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Comment by kkylin | Hacker News Reader

Some relevant data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

Thanks, probably better than TFA. The under-employment numbers are always telling, anyone who talks about employment without mentioning this is running a scam. Sobering to see that only elementary ed and nursing are really doing ok, fields where we're always chronically short. And even while everyone's talking about demographic bombs and aging populations, nurse-adjacent med-tech is still sitting at 57.9%.

Even so, computer science is still among the fields with the lowest reported underemployment rate. It's essentially tied for second place, after nursing, with a much higher salary.

I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.

> I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.

Most of the stories you hear about difficulties getting hired are from new grads. Anecdotally, companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years, they only want to hire seniors that other companies have already trained. It would be interesting to see these per-major underemployment numbers filtered by whether someone had recently graduated.

> companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years

Might have something to do with the appalling employee retention numbers in today’s tech scene.

Why bother spending six months, and five figures, training someone, only to have them hop to another company in 18 months?

It's easier to keep employees when you adjust their compensation to remain at the market rate.

It’s more than just money, though. It’s just that companies are using that as their only variable, so the results are inevitable.

For some reason, companies would rather pay insane salaries, than treat employees well enough to encourage them to stay.

Well, these numbers _are_ from 2023. Things seem to have shifted (especially for the new grads) in the past 2 years...

(We'll know when new numbers come out of the feeling is correct?)

Huh, TIL that around 50% of college grads go on to get some Graduate degree. Much higher than I expected.

Would be interesting to break that out by industry.

Who knew, art history is more employable than finance.

You apparently didn't look at the underemployment and median early career wage data.

I'm guessing that many people with a art history degree do not work in art history...

Or perhaps its a vanity degree? Or its pursued by people with family wealth and good connections, the sort that an auction house or high-end gallery would want to hire.

Some more: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGMD25OM

Interesting how approximately 6-7% unemployment rate among new SWE graduates translates to such gloomy anecdotes going around in this post.

6-7% of 1+ million software engineers (according to BLS) is a lot of actual people.

Stats have ground truth underlying them. 6%-7% is less text than the big numbers popular for brevity. But it’s just mathematical euphemism for a real count.

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