The Outlook for Programmers

Summary

Although Sarah Olson is a senior at Massachusetts’ Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) working toward dual bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, she already has secured a job after graduation as a software engineer at Capital One Bank. Amid an environment of layoffs and shrinking IT jobs, Olson is one of the lucky ones.She credits her good fortune to an internship she had at the bank last summer, along with help from the non-profit organization Rewriting the Code, which supports women and underrepresented communities interested in the technology field and helps them find and succeed in computer science and engineering roles.Before Olson was offered the job, she said she had applied everywhere she could at companies with entry-level programs for computer science graduates.“I saw [a post] on LinkedIn for an internship program that had 200 spots and the application pool had 43,000 candidates. It’s absolutely nuts,’’ Olson recalled. She attributes this to the fact that computer science majors are also competing for software engineering jobs with people who minored in the discipline, increasing the competition even further.There are also fewer overall tech jobs. “I think there was a bit of over-hiring during COVID, for sure,’’ Olson said. “There was a lot of money put into tech at the time and now that’s been backed off and companies can’t afford to keep as many people at the level of pay they were receiving.”For people fresh out of college, “The notion going in was, you got a computer science degree, you were set. There was going to be a job waiting for you when you got out, and I think many people went into computer science for that reason,’’ Olson said.Today, that is not necessarily the case.The Changing Face of the Technology FieldHiring professionals and technology consultants say the landscape for IT jobs is undergoing a major shift, due in large part to over-hiring during the pandemic, but also because of intense interest in deploying AI to automa...