AI and Job Loss: That Computer Science Degree May Not Be As Safe As We Think
- Nitin Deckha
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 6
Idea 22 for 2025
Earlier this year, in February, visiting friends for dinner, an undergraduate computer science student told me in conversation that he was considering graduate programs since #jobs were computer science grads were disappearing.
Interestingly, a few weeks later, the Washington Post’s columnist Andrew Van Dam wrote an extensive article exploring the disappearance of ¼ of all #computer #programming jobs in the US.
Analyzing Bureau of Labor Statistics Data, Van Dam explored a range of data noting the following that while there are fewer programmers today in the US since 1980, the loss of programmers wasn’t typical compared to other computer-related occupations, with other jobs, such as software developers and database administrators, were seeing increases.
Van Dam and colleagues at the Post’s Department of Data dug further into government data, consulted a range of other researchers, to ask whether the vanishing of jobs in computer programming was due to the rise of generative #AI.
Indeed, the researchers indicated that there could be shifting ground, where “programmers, might be losing ground as jobs shift to occupations for which AI is more of a complement than a substitute.”
One of these researchers, Mark Muro at the Brookings Institution, told Van Dam and colleagues that:
As AI replaces rote coding tasks and people rely more on snippets generated by models, “the first inroads are going to be for the more routine programming,” Muro told us. “Without getting hysterical,” he added, “the unemployment jump for programming really does look at least partly like an early, visible labor market effect of AI.”
Muro referred them to work by Anthropic, whose new Economic Index seeks to analyze the impacts of AI on the labor market over time.
Its February 2025 report highlighted that AI usage:
“is concentrated in software development and technical writing tasks
leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks.
more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations like computer programmers and data scientists, but is lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles. This likely reflects both the limits of current AI capabilities, as well as practical barriers to using the technology.”
Importantly, context is always salient. Anthropic’s Alex Tamkin cautioned the Department of Data folks that the report focused on how people were using AI rather than which jobs would be replaced by AI. Other researchers also pointed out larger economic challenges of rising interest rates and slowing growths as having impacts on computer programmer (as well as other) employment.
Yet, it does suggest that, given the greater usage of existing computer programmers to use AI to automate some of their tasks and augment others, there may be a greater risk of job displacement in computer science than other sectors.
And this takes us back to the undergraduate now faced looking to develop some new skills, certified by a new #credential.
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