Guys, I was checking the news, and Stanford has an issue. Everyone worries that AI is taking the jobs of unskilled laborers, and Twitter artists (which it should), but there’s a whole other scope of people dealing with AI, too.
Honestly, I think it’s kinda a good thing.
Stanford’s Problem
Stanford computer science grads are doing everything right—and still striking out. Top pedigree. Hard skills. Clean transcripts. And yet the job offers aren’t coming. Not slowly. Not later. Just not at all.
You were told this degree guaranteed entry. It doesn’t. AI burned the bridge while everyone was still walking across it. Beautiful campus. Brutal timing.
Early‑career employment in AI‑exposed fields for ages 22 to 25 is down 13% over three years. Youth unemployment just hit 10.5%, the highest since April 2021. And Stanford isn’t spared. Neither is Berkeley. Neither is USC.
This isn’t a fluke. It’s a signal.
The AI Influx
Here’s the math companies are now using. Ten junior developers used to be the baseline. Today it’s two senior engineers and one AI coding assistant. Same output. Lower cost. Fewer meetings. No ramp‑up time.
AI coding tools now outperform entry‑level programmers on routine tasks. That’s not a future threat—that’s current operating procedure. Experienced engineers use AI to compress weeks of junior work into hours. And once that door closed, it didn’t creak. It slammed.
So firms stopped hiring at the bottom. Meta cut. Block cut. Autodesk cut. The entry rung of the ladder is gone, and everyone graduating into tech is staring up at bare wall.
Some grads retreat into master’s programs. Others take jobs they were told they were “overqualified” for. Others try startups, not out of ambition but necessity. And yes—that’s rational behavior.
The Verdict
Do Stanford grads deserve jobs? No one deserves demand. Markets don’t care about merit badges.
What they deserve is honesty. The era where a CS degree automatically translated into junior engineer headcount is over. AI erased that role faster than universities can update a syllabus.
And here’s the honest truth—you don’t compete with other graduates anymore. You compete with a senior engineer who never sleeps because their AI partner doesn’t. You also compete with guys who can come online and create a business that scales to 100x in the time it takes to brew a morning coffee.
The fix isn’t prestige. It’s leverage. Become the person who directs the systems, not the person replaced by them. Or step sideways—research, operations, startups, anything where judgment beats keystrokes.
The ladder didn’t move. It vanished. And pretending otherwise is the only real failure.