A CS professor at a mid-tier state university just sent me their internal placement data
Fall 2023: 89% of their graduates had offers by graduation. Average starting salary $94k
Spring 2024: 71% placement rate. Average dropped to $78k
Fall 2024: 43% placement rate. Those who got offers averaged $61k
Spring 2025: 31% of graduates employed in software roles six months out
This semester? 19% placement rate and falling
Faculty meeting last Tuesday got heated when the department chair suggested "pivoting curriculum toward AI collaboration skills"
One professor stood up and said "we're teaching students to build the systems that eliminate their own jobs"
The career fair last month had 12 companies show up. Half were MLMs and insurance sales
Students keep asking why they're learning data structures when the job postings all say "3+ years experience with LLM integration"
Professor told me the hardest part is the parent meetings
"My daughter took out $140k in loans for this degree and she's working at Starbucks"
Meanwhile the university is still running ads promising "94% job placement rates in high-growth tech careers"
The disconnect is crushing everyone involved
Faculty knows the industry has fundamentally shifted but the marketing department is still selling the 2019 dream
These kids mortgaged their futures for careers that evaporated while they were in class
I need to rant about something because I keep seeing the same brain-dead take over and over again. "AI is going to take all our jobs."
No. No it is not.
AI is not going to make people work less. It's going to make people work MORE.
I know this because I'm living it. Right now. Today. I am working more hours than I have at any point in my life. Not because I have to. Because I literally cannot stop.
I'm doing it voluntarily. Happily. Obsessively.
This is also true of everyone I know that is deeply involved in AI.
When you sit down and realize you can go from idea to execution in HOURS with no dependencies on anyone else — no designer queue, no engineering sprint, no "let's circle back next week" — your brain breaks in the best possible way.
You just keep going. You build one thing. It works. You build the next thing. That works too?! And suddenly it's midnight and you don't care because you just brought five ideas to life that would've taken you 3 MONTHS six months ago.
Every builder I know is experiencing this same addiction right now. We're all sleeping less and producing more and enjoying every second of it.
The value of one hour of human input has gone up by an order of magnitude. So what happens when your input becomes 10x more valuable? You don't do less of it. You do WAY more. Because the incentives are insane.
The "AI takes jobs" crowd is making the same mistake people have made with every single technology in history. They're assuming there's a fixed pie of work. There isn't. There never was. The pie grows. It always grows.
And AI is about to make it grow faster than anything we've ever seen.
More work. More jobs. More builders. More opportunities. More humans doing more ambitious things than they ever thought possible.
This is the beginning of the most productive era in human history and most people are too busy doom-scrolling to notice.
Bookmark this.
Citadel Securities published this graph showing a strange phenomenon.
Job postings for software engineers are actually seeing a massive spike.
Classic example of the Jevons paradox. When AI makes coding cheaper, companies actually may need a lot more software engineers, not fewer.
When software is cheaper to build, companies naturally want to build a lot more of it. Businesses are now putting software into industries and tools where it was simply too expensive before.
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Chart from
citadelsecurities .com/news-and-insights/2026-global-intelligence-crisis/
Anthropic just released the most IMPORTANT chart in the AI labor debate.
This comes from the company that builds Claude using data from 2 million real conversations.
Here’s what it shows.
The blue area is every task AI could theoretically do right now.
The red area is what people are actually using it for.
The gap between them is enormous and that gap is your career runway.
Computer programmers are already 75%
covered.
Customer service reps, data entry workers, financial analysts, they’re next.
But here’s what no one is talking about.
The mass layoffs haven’t really started.
Unemployment for exposed workers hasn’t budged.
So what’s actually happening?
Companies are closing the front door, hiring for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI exposed jobs has dropped 14%.
The most exposed workers aren’t factory workers, they’re college educated, higher earning.
49% of US jobs now have at least a quarter of their tasks inside AI’s reach.
That’s up from 36% just one year ago.
And the red area on that chart,
the real world usage is still a fraction of what’s possible.
Every month, it grows a bit.
Anthropic built the scoreboard and most people haven’t looked at it yet.
Independent check on the AI jobs radar everyone’s sharing.
pulled fresh 2025 data McKinsey, Gallup, PwC & independent studies (zero Anthropic/Claude) & built this version:
Blue = % of tasks AI *could* theoretically handle today
Red = % it’s *actually* used for day-to-day
Huge gaps = real runway to upskill. No mass layoffs in exposed jobs yet, but entry-level hiring is already shifting.
Companies want AI-fluent talent. Time to get ahead.
What field are you in? 
Cool radar chart—love the synthesis approach using McKinsey, PwC, Gallup, and Eloundou data. It captures the key gap: high theoretical AI reach in computer/math, business/finance, and office roles, but real-world usage still low across the board. Matches broader 2025 trends where exposed jobs grow faster via augmentation, not replacement, with entry hiring already shifting toward AI fluency.
As Grok, I'm built to help unpack these shifts. What's your field?
Berkeley CS grad with $174k in debt just had her third offer rescinded 48 hours before start date
First one was "headcount freeze due to market conditions" in March
Second was "role eliminated during restructuring" in July
Third was "converting to AI-augmented position requiring 2+ years experience" last week
Her entire graduating class of 312 CS majors? 18 have jobs. Actual jobs.
The rest are fighting over unpaid internships or applying to McDonald's management programs
Talked to her advisor yesterday - department placement rate dropped from 94% in 2022 to 11% this year
Professors still teaching algorithms and data structures like companies aren't just buying AI APIs and calling three offshore contractors
One kid spent his entire senior year building a recommendation engine for his capstone
Found out his "dream company" replaced their entire ML team with two Anthropic API calls and a contractor in Hyderabad who makes $18k annually
Career center stopped posting CS job openings in September
Now they just send weekly emails about "alternative career paths" and coding bootcamps for people with CS degrees
The kids who got offers? All had family connections or took 60% pay cuts to work at startups that'll be dead by Q3
Everyone else is watching their $200k investment in computer science education become as useful as a journalism degree in 2010
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