Coding Boot Gamp Graduates Find tough Prospects In an AI-Powered World

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times:

Between the time [construction worker Florencio] Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a 'golden ticket' to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting. Mr. Rendon says he didn't land a single interview.

Coding boot camp graduates across the country are facing a similarly tough job market. In Philadelphia, Mal Durham, a lawyer who wanted to change careers, was about halfway through a part-time coding boot camp late last year when its organizers with the nonprofit Launchcode delivered disappointing news. 'They said: 'Here is what the hiring metrics look like. Things are down. The number of opportunities is down,'' she said. 'It was really disconcerting.' In Boston, Dan Pickett, the founder of a boot camp called Launch Academy, decided in May to pause his courses indefinitely because his job placement rates, once as high as 90 percent, had dwindled to below 60 percent. 'I loved what we were doing,' he said. 'We served the market. We changed a lot of lives. The team didn't want that to turn sour.'

Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent. 'I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech, period, that I've seen in 25 years,' said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.

A Stack Overflow survey of 65,000 developers found that 60% had used AI coding tools this year, the article points out. And it includes two predictions about the future:

Armando Solar-Lezama, leader of MIT's Computer-Assisted Programming Group, 'believes that A.I. tools are good news for programming careers. If coding becomes easier, he argues, we'll just make more, better software. We'll use it to solve problems that wouldn't have been worth the hassle previously, and standards will skyrocket.'

Zach Sims, a co-founder of Codecademy, said of the job prospects for coding boot camp graduates' 'I think it's pretty grim.'

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