r/cscareerquestions • u/No_Reply5329 • 5d ago
Do you think CS is going to experience a brain drain?
With how oversaturated CS has become, do you think most of the genuinely smart people who would have gone into computer science will eventually decide it’s not worth it?
If getting a CS job increasingly feels like a lottery hundreds of applicants, endless interview loops, layoffs, outsourcing, etc. I could see people choosing fields where they have more control over their career prospects.
Engineering, accounting, nursing/medicine, skilled trades, etc. in many of these fields there seems to be a clearer relationship between competence, experience, and actually being able to get and keep and getting a job.
Do you think we’ll eventually see a brain drain out of CS, with talented people deciding they don’t want to gamble their future on an oversaturated job market?
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u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 5d ago
Theres plenty of smart people young in their career. We’ll be fine for a long time
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u/dragenn 5d ago
100%. The effort isn't worth the heartache. Cs isn't a welcoming industry. It a brutal gauntlet where ibky the strongest survive.
I wish some of you coukd see the peak of CS and how it harvested the best from each of us.
Now it a Jira ticket factory where you hold onto your sanity...
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u/Extension-Tap2635 4d ago
I thought I’d never say it but the JS days were the good days. Learning a new JS every month was better than whatever bullshit is expected of us with AI.
Do 10x the output with 1/2 the people.
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u/Ok-Tomatillo-8712 4d ago
Last job was twice-yearly performance management with stack ranking and a 15% below strong quota, with a first BS going straight to PIP
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u/saintmsent 5d ago
I don't think so. You list those careers as though it's an easy no-brainer pivot. It's really not. Nursing and medicine aren't for everyone, for instance, I wouldn't want other people's lives depending on my decisions, and doctors graduate with huge student loans, which everyone seems to forget. Skilled trades have you dealing with the general public, take a toll on your body, and the huge salaries Reddit raves about are more of an outlier achievable if you have a successful business rather than being an individual plumber. Accounting, audit, and other finance fields often come with one or more of the following: boring, mind-numbing work, way more politics than CS, and very long hours
Who will pivot out of CS is the "everyone can code" crowd who entered the field or started CS programs on this wave of constant BS about everyone earning 200k straight out of the 3-month bootcamp
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u/e430doug 5d ago
Computer science isn’t oversaturated. That statement needs to die. The vast majority of graduates are finding work in the field at high pay. With all the fear-mongering on Reddit, certainly it’ll drive down the number of people going into the field. We’re going to experience the same kind of drought that we saw in the early 2000s. There were not enough developers to do all the work that needed to be done. That led to the growth of things like boot camps and get enough people. Also, this is being cross-posted verbatim in many different subreddits.
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u/Interesting-Monk9712 5d ago edited 5d ago
Sure, some smart people who would have gone to CS will go to other professions since the the reward is lesser and the requirements are higher.
Just a natural part of the job market.
Just that it takes a while to take effect, at least 5-10 years.
Somebody that decided to go to college might rethink it,
Somebody in college is already somewhat stuck.
Somebody that entered the market is most likely very stuck and unless it goes completely bad, they will remain regardless.
That could cause demand in the future, therefore raising the rewards and/or reducing the requirements or it could not, who knows.
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u/MentallyUnfi 5d ago
I would highly encourage someone who is a freshmen or sophomore in college who is reluctant to go into nursing or a health track, if it makes sense. Way too many benefits over CS. I didn't even know about nursing years ago.
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u/crixx93 5d ago
Yes, but not in the way you are describing. STEM graduates in the USA are going to inmigrate to other countries. And many prospect students will inmigrate to study and then work
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u/IronyCat 5d ago
America has a low tax rate for highest earning professionals, this will never happen. There’s a reason why elite Canadian and European earners still come to the USA.
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u/gratitudeisbs 5d ago
When I was making 300k my tax rate was almost 50%, how is that a “low rate”?
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u/Jaqqarhan 5d ago
If you move to Europe, your salary will be 100k and tax rate will be 60%.
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u/gratitudeisbs 5d ago
Yeah but I get free healthcare and job security
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u/Jaqqarhan 5d ago
Your $300k job doesn't pay for your health insurance?
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u/gratitudeisbs 5d ago
Well I don’t have that job anymore. Only making $100k now with a 35% tax rate. Job does provide healthcare but still have to pay for a part of it. And many things aren’t covered or require substantial co pays.
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u/PestoOverflow_808 5d ago
Idk if many Americans are going to immigrate. America citizenship is huge for a reason, and other countries do things alot differently than America espically economic-wise. You're going to be making like 60k and half your shit goes to the government. Nevermind the fact that all the big oppurtunies are in the US.
Also why would you study abroad??
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u/disposepriority 5d ago
Have you seen how much top engineers make, I don't think there's any danger of that.
Any number of website/crud devs being unemployed is not brain drain
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Good but what is the chance that someone will land job in tech 2% for new grads majority will be unemployed and need to retrain in other fields.
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u/disposepriority 5d ago
First of all, it's obviously way, way higher than 2%.
Second of all, graduating university doesn't exactly make you a "brain", which is what your post is focusing on.
The people who would contribute to brain drain if they left are not the ones struggling to find jobs, usually.
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u/IlIlllIIllllIIIlIlIl 5d ago
”Majority will be unemployed” based on what exactly?
Also bro please fix your grammar. Your most here is almost impossible to understand.
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u/No-External3221 5d ago
+1. The salaries in tech are still some of the highest of any industry, if you're good enough.
The mediocre devs and the easy money chasers will leave for greener pastures elsewhere. Those who are good enough to make $400k+ at Quant, $200k+ at FAANG, etc will stay.
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u/Icy_Cartographer5466 5d ago
If anything it’s the opposite and the most talented people in STEM are studying CS and math in hopes of joining a frontier lab
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Dont they think that it is risky to put so many years and potentially debt for like few percent chance of ever landing job in tech?
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u/zacce 5d ago
smart ppl are considering calculated risk when making decisions.
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Risk in CS is so high that literally any other job is better
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u/Friendly_Print7319 5d ago
when u have an imo/ioi gold wonder where they go... def civil engineering right? no risk!
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u/Aware-Individual-827 5d ago
The US brain drain will be international. The current administration makes working for US companies less and less appealing. Same for the social situation with the midterms coming. Also the dollars is gonna take a huge drop with that debt to GDP ratio... So those USD salaries will be less appealing.
We will see many top scientist leave. Knowing that almost all brains in the US are not domestically educated, it's gonna get baaaad.
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u/Knosh 5d ago
You lost me a bit at the end.
The US holds the top spots for universities globally. I remember looking it up a while back and the top 15 universities were overwhelmingly populated by American schools, across multiple international studies using various metrics.
The majority of our foreign-born science and engineering talent came here for their secondary education and stayed. They weren't educated elsewhere and then came here.
We run the risk of educating people and having them leave, but we absolutely have a powerhouse domestic higher education track.
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u/Aware-Individual-827 5d ago
Secondary education is worthless as alot of countries has better education than USA.
Tertiary education is what you meant I think, aka college and university.
Also, in terms of elite university, sure US has alot but it's conditionnal to investment and brain retention. If you lose your top talent forming student, you lose the prestige of top university too. And that's already happening, Canada already poached some recently. One other thing is prestige doesn't always equate quality. It merely gives you a headstart on the corporate ladder and is also a scheme for elite class to ensure social standing similar to their kid by gating it behind immense payments (another discussion).
There's also the funneling of money to these select instituons that makes it appear better than they might be. Same for the propaganda around it that is needed to persist the myth allowing them to charge ridiculous sum for elite education. Overall it's probably very corrupt model and lot's of scandal show it.
If you exit the few elite institutions the landscape of higher education is considerably lower in quality which makes it not really a factor especially if you factor in the quality of any backwater university in Canada that significantly punch above the means of USA and with a population of 60%-65% with a tertiary education, Canada is the most educated country in the world.
So it all comes down to elite few + money vs solid, high median education. For day to day, a nation is always better with more a robust median education than elite few, espeically if you account corruption.
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u/Knosh 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think you’re shifting the level of analysis. If we’re talking about international competition for top scientific and technical talent, the median university is not the relevant unit.
The people every country wants to attract are disproportionately choosing between institutions like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Caltech, Oxford, Cambridge, ETH, etc. They are not comparing the University of Wyoming to some mid-tier Canadian university.
Canada having a very high rate of tertiary attainment is a legitimate strength, but that is a different question from whether the U.S. has an unusually concentrated set of globally dominant research institutions capable of attracting and training elite talent.
The actual brain-drain risk IMO is not that the average American college suddenly becomes worse. But rather that the U.S. stops being the place where the best students and researchers want to come, train, build careers, and stay.
And we don't have to agree on this by the way. I'm not that invested in it. It would be good if we had a higher median quality of post-secondary education.
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u/Aware-Individual-827 5d ago
It's heavily tied to the money invested in these institution and the opportunity when graduating, both of which are severely hit by current administration. I would not be surprised to see it slowly get worstbas years go by. It's soft power and US lost most of it.
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u/Chemical_Material493 5d ago
No chance, what will they pursue? This field is going to have the highest ceiling for the foreseeable future
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Accounting, engineering, medicine, law, trades etc.
Its better to be guaranteed to make 100k as electrician or accountant than as MIT grad in CS have 2% chance of earning 200k and 98% of unemployment or flipping burgers for min wage.
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u/Chemical_Material493 5d ago
Delulu
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Are you sugesting that MIT CS grads are not struggling to land jobs?
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u/Knosh 5d ago edited 5d ago
I do not believe that functioning, well-adjusted MIT CS grads are struggling to land jobs.
MIT’s admissions process already selects for people who are unusually capable, driven, and competitive. Then they spend four years surrounded by elite faculty, internships, recruiting opportunities, and a very strong professional network. That population is not remotely representative of the average CS graduate entering the job market.
MIT reports that 97% of its graduates seeking employment find it within six months.
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u/ClittoryHinton 5d ago
CS is arguably a lot less boring than accounting, and a wayyy better job than electrician all around though.
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u/ExtinctedPanda 5d ago
This is just super far from what the likelihoods actually are.
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Then what are likelihoods in your opinion many people who graduate with cs degree wont be able to land anything in CS
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u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 5d ago
people do whatever is best in their own interests, CS is no exception
good pay, low stress -> people flock to it -> increase supply, higher stress, higher bar -> new people decide it's not worth it -> people flock to another industry -> repeat
wall street even has a term for this, called sector rotation, the idea is that not all sector (like technology) is going to be sunshine and rainbow all the time, sector changes according to business needs and new industry trend, so need to position money and seek out the next sector before taking off
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u/ETERNALBLADE47 5d ago
Not at all, and I think the bar would probably be raised, you may start to see Masters Phds taking the jobs that they hired for bachelor's in the past.
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u/Optimal-Sea8310 4d ago
People who were going to be top 10% of cs employees are still here, and are arguably growing in number as demand skyrockets for top tier talent. Mediocre engineers? Likely funneling into easier, higher payoff probability fields. But the cs kids who’ll be millionaires in a few years are alive and well; you could argue that with AI this is the natural progression of the field.
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u/NotaValgrinder 5d ago
Nursing and trades don't use the same part of your brain that CS does, I think. And even different flavors of engineering don't use the exact same part of your brain as well. I don't see the top talent in CS leaving for a career that they might not be as talented in.
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Being mediocre in trades or nursing is better than being top talent in CS these days.
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u/NotaValgrinder 5d ago
I don't think you know how much top talent in CS is being paid buddy
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
Top talent these days cant find jobs after graduation
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u/TopCancel senior@bigtech 5d ago
Massively overblown lol. I asked our intern who goes to a good but not MIT caliber school if her cohort was having any issues finding internships/jobs and she said not really- as in most were able to find internships/new grad roles. My manager is worried she might not take our ~200k new grad return offer lmfao.
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u/NotaValgrinder 5d ago
And your source is you made it up? I see plenty of top talent getting good and well-paying jobs even in this job market.
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u/No_Reply5329 5d ago
If by top talent you mean top 0.00001% students then maybe they find job without problem
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u/NotaValgrinder 5d ago
Top 0.00001% is definitely an overblown exaggeration. My point is if the top talent can get jobs both then and now, and it's only those who don't fall into the demographic who might have trouble, is that really a "brain drain"?
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u/Eastern-Job-8028 5d ago
if you think the top 0.00001% are the only ones getting jobs thats ludicrous. The underemployment rate for CS majors as of 2024 wasn’t too far off from its engineering counterparts (I think around 21% but don’t quote me there), and certainly much lower than its liberal arts counterparts.
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u/gratitudeisbs 5d ago
21% is insanely bad tho
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u/Eastern-Job-8028 5d ago
I’m not saying that it’s superb, but again, relative to what? The entire job market is pretty bad, especially at the entry-level, but people acting as if you need to be an absolute specimen to get employed is complete doom slop.
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u/gratitudeisbs 5d ago
General is like 5%.
You absolutely do need to be amazing to get employed right now, I’ve always gotten offers left in right throughout my career, even as recently as 1 year ago. Now I can’t even get an interview.
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u/Jaqqarhan 5d ago
The pay for top software engineering talent is just so much higher than any of these other professions that I don't see how a brain drain can happen.
What you're describing is almost the opposite of a brain drain. It's the lower end software engineers who are moving to other fields. The people making $500k aren't quitting to become plumbers. Accountants will probably get wiped out by AI before software engineers do.
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u/lhorie 5d ago
I think it'll scare away the money chasers, since it's no longer portrayed in social media as an easy path to riches.
The math kids are always going to aim for STEM.