Goodbye, $165,000 tech jobs. Student coders seek work at Chipotle.

Growing up near Silicon Valley, Manasi Mishra remembers seeing tech executives on social media urging students to study computer programming.

"The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary," Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, California.

Those golden industry promises helped spur Mishra to code her first website in elementary school, take advanced computing in high school and major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for tech jobs and internships, Mishra graduated from Purdue University in May without an offer.

"I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle," Mishra said in a get-ready-with-me TikTok video this summer that has since racked up more than 147,000 views.

Since the early 2010s, a parade of billionaires, tech executives and even U.S. presidents has urged young people to learn coding, arguing that the tech skills would help bolster students' job prospects as well as the economy. Tech companies promised computer science graduates high salaries and all manner of perks.

"Typically their starting salary is more than $100,000," plus $15,000 hiring bonuses and stock grants worth $50,000, Brad Smith, a top Microsoft executive, said in 2012 as he kicked off a company campaign to get more high schools to teach computing.

The financial incentives, plus the chance to work on popular apps, quickly fed a boom in computer science education, the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms. Last year, the number of undergraduates majoring in the field topped 170,000 in the United States -- more than double the number in 2014, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data annually from about 200 universities.

But now, the spread of AI programming tools, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code -- combined with layoffs at companies like Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft -- is dimming prospects in a field that tech leaders promoted for years as a golden career ticket. The turnabout is derailing the employment dreams of many new computing grads and sending them scrambling for other work.

Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1% and 7.5% respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3%.

"I'm very concerned," said Jeff Forbes, a former program director for computer science education and workforce development at the National Science Foundation. "Computer science students who graduated three or four years ago would have been fighting off offers from top firms -- and now that same student would be struggling to get a job from anyone."

In response to questions from The New York Times, more than 150 college students and recent graduates -- from state schools including the universities of Maryland, Texas and Washington, as well as private universities like Cornell and Stanford -- shared their experiences. Some said they had applied to hundreds, and in several cases thousands, of tech jobs at companies, nonprofits and government agencies.

The process can be arduous, with tech companies asking candidates to complete online coding assessments and, for those who do well, live coding tests and interviews. But many computing graduates said their monthslong job quests often ended in intense disappointment or worse: companies ghosting them.

Some faulted the tech industry, saying they felt "gaslit" about their career prospects. Others described their job search experiences as "bleak," "disheartening" or "soul-crushing."

Among them was Zach Taylor, 25, who enrolled as a computer science major at Oregon State University in 2019 partly because he had loved programming video games in high school. Tech industry jobs seemed plentiful at the time.

Since graduating in 2023, however, Taylor said, he has applied for 5,762 tech jobs. His diligence has resulted in 13 job interviews but no full-time job offers.

The job search has been one of "the most demoralizing experiences I have ever had to go through," he added.

The electronics firm where he had a software engineering internship last year was not able to hire him, he said. This year, he applied for a job at McDonald's to help cover expenses, but he was rejected "for lack of experience," he said. He has since moved back home to Sherwood, Oregon, and is receiving unemployment benefits.

"It is difficult to find the motivation to keep applying," said Taylor, adding that he was now building personal software projects to show prospective employers.

Computing graduates are feeling particularly squeezed because tech firms are embracing AI coding assistants, reducing the need for some companies to hire junior software engineers. The trend is evident in downtown San Francisco, where billboard ads for AI tools like CodeRabbit promise to debug code faster and better than humans.

"The unfortunate thing right now, specifically for recent college grads, is those positions that are most likely to be automated are the entry-level positions that they would be seeking," said Matthew Martin, U.S. senior economist at Oxford Economics, a forecasting firm.

Tracy Camp, executive director of the Computing Research Association, said new computer science graduates might be particularly hard hit this year because many universities were just now starting to train students on AI coding tools, the newest skills sought by tech companies.

Some graduates described feeling caught in an AI "doom loop." Many job seekers now use specialized AI tools like Simplify to tailor their resumes to specific jobs and autofill application forms, enabling them to quickly apply to many jobs. At the same time, companies inundated with applicants are using AI systems to automatically scan resumes and reject candidates.

To try to stand out, Audrey Roller, a recent data science graduate from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, said she highlighted her human skills, like creativity, on her job applications, which she writes herself, unassisted by chatbots. But after she recently applied for a job, she said, a rejection email arrived three minutes later.

"Some companies are using AI to screen candidates and removing the human aspect," Roller, 22, said. "It's hard to stay motivated when you feel like an algorithm determines whether you get to pay your bills."

Recent graduates looking for government tech jobs also report increased hurdles.

Jamie Spoeri, who graduated this year from Georgetown University, said she majored in computing because she loved the logical approach to problem-solving. During college, she also learned about the environmental impacts of AI and grew interested in tech policy.

Last summer, she had an internship at the National Science Foundation, where she worked on national security and technology issues, like the supply of critical minerals. She has since applied for more than 200 government, industry and nonprofit jobs, she said.

But recent government cutbacks and hiring freezes have made getting federal jobs difficult, she said, while AI coding tools have made getting entry-level software jobs at companies harder.

"It's demoralizing to lose out on opportunities because of AI," said Spoeri, 22, who grew up in Chicago. "But I think, if we can adapt and rise to the challenge, it can also open up new opportunities."

Prominent computing education boosters are now pivoting to AI. President Donald Trump, who in 2017 directed federal funding toward computer science in schools, recently unveiled a national AI action plan that includes channeling more students into AI jobs.

Microsoft, a major computing education sponsor, recently said it would provide $4 billion in technology and funding for AI training for students and workers. Last month, Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company was also assessing how AI was changing computer science education.

Mishra, the Purdue graduate, did not get the burrito-making gig at Chipotle. But her side hustle as a beauty influencer on TikTok, she said, helped her realize that she was more enthusiastic about tech marketing and sales than software engineering.

The realisation prompted Mishra to apply cold for a tech company sales position that she found online. The company offered her the tech sales job in July.

She starts this month.