The Softening of Computing Jobs: Blip or Trend?

Tech companies are performing exceptionally well, driving the S&P 500 to new heights with their soaring stock prices. However, the tech sector, apart from AI, expects a job decline to persist throughout the year, accompanied by a tougher hiring process. The situation becomes even more challenging for foreign students requiring sponsorship to secure a job after college, or older tech workers without the latest skills.

Despite these challenges, tech jobs remain more abundant than in most other fields, although the era of immediate employment with nearly six-figure salaries straight out of college with any CS degree has ended.

In discussions with industry leaders, I encounter varied perspectives on whether these changes represent a temporary fluctuation or a long-term trend. Let's explore some of the reasons for this 

The Elon Effect

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in the fall of 2022, he cut about 80% of the employees. The platform had some hiccups but didn't fall apart. You might not like what is now called X became but technically it still functions pretty well. Many other companies started looking at their workforce and starting thinking whether they needed all the software develops they've hired.

Over Supply

We've seen tremendous layoffs among the larger tech companies, paring down from over hiring during the pandemic, and massive growth of computer science programs at universities across the country and world. We just have too many job searchers going after too few tech jobs.

Uncertainty

Companies hold back hiring in the face of uncertainty. Uncertainty in elections in the US and abroad, international relations particularly with China, regulatory and legal landscapes, wars, interest rates, and the economy. 

Artificial Intelligence

Almost everyone I talk to thinks (wrongly) that their careers will not dramatically change with AI, except for programmers where we already see significant productivity improvements with ML tools like Github co-pilot. So many companies are re-assessing how many software developers they need. AI also adds to the uncertainly as the tools continue to improve, but how much and how fast remain difficult to predict. 

Blip or Trend?

The supply will balance itself out in the future, though possibly through a drop in the number of CS majors. The world will get more certain, hopefully in a good way. But how AI will affect the tech (and every other) job will take years if not decades to play out.

So what advice for those looking for tech jobs: build skills, get certificates, perhaps a Masters to wait out the job market, learn AI both as a skill in demand but also to make yourself more productive. Be aggressive (but not too aggressive), network, enter competitions, build a portfolio. The jobs are not as plentiful but they are out there. 

I know what A-B-C-D-F mean but what about V? X? HP?

 I am looking at LOTS of transcript of students who applied for my program REU-CAAR so I sometimes come across grades that I don't understand. The transcript does not have a guide to them, and I have been unable to find the meaning on line.

Normal grades of A,B,C,D,F possibly with + or - I DO understand, as do you, though standards differ from school to school.

UMCP also has 

P for Pass in a course the student chose to take Pass-Fail

W for withdrawing from a course

WW which will be on all courses in a semester- so the student dropped out that semester 

XF means failed because you cheated. I suspect people outside of UMCP would not know that, though the `F' part looks bad. 

NG seems to mean they placed out of the course somehow. Might stand for No Grade. 

I've seen

V at Georgia Tech. Lance told me that means the student audited the course. 

Q at University of  Texas at Austin.I do not know that means. 

X at Depauw. I do not know what that means.

HP at Harvey Mudd. I do not know what that means.

WV at Harvey Mudd. I suspect some kind of withdrawal but I don't know. 

SX at Cornell. I do not know what that means.

E is used at some schools for FAIL and at other schools for EXCELLENT

Some schools in India use O for Outstanding- higher than an A. 

Fortunately it is rare that I NEED to know a grade that has a letter I don't understand the meaning of. However, another problem is names of courses. 

Analysis could mean Calculus with or without proofs, one or many variables. 

Discrete Math could mean an easy course on how to proof simple thing or a hard course in combinatorics. Often I can tell if its a Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, or Senior course so that may help tell what it is. 

Foundations could mean... a lot of things. 

So what can be done? The only thing I can think of is to have schools include a legend on their transcripts that tells what each grade means. Why hasn't this already been done? Speculation

a) Harder than it seems to do.

b) Not really an important problem (this blog is the only time I've every seen it mentioned)

There may be some tradeoff between how easy something is to do and how important a problem is to solve in order to take action. And this problem does not reach that threshold.

This would seem to be a problem for admissions to grad school as well, yet I have not heard of people complaining about it there either.

Can you feel the machine?

In the recent academy award winning movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr tests a young Oppenheimer.

Bohr: Algebra's like sheet music, the important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?

Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.

I can't hear the algebra but I feel the machine. 

A Turing machine has a formal mathematical definition but that's not how I think of it. When I write code, or prove a theorem involving computation, I feel the machine processing step by step. I don't really visualize or hear the machine, but it sings to me, I feel it humming along, updating variables, looping, branching, searching until it arrives at its final destination and gives us an answer. I know computers don't physically work exactly this way, but that doesn't stop my metaphorical machine from its manipulations.

I felt this way since I first started programming in Basic in the 1970's, or maybe even before that on calculators or using the phone or sending a letter. I could feel the process moving along.

So when I took my first CS theory class, I could feel those finite automata moving along states and the PDAs pushing and popping. I even felt the languages pumping. After graduate complexity, I knew I found my calling.

And that's why I prefer Kolmogorov Complexity arguments more than information theory. Information doesn't sing to me but I can see the compression.

As computational complexity evolved, focusing more on combinatorics, algebra and analysis, and often on models that have little to do with computation, I sometimes find myself lost amongst the static math. But give me a Turing machine and I can compute anything!

Grad Student Visit Day: That was then, this is now.

(Harry Lewis helped me with this post.)

March 15 was UMCP Computer Science Grad Student Visit Day. I suspect many of my readers are at schools that had their Grad Student Visit Day recently, or will have it soon. 

In 1980 I got into Harvard Grad School in Applied Sciences. I went there in the Spring to talk to some people and take a look at the campus. I paid my own way- it  did not dawn on me to ask them to reimburse me and I doubt they had the mechanism to do so. 

I know a student who got into two grad schools in 1992 and contacted them about a visit. Both set up the visit and reimbursed his travel, and the two trips helped him decide which school to go to. His criteria: The grad students looked happy at one and sad at the other. He went to the school where the grad students looked happy. Was it the right choice? He got his PhD so... it was not the wrong choice.

That was then. 

In 1980 no  schools that I know of had anything called Grad Student Visit Day.  In 1992 I suspect some did but it was a mixed bag. 

Now all schools that  I know of (including Harvard)  have a day in the spring where prospective grad students in CS are invited to come to campus. There are talks about grad school at that school, a very nice lunch, and 1-on-1 (or perhaps finite-to-1) meetings of grad students with faculty. Students are reimbursed for travel and lodging (within reason). There are variants on all of this, but that's the basic structure. The idea is to convince grad students to go to that school. It also serves the purpose of helping grad students who are already coming to get a sense of the place and a free lunch. It costs money: reimbursing students for travel and food for the students on the day itself. 

Random thoughts.

1) In 1980 no grad schools in CS did this. In 2024 (and I think for quite some time except the COVID years) all CS grad students do this. Does anyone know when the change happened? I suspect the early 1990's. 

2) Do other departments do this? For example Math? Physics? Applied Math? Chemistry? Biology? Engineering?  I doubt Art History does. 

3) Does it really help convince students to go to that school? I suspect that at this point if a school DIDN"T do it they would look bad and might lose students. Is there a way out? See the next  two points. 

4) Do students judge a school based on the professors they see (``Oh, UMCP has more people doing a combination of ML and Vision then I thought- I'll go there!'') or on the quality of the food ("UMCP had ginger bread for one of their desserts, which is my favorite dessert, so I'll go there.'') or how smoothly the trip went (``UMCP had an easy mechanism for reimbursement, whereas school X had me  fill out a lot of  forms.'')

5) Are we really advancing the public good for which we (schools) either have tax-exempt status OR are using tax-payer money by spending extra money to provide better meals and softer beds than our competitors do? Maybe we should all agree with each other to not waste money trying to outdo each other on stuff of no educational or research significance to the students. But wait---THIS MIGHT BE A VIOLATION OF ANTITRUST LAW. We are competitors, and under federal law are not allowed to (I think) cooperate to prevent a bidding war, even when it would be in the public interest that we do so in order to save money to use on the stuff that matters. 

6) One benefit I get from this as a professor: During the talks  I  hear things about my department I didn't know. 

Translation in Context

La Scala in Milan

Google translate generally impresses but consider this translation from a short Italian news article. I boldfaced a few items.

Not scheduled at the premiere of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) which debuted this evening at La Scala.

During the second act, in fact, someone dropped a mobile phone from the stage and hit a spectator in the front row on the cheek.

'I'll report you,' the man who was hit shouted. And then at halftime he explained to the ushers that he would keep the smartphone until the owner arrived to report it. In the meantime, the performance, in the historic staging by Giorgio Strehler conducted by Thomas Guggeis, continued with applause from the audience for almost every aria.

The stage? Last I checked Mozart didn't write any mobile phones into his opera, though you can never tell with those European directors. It certainly would have made the abduction easier. Even if a phone was dropped from the stage how did it jump over the orchestra pit into the audience.

So I asked ChatGPT to translate the story.

An unexpected event occurred during the premiere of Mozart's "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" (The Abduction from the Seraglio) which debuted this evening at La Scala.

During the second act, indeed, a cellphone fell from a box and struck a spectator in the front row on the cheek.

"I'll sue you!" the struck gentleman shouted. And then, during the interval, he explained to the ushers that he would keep the smartphone until the owner arrived to sue him. In the meantime, the performance, in the historic staging by Giorgio Strehler with the direction of Thomas Guggeis, continued amidst the audience's applause almost after every aria.

That makes more sense. So what's going on? The word for box is "palco" and the word for stage is "palcoscenico" sometimes shortened to "palco" when the context is clear (Italian speakers can fact check me). LLMs capture the context and seem to yield better translations.

Also note the difference in what the man shouted. According to ChatGPT

The Italian verb "denunciare" means "to report" or "to denounce" in English. When conjugated in the first person present indicative, it becomes "denuncio," translating to "I report" or "I denounce." It's used to express the action of making a formal accusation or report against someone, often in a legal or official context. So, in the context you provided earlier, "Ti denuncio" translates to "I'll sue you" or more literally, "I report you" or "I denounce you," indicating the speaker's intent to take formal action against the person responsible for dropping the cellphone.

We love to talk about the failures of LLMs, but here it improves and explains the translations. 

I wonder if the owner ever did try to get his phone back. 

The Thrill of Seeing Your Name in Print is Gone

 In the 1980's and 1990's when I got a paper accepted to a journal or conference  it seemed important to see it in print. Having a paper accepted was nice, but it didn't seem real until I held the conference proceedings or journal in my hand. I can't imagine that now.

Random Thoughts

1) Now when a paper gets ACCEPTED, that's when it's REAL. For some journals the paper goes on their website very soon after that. For many papers  this does not matter since the paper has been on arXiv's for months, so having it on a journal's website (perhaps behind a paywall) does not increase its being out-there anyway. Caveat- there may be people who subscribe to that journal who are not aware of the paper until they get the issue. Then they go to arXiv to get an e-copy.

2) For e-journals there is no such thing as holding a journal in your hands. 

3) There are still some people who want to see their name in print. That was part of this blog and this blog

4) This post was inspired by the following: I had a paper accepted for a special issue of Discrete Mathematics , a memorial issue for Landon Rabern (a Combinatorist who died young). The paper is here (that's the arXiv version). I recently got the journal, on paper, mailed to me. So I got to see my name in print. My wife was thrilled. I didn't care. I don't know if they send a paper copy of the journal to all authors, for all issues,  or do they only do that for  special issue. (My spellcheck thinks that combinatorist is not a word. Or perhaps I am spelling it wrong. ADDED LATER: There is a debate about this word in the comment. Really!)

5) Note for aspiring bloggers: Getting that issue was the inspiration for this post. When you are inspired try to write the blog post soon before you lose interest.

6) Before I got the paper copy I didn't know (or care) if there was a paper copy.

7) I recently asked an editor for a BEATCS column if BEATCS also has a paper copy. He didn't know. That is how unimportant it has become. So why did I ask? I was planning a  blog post on which journals are paper free and which aren't- though I don't think I'll write that after all- to much work, and this post and some prior posts (the ones pointed to in item 3) cover that ground.

8) I wonder for my younger readers: Did you EVER feel a thrill seeing your name in print? Have you ever even seen your name in print? If you don't understand the question, ask your grandparents what in print means.

Favorite Theorems: Sensitivity

February Edition

Our next favorite theorem gave a relatively simple proof of the sensitivity conjecture, a long-standing problem of Boolean functions.

Induced subgraphs of hypercubes and a proof of the Sensitivity Conjecture

by Hao Huang

Consider the following measures of Boolean functions \(f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow\{0,1\}\) on an input x

• Decision tree complexity: How many bits of an input do you need to query to determine \(f(x)\)
• Probabilistic decision tree complexity
• Quantum decision tree complexity
• Certificate complexity: Least number of bits that forces the function
• Polynomial degree complexity: What is the smallest degree of a polynomial p over the reals such that \(p(x_1,\ldots,x_n)=f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\) for \(x\in\{0,1\}^n\). 
• Approximate polynomial degree complexity: Same as above but only require \(|p(x_1,\ldots,x_n)-f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)|\leq 1/3\).
• Sensitivity: Over all x, what is the maximum number of i such that if  x' is x with the ith bit flipped then \(f(x)\neq f(x')\).
• Block sensitivity: Same as sensitivity but you can flip disjoint blocks of bits.

Based mostly on the 1994 classic paper by Nisan and Szegedy, all of the above measures, except for sensitivity, are polynomially related, in particularly if say f has polylogarithmic decision-tree complexity then they all have polylogarithmic complexity. The sensitivity conjecture states that sensitivity is polynomially related to the rest. I wrote about the conjecture in 2017 and a combinatorial game that, if solved the right way, could settle the conjecture.

Twenty-five years later Huang settled the conjecture in the positive, and now all the above measures are known to be polynomially-related. His proof uses eigenvalues of some cleverly constructed matrices. 

So what's left? The game remains open. Also whether the rational degree is polynomially-related to all the above. But sensitivity was the big one!

The letter to recommend John Nash was ``The Best Recomendation Letter Ever''- I do not think so.

There is an article about the letter Richard Duffin wrote for John Nash that helped John Nash get into Princeton: here. The title of the article is 

The Best Recommendation Letter Ever.

The article appeared in 2015. 

The letter is dated Feb 11, 1948. 

The letter itself is short enough that I will just write it:

Dear Professor Lefschetz:

This is to recommend Mr. John F Nash Jr, who has applied for entrance to graduate college at Princeton.

Mr. Nash is nineteen years old and is graduating from Carnegie Tech in June. He is a mathematical genius.

Yours sincerely, 

Richard Duffin

I am right now looking through 365  applicants for my REU program. (Am I bragging or complaining? When it was 200 I was bragging. At 365 I am complaining.) 

If I got a letter like that would I be impressed?

No.

A good letter doesn't just say this person is  genius. It has to justify that. Examples: 

She did research with me on topological  algebraic topology. I was impressed with her insights. We are working on a paper that will be submitted to the journal of algebraic topological algebra. See the following arXiv link for the current draft. 

They  had my course on Ramsey theory as a Freshman and scored the highest A in the class. However, more impressive is that, on their own, they discovered that R(5)=49 by using their knowledge of both History and Mathematics. 

Writing a letter for Jack Lotsofmath  makes me sad we live in an era of overinflated letters. I worked with him on recursion theory when he was a high school student; however, he ended up teaching me 0''' priority arguments. 

So my question is

1) Why did just stating that John Nash was a genius good enough back in 1948? Was Richard Duffin a sufficiently impressive person so that his name carried some weight? His Wikipedia entry is here.

2) Maybe its just me, but if a letter comes from a very impressive person I still want it to say what why the applicant is so great. 

3) Was there more of an old-boys-network in 1949? Could the thinking have been if Duffin thinks he's good, then he's good. The old-boys-network was bad since it excluded blacks, women, Jews, Catholics, and perhaps people not of a certain social standing. But did it err on the other side-- did they take people who weren't qualified because they were part of the in crowd? And was Duffin's letter a way to say but this guy really is good and not just one of us.

4) I suspect there were both less people applying to grad school and less slots available. I do not know how that played out.

5) Having criticized the letter there is one aspect I do like.

Today letters sometimes drone on about the following:

The letter writers qualification to judge:

Example:  I have supervised over 1000 students and have been funded by the NSF on three large grants and the NIH on one small grant. Or maybe its the other way around.

The research project, which is fine, but the letter needs to say what the student DID on the project.

Example: The project was on finite versions of Miletti's Can Ramsey Theory proof. This had never been attempted in the history of mankind! This is important because the Can Ramsey Theory is fundamental to Campbell's soup. This connects up with my upcoming book on the Can Ramsey Theorem to be published by Publish or Perish Press, coming out in early 2025.

 Irrelevant things for my program or for grad school, though perhaps relevant for College: 

Example: He is in the fencing club and the Latin club and was able to trash talk his opponents in Latin. They didn't even know they were being insulted!

So I give credit to Duffin for keeping it short and to the point. Even so, I prefer a letter to prove its assertions.