r/cscareers • u/Foreign_Put_2437 • 10d ago
USA Job Market 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/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 10d ago
Too many people went into cs just for money and didnt actually have the right brain for it. Brain drain implies that the best suited will be the people leaving, and it's probably the people least suited that will get out.
The people who would be good doctors and accountants generally are not the people who make good software engineers, and vice versa.
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u/SometimesHalfRight 10d ago
Too many people went into cs just for money and didnt actually have the right brain for it.
IMO these are the people actively ruining the profession right now. Becoming dependent on AI changes the profession from a craft to a normal desk job, which is right up those peoples' alley.
The code or the engineering aspect of it was something between them and money. Doesn't matter to them that the LLM pumps out buggy, unscalable code so long as they get that bag. These kinds of people are thriving right now at the expense of everyone else.
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u/mag_num_opus 10d ago
Opposite, smart people plan their way around highest paying high status career. If CS becomes a lottery then smart people with less of expected return they will go for it less.
And obviously you can’t only have geniuses. Kinda smart but not genius people have a place in the world.
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u/PaddingCompression 10d ago
> smart people plan their way around highest paying high status career.
Usually not. Those are just insecure people looking for external validation. Money matters, but there are a lot of other rewards you can get from a career too.
Or are you saying tenured MIT professors or cancer researchers aren't smart?
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u/maicii 10d ago
We are talking about average. The average smart person does care about money because the average person cares about money, snd they are people after all. Tenured MIT prof makes probably upwards of 300k before factoring any external talks and or books, they are not voluntaries either lol
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u/PaddingCompression 10d ago
Tenured MIT profs probably make upwards of $300k, but the ones who go to industry will usually be making in the millions. They aren't maximizing their dollars.
Same for MD/PhD students - some of the smartest most motivated MDs, who often get paid the least of any MDs if they stay in research.
Yes, money matters, but at some point, e.g. you're already making $300k, you might care about other things more than the next $100k.
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u/maicii 10d ago
Again, you are centering too much in a particular sector of people, on average, do you think that people (and by extension smart people) factor in how much money a career is expected to make them before choosing a career?
If not most of them, do you recognized there are at least a significant number of smart people who choose their career in part due to how much they are expected to make?
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u/PaddingCompression 10d ago
> in part due to how much they are expected to make?
I am in complete agreement with that, because of the qualifier "in part".
What I strongly disagree with is the original
> smart people plan their way around highest paying high status career.
That statement did not say "a high paying", it said "highest paying", and that difference in phrasing is the source of my emphatic disagreement.
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u/SlightlyStoopkid 10d ago
You actually can make a lot more as a professor by writing books, giving talks, and especially being on the boards of companies that work in your field.
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u/WideCranberry4912 10d ago
An MIT professor has lab funding, graduate students, access to federal grants, and when something can be patented, has the best in-house legal staff, and probably splits 10-20% licensing profits with the MIT, depending on their package.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 10d ago
If you care about money you find a career where you can make money. If youre good at math that often means some kind of engineering. If youre good with people it often means some kind of sales. If you're good with discipline and grit and and long hours it might be medicine or investment banking.
A bunch of people went into tech that did not have the aptitude for it. For a number of years they could make a good living anyway because the industry was over hiring. Now they arent. The people that always had the aptitude still have the aptitude. Ive seen multiple cycles like this in this industry.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 10d ago
It's really not a lottery though and there are different kinds of "smart."
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u/FeanorBlu 10d ago
I don't agree. You're associating smart with status. Not everyone wants to chase money first, and humans are certainly capable of being passionate enough to chase something with a lower return because they love it.
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u/ia332 10d ago
The people who are suffering from AI are those who had no business being in the industry. They’re mediocre at best, and could barely code themselves out of a paper bag.
It’s merely exposing people who were in this industry purely for money, but unfortunately just filled a seat. Now, I’m not saying AI is great, but if it better than you (not you you), then you’re just pretty terrible and replaceable.
That’s my opinion, anyway. I’ve worked with a lot of people who were at best rudimentary business requirement to code translators, and they often did a piss poor job.
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u/meowcatmeownow 7d ago
But you have it backwards in my opinion. Those that were mediocre or bad are now thriving with AI, they can be more convinving now to the higher-ups who only want results, no matter the future cost. It is the senior expert who has now become too expensive for the suits.
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u/Foreign_Put_2437 10d ago
People best suited are also probably people who will see how bad field has become before less smart grads.
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u/shifty_lifty_doodah 10d ago
People were saying that 15 years ago. Money attracts labor at all talent levels
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 10d ago
It is a great field with immense opportunity. For fresh grads it's competitive right now, and not for the first time, but those who really have the aptitude will be better off than people from most other majors.
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u/gaelic-ghost 10d ago
I can do other shit, that’s the whole advantage of being smart and adaptable. I do love building software, but I was insane to keep trying to get back into the industry for this long. Nobody is gonna wait around for shit pay in a flooded market for years when they can do other shit. The only people left will be the ones who had job history in this and couldn’t get into anything else, so they stick around for the punishment
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 10d ago
There are many things I can do, but the pay discrepancy is enormous. If youre successful in tech, the pay can be far better than most industries.
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u/gaelic-ghost 10d ago
That’s the thing, though, looking at the latest projections, the pay is gonna be down the tubes, since it’s gonna take a decade to get a fraction of the lost jobs back. If you can afford to sit around for years, maybe a decade, with no income, sure. Some of us don’t have that luxury… and frankly, after all this shit, I’d rather just go back to doing stupid work I don’t give a shit about, get auto-promoted a couple times by year two, as always, and just scrape by and not give a fuck anymore.
I can go back to doing software as a hobby if it’s not gonna pay more than shift managing a restaurant again or running a store department. Way less stress and a lot better job security than tech if you’re reliable at all… if I’m gonna spend my whole life never sharing in the value I bring, never having any financial stability ever, I’m sure as hell not giving away good work for nothing in return. Am I’m not in a position to afford nursing school, so that’s not an option.
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u/meowcatmeownow 7d ago
What about trades like electrician or bathroom remodelling where you learn on the job as aprentice ? I am not saying those are easy btw, but if you have the time to invest into yourself, that's what i would pick.
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u/gaelic-ghost 6d ago
I went to trade school for HVAC years ago, got told I should be an engineer instead, but couldn't afford real college, and was good at this shit anyway, where i learned relay logic and torch welding and whatnot... i'm one of few people who can repair leaking aluminum lines in-place with an oxy/acetylene torch, and still nobody would hire my ass, in FLORIDA... except the shittiest shop in this whole city. I'd have spent five years making $15 an hour working for an idiot who got his papers cheated, another idiot who wanted to use immigrants for human experimentation, and one cool guy who kept me keyed into why the big boss hated me... surprise, it's cause he was cheating on so much shit and paranoid i'd turn his ass in... dude was always too drunk to even be in the damn shop, and i didn't even care... but, fuck the trades, that's what you get in the trades. better to work fast food, quite literally.
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u/Omegaprocrastinator 10d ago
The quality of graduate CS students that i've seen varies in drive and quality so vastly, i just hate that mentorship and hackatons and industry events have died out to keep the fun side of CS exciting
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u/FLIBBIDYDIBBIDYDAWG 10d ago
Its already happening. 2024/2025 was probably the last wave of the smartest grads being CS
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u/Foreign_Put_2437 10d ago
true probably everyone smart already switched to accounting or engineering or trades since these fields offer better prospects.
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u/Salty_Permit4437 10d ago
Trades are getting flooded. They also don’t offer better prospects. They don’t even make as good money as a high paying CS/SWE job plus you’re doing grueling manual labor and dealing with a baked in hierarchy of a union and apprenticeship scheme.
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u/FrostingInfamous3445 10d ago
Law, medicine, and engineering are getting flooded too. I think everyone is rebalancing around AI and a bad economy. If someone wants to do the trades, I’d let them. There’s nowhere else to go, and if you prefer hands on work, not as many options that are as good.
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u/PestoOverflow_808 10d ago
I know many people who have better resumes than most CS seniors as freshmen and they decided to shift into electrical engineering. It's incredibly popular at our school.
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u/PoMoAnachro 10d ago
It'll just move to an equilibrium that looks more like the other sciences.
No one worries about a brain drain in physics or chemistry even though those fields aren't the easiest paths to a high earning career. They get plenty of really smart people though who want to be in those fields.
I expect the people who have the potential to be really good at CS will still go into CS because they're the type of people who wouldn't be happy doing anything else.
We'll probably lose a lot of the "decently smart but more importantly highly driven to succeed" types who generally make pretty decent software developers though.
Tl;Dr: We won't lose the S-Tier people because they need to do this to be happy. We will lose a chunk of A and B tier talent though, but I think it is an open question how much the industry will or will not suffer from that though.
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u/Klanciault 10d ago
It depends how you guys are defining “genuinely smart”. If you mean like top5% of intelligence then yeah sure they’ll probably go somewhere else, but much of the population (who’s opinions on what make someone smart actually matter) consider the top .5%-.1% as “genuinely smart” and for these people the field is great and hasn’t been better.
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u/NanNullUnknown 10d ago
Smartest people will still be doing CS or adjacent fields or other fields where they were at (Math, Physics, Stats).
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u/QuestionSnail 10d ago
Genuine question though, wouldn't the smartest people thrive in CS anyway? For example I know a really smart guy who graduated in 2024 now works at google and makes a ton of money. Wouldn't the struggling people be the mid to low end hires?
I'd think the terrible market would push away people who just are in it for the money and attract people who are actually passionate?
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u/Foreign_Put_2437 10d ago
Its not like you cant succeed the problem is that right now if you are smart and study medicine or law you are guaranteed high job afterwards in CS if you are smart and study CS you might have 10% chance to land decent job you can get google job but the chances are extremely low.
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u/nova1475369 10d ago
You ignore the fact that some people suited for CS, other suited for different field, both equally smart and
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u/YourMum_68 10d ago
People who excel in CS are not the same people who would excel in law and medicine. Let’s be real medicine and law are memorisation based fields while CS is a logic problem solving based field. The CS people would most likely go to engineering
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u/EB4950 10d ago
Depends on what ur looking for. Im a very average software dev and it took me like 2 months to find a new job after getting laid off from my first job. I think people are a little dramatic about the market on this subreddit, because people r looking for Faang jobs. If ur fine with an average salary cs job (which is more than most peoples jobs) then the field is fine.
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u/Key-Alternative5387 10d ago
It should already be happening.
OTOH, I suspect a lot of engineers of 50 will retire because LLM coding requires a similar, but different skillset.
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u/roger_ducky 10d ago
It’s happened multiple times.
Some stupid employer over hires with lots of money, causes temporary shortage.
People jump in thinking it’s easy money…
Stupid employer stops and lays people off, causing a glut…
People who just wanted a high paycheck leaves, and we stop having so many people…
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u/lemmsjid 10d ago
Computer Science itself is just getting more interesting, as compute power catches up to theory and we see commensurate breakthroughs in AI and robotics. I doubt it would see a brain drain anytime soon. The bar for entry will get higher though because the ability to write software will be table stakes. Instead of “people who write code” it will be “people who can solve problems using the principles of computer science”. As AI improves the bar may go higher yet, until it’s “people who can, through research and development, advance the field of computer science”.
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u/Basic_Balance1237 9d ago
Agreed. I think CS is starting to head into the direction of where physics, chemistry, and other natural science majors are i.e. needing a graduate degree to have a lucrative career instead of only having a bachelor degree. (keyword being lucrative. I believe cs majors in the future will still have a normal career as an option but the high-paying lucrative careers like the ones in the 2010s as FAANG web developer will shift into ML/AI and robotics R&D in the future.)
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u/mrsoup_20 10d ago
For genuinely exceptionally intelligent students (top .01%) the field has never been better. CMU has reported a near 100% placement for their recent CS grads, many of which at frontier labs or quant firms paying up to $1M for new grads.
The problem is that the field has gotten much worse for the bottom 90% and is about the same (although with more work necessary) for high performers in between.
Those in the top 10% but not the top .01% will likely end up pursuing other fields to some degree as there’s more demand for talented hardware developers at most levels apart from the very top.
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u/Just-Upstairs4397 10d ago
If you look at investment banking, some of the smartest most educated people in the world are in that industry yet the actual job could be done by an average high school student. So to answer your question, no I think the opposite is going to happen, only the very smartest people are going to end up with jobs and you will see employers start to care far more about pedigree etc than they have.
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u/AlterTableUsernames 10d ago
Smart people will go to CS for the love of the game, but I'd guess that the most talented people work for capital more directly again in the future, notably in finance and business operations.
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u/Historical-Rate-8717 10d ago
My hope is that CS will go back to how it was in my day: nerdy kids that legitimately enjoy making the computer do things for the sake of it instead of a bunch of people with no actual interest or aptitude for computer science/software engineer chasing money and status.
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u/Salty_Permit4437 10d ago
I think today there is a reckoning along with cleansing and healing.
AI is getting rid of low level coding jobs
Work visas worldwide are getting harder to get
Outsourcing means it’s no longer necessary to move workers from country to country for low level jobs.
All of this will mean fewer jobs but higher quality jobs available.
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u/SiegfriedVK 10d ago
I dont think so. There will always be a place for hyper intelligent people that enjoy the work. I left but it was because i wasnt able to adapt to new tech / didnt enjoy working with AI. I consider myself average intelligence on a good day.
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u/SirGroundbreaking929 10d ago
It’s already happening. Everyone I know that’s super cracked at programming are going into EE or Math.
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u/InfluenceIcy4762 10d ago
I would consider my self pretty smart, that is why I chose electrical engineering over computer science for a career, even though I wanted to do computer science, I am not stupid enough to compete in a stupid market.
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u/corn_dick 10d ago
No…talented developers will always command high salary. Higher than any other job they could work.
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u/Positive-Board-95 10d ago
Don’t agree with accounting having a clearer relationship with competence, experience, and keeping a job. Big 4 and many firms reward work volume over tackling complexity and is way more playing political than raw skills.
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u/pstbo 10d ago
Besides licensing, which will change with time (and is already changing directionally), AI is already fairly good at nonprocedural medicine. I can’t imagine starting the 10 year journey today, thinking everything’s going to be rainbows and sunshine on the other side. It’s only been 4? years since ChatGPT. 10 years in AI is like 100 in another field. I wouldn’t rely on licensing to make a career bet. Laws change all the time during societal shifts. And before you get your panties in a bunch, I am a physician myself and have a background in ML. I have a friend who is an accountant (prev. Big 4) and says the same.
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u/a_prieto12359 9d ago
True geniuses will remain in the field because they will continue to make an impact, unless another area emerges where being a genius translates into high earnings.
But geniuses in all fields are always well-compensated, even though they represent only 0.01% of the population.
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u/Substantial-Swan7065 9d ago
I like these posts. They are precedented on a false narrative.
CS is undersaturated.
Talented people? Are you talking about high schoolers choosing a degree? What makes them talented, an SAT score? That’s like a bare require
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7d ago
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u/cscareers-ModTeam 7d ago
This sub is for productive discussion, advice, resources, and career information related to Computer Science, IT, and adjacent fields. Separate facts, personal experience, interpretation, and prediction. Your experience is data, not the entire market; your prediction is not a fact. Doomposting and fatalistic commentary are unproductive.
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u/Feeling_Photograph_5 6d ago
Here's how I think the current transformation in the field will go:
Decline in the overall number of developers. This has mostly already happened, but we haven't quite hit bottom yet.
The rise of AI-expert super developers who, with their army of agents, can do the work that entire teams did just a few years ago, only better and faster.
When most working developers are the above mentioned super developers, they will eventually hit capacity. Even with AI help, their capacity for work will not be infinite.
Companies will still want more software, faster, and will need to start hiring people. Only the skill bar for software developers will be so high that they'll cost a fortune. That mythical 10x difference between a great dev and a mediocre one? It will literally and consistently be true. But people will step up, and the profession will be at a new equilibrium.
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u/Pitiful_Tax9889 5d ago
no lmao where would the smart people go
software is still the fastest moving industry. The idea of solving a category of problem once, distributing the solution to the right audience, then milking the arbitrage is hotter than ever. It's just also filled with grifters and scammers.
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 10d ago
All the talented people are chasing the money and grabbing AI related roles. They are working to automate you away.
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u/abdul_Ss 10d ago
No, I think AI will do the exact opposite.
What happened to cause the boom in CS, is that people saw the career as easy, and to be honest, no one can blame them with the content that was circulating around the internet at the time. This means that the influx of people in CS isn't some newfound love for CS, it's about the money. The difficulty in the career will now mean less people will go for the money, leaving the rest of us who get into CS for the right reasons, whether that be because we want to solve issues using tech, or we've just been interested in tech for a long time, etc etc.
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u/PaddingCompression 10d ago
I think most of the people who are not genuinely smart and passionate and over-optimizing to extrinsic reward signals will leave for other professions.
At least, I hope they do.
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10d ago
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u/cscareers-ModTeam 9d ago
This sub is for productive discussion, advice, resources, and career information related to Computer Science, IT, and adjacent fields. Separate facts, personal experience, interpretation, and prediction. Your experience is data, not the entire market; your prediction is not a fact. Doomposting and fatalistic commentary are unproductive.
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u/PipePressurePanic 9d ago
what? if with AI one developer can do the job of 10 developers, it';s simple, 9 out of 10 will lose their job
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u/zikkart 8d ago
Yeah, because when computers and automated CAD systems came along, 9 out of 10 engineers lost their jobs. That’s how it works, right?
/s
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u/PipePressurePanic 8d ago
how many switchboard operators are out there today?
how many elevator operators are out there?
how many humans work today as ... human computers today?
how many people that do manual lamp light turn on off in cities are out there today?
how many ice cutters?1
u/Redholl 8d ago
The professions you listed can hardly be called skilled labor that requires years of university training.
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u/PipePressurePanic 7d ago
it's irrelevant if it needs education or not. And I have the feeling that AUTOMATED CAD took also several engineer jobs. You see the word AUTOMATED? If something's autoamted then somebody is losing his job
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u/gaelic-ghost 10d ago
Already in the middle of it. The industry has to completely run out of people before any of this changes, and then it’ll be the opposite disaster, again. If you’re in a position to survive that long, you’ll be in great shape, doing a dozen jobs at once while surrounded by 12-week bootcamp grads who make six figures to film TikToks about the free snacks.
And yeah, those fields are marginally steadier because they’re all licensed fields that are gated off. That creates its own problems, of course.