interest rates and the specter of new tariffs, executives are likely holding off on expanding, and workers are reluctant to leave their job, says Zack Mabel, director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Companies have an incentive to blame layoffs on AI instead of forces within their control, David Deming, an economics professor at Harvard, told me. “Before we see big changes from AI in the labor market, companies have to internalize this new capability and change what they ask for. And that’s the thing that I have not seen very much of,” he said. “It could be AI, but we just don’t know.”
并非所有人都同意AI在就业市场上引起动荡。科技行业经常经历繁荣和萧条。当经济良好时，最大的公司的规模爆炸。乔治敦大学教育和劳动力研究中心研究总监扎克·马贝尔（Zack Mabel）说，现在，随着高利率和新关税的幽灵，高管们可能会推迟扩大，而工人不愿离开工作。哈佛大学的经济学教授戴维·戴明（David Deming）告诉我，公司有动力将裁员归咎于AI而不是部队。他说：“在我们看到劳动力市场中AI的重大变化之前，公司必须内部化这种新的能力并改变他们的要求。这就是我没有看到太多的事情。”“可能是AI，但我们只是不知道。”
Enrollment in the computer-science major has historically fluctuated with the job market. When jobs are scarce, people choose to study something else. Eventually, there aren’t enough computer-science graduates, salaries go up, and more people are drawn in. Prior declines have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than where they started. (And some universities, such as the University of Chicago, still haven’t seen any enrollment drops.) Sam Madden, a computer-science professor at MIT, told me that even if companies are employing generative AI, that will likely create more demand for software engineers, not less.
在历史上，计算机科学专业的入学人数随就业市场而波动。当工作稀缺时，人们会选择学习其他东西。最终，没有足够的计算机科学毕业生，薪水上升，并吸引了更多的人。先前的下降始终反弹到高于他们开始的入学水平。（还有一些大学，例如芝加哥大学，仍然没有看到任何入学人数下降。）麻省理工学院的计算机科学教授Sam Madden告诉我，即使公司雇用了生成的AI，这也可能会对软件工程师产生更多的需求，而不是更少。
Read: Silicon Valley braces for chaos
阅读：混乱的硅谷牙套
Whether the past few years augur a temporary lull or an abrupt reordering of working life, economists suggest the same response for college students: Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. Deming’s research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. “It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds,” Deming told me. “You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.”
无论过去几年，经济学家都为大学生提出了相同的回应：专业的主题提供持久，可转移的技能。信不信由你，那可能是文科。Deming的研究表明，从长远来看，男性历史和社会科学专业的专业最终会超越其工程和Comp-SCI对应，因为他们发展了雇主一贯寻求的软技能。Deming告诉我：“去学校学习交易或特定技能实际上是很冒险的，因为您不知道未来的情况。”“您需要尝试考虑获取将要实现未来的技能，并持续45年的工作生活。”
Of course, when faced with enormous uncertainty, many young people take the opposite approach and pursue something with a sure path to immediate employment. The question of the day is how many of those paths AI will soon foreclose.
当然，当面对巨大的不确定性时，许多年轻人采取了相反的方法，并采取了肯定要立即就业的道路。当天的问题是，AI很快将取消抵押贷款。
