Example · Computer Science Student
Your degree still leads to good-paying work. Getting the first job is harder than it used to be.
20 of your 40 hours still need you
- 10 stay yours
- 10 faster with AI
- 20 tools could take
A typical week at the middle pace. Your plan uses your own tasks.
Is computer science still worth it with AI?
In the work a computer science student is heading toward, 20 of a typical 40-hour week still need a person, by our task-by-task count. Tools could already take about 20 hours. The numbers on your degree show a hard start and a strong payoff at the same time. Recent computer science graduates had a 7% unemployment rate in 2024, one of the highest of any major, and the same cohort had close to the highest starting pay of any major (New York Fed, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates, February 2026).
Read more
Read together, they say the field still pays well, but getting in is harder. A model can now do a large share of what a first-year engineer was hired to do, and the people who land a first job are increasingly the ones who arrived with evidence of the other share.
That other share includes turning a vague request ("printer broken") into what the person actually needs, knowing whether a change is safe before anyone finds out the hard way, and being the person a system's users complain to. Many CS students already do some of this, at a part-time IT job, in a club or for a small tool other people use, and often describe it as the best part of their week. The semesters you have left are about making that visible to someone who hires, and about getting one paid summer before you graduate. Nothing in this report asks you to change major, and nothing in it asks you to become an AI researcher.
The hard truth
Recent CS grads face higher unemployment than most majors.
A CS degree is no longer a quick ticket to a first job. Recent CS grads are now more likely to be unemployed than the average recent college grad.
Sources (2)
- In 2024, recent computer science grads had 7.0% unemployment, versus 4.2% for all recent college grads. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Labor Market for Recent College Graduates, 2026-02
- Early-career CS grads still earned a median $87,000, among the highest of any major. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Labor Market for Recent College Graduates, 2026-02
What stays yours
Reading the ticket that says "printer broken" for what it means
The gap between what a user names and what they need lives in a building, a department's habits and a person's vocabulary. A model reads the ticket, but it does not know that the third floor calls the shared drive "the printer." Every task that holds up in this role has this shape.
Being the person users complain to when something you built breaks
If you have users, even a few, they know your name and come to you. A new graduate almost never has this. It is the single most convincing thing a student can show a hiring manager, and the plan is built around it.
Desk-side visits, lab imaging, hands on hardware
Someone has to be in the room. Nobody hires an engineer for it, but it is why IT support desks, including many on campuses, still hire students.
Debugging other people's broken code
As writing code gets cheap, the person who can tell whether it is right becomes the bottleneck. This is the skill the plan asks you to name and log.
Knowing what the machine is actually doing
Systems knowledge is how you tell that an agent's diff that looks fine will page someone at 2 a.m. It is also the track (operating systems, networks, databases) where entry hiring is holding up best among the jobs we studied.
What can I do with a CS degree if entry-level coding jobs shrink?
Plan A is your best move in the field you are studying for. Most sessions in the 13-week plan build toward it.
- A
Aim for infrastructure and internal-tools teams
Why it fits
Why you. If you like knowing what the machine is doing or prefer debugging to writing, this is your door. Time near a campus department, lab or club that runs real systems helps if you can get it.
The gap. No production change on your record, no operating systems or networks course yet, and a resume that doesn't yet show the systems work you've done.
The trade-off. It is less glamorous. Pay on an infrastructure team at a hospital, utility, state agency or university is usually below a big-tech feature team, so compare offers. Some jobs are titled "support engineer," which you may need to explain to family. The door is much wider.
Other moves that fit
These are also good bets in this field. Read them if Plan A doesn't suit you.
Build tools for people you can talk to: internal tools, implementation and solutions roles
Why it fits
Why you. "Build tools for people I can see using them" is this job's description, and "says printer, means shared drive" is its core skill. If you have a system with users already, you have a head start.
The gap. A side project starts to count once it has a changelog, a bug fixed from a user's report, and one feature specified by interviewing someone. A tool sixty people use is worth more than a portfolio project nobody runs.
The trade-off. Small companies are fragile and their titles vague. Pay varies more than on infrastructure teams, so compare offers, and you may spend a year called a support engineer while doing an engineer's job.
Still apply to big-company internship programs, without spending much on it
Why it fits
Why you. Sophomores are who the second-year programs exist for. Explore Microsoft is a "12 (US only) week summer internship program" with a separate application for "candidates in their second year of a bachelor's degree program," requiring CS1 "and one semester of calculus." Google's equivalent could not be verified; check Google Careers in October.
The gap. The gap is the coding interview, which many students find a grind. The plan prepares you for it with a free study group instead of a paid subscription.
The trade-off. The odds are long and the 3.0 GPA screen is real. A GPA close to it leaves no room for a bad semester. Do not let this move eat the infrastructure and user-facing moves.
What's a plan B for CS majors?
Plan B is a job AI is creating that these skills already fit. One session a week in the plan trains you for it, so it is ready if your job shrinks or you want a change.
BPlan B, picked for this role
AI deployment strategist
Solutions and implementation roles want juniors who talk with users, and reading a vague ticket for what it means is that skill.
Other options
AI workflow builder
Debugging other people's broken code means you can ship and maintain working automations for a team within a few months.
AI evaluation specialist
Knowing what the machine is actually doing helps you design tests that catch where an AI coding tool fails without warning.
In your own plan you can switch to any of the 47 roles.
The first two weeks
The first 2 of 13 weeks. Most weeks have a 45-minute, a 60-minute and a 90-minute session, plus one 40-minute Plan B session. Weeks 8 and 9 are finals and drop to one 90-minute session plus the Plan B session, and weeks 10 to 13 fall over winter break. If you don't have a side project, weeks 1, 2 and 6 help you start one: pick a small tool someone you know would use. By week 13 you'll have a project with real users and a changelog, an error log of agent mistakes you caught, and about 30 summer applications sent with a one-page summary of your work.
- Week 1: See where your time goes
What you do
- AList a typical week of your classes, assignments and projects. Mark which parts AI already helps with, such as writing code, tests or docs.
- AClaim the free GitHub Student Developer Pack and turn on Copilot, GitHub's coding assistant. Install Claude Code too.
- AWatch lectures 1 and 2 of Missing Semester, MIT's free course on developer tools.
- BTake Anthropic's free AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations course. Write the four Ds in your own words with one coding example each.
- Week 2: Pick a project with users
What you do
- AList the people who use your side project and every complaint you remember. If you don't have one yet, pick a small tool a friend or club would use and list who would use it.
- AWrite up three things that broke, or three problems your users have today, as bug reports with clear steps to see each one.
- AWatch the Missing Semester lecture on version control. Put your project in a Git repository, or clean up its history if it has one, and start a CHANGELOG.md file that lists each change.
- BTake AI Fluency for Students, with extra time on the career planning module.
Three courses from the plan
Checked 2026-09-22.
- GitHub Student Developer PackGitHub Education · Free to verified students
Yes, Week 1.
- The Missing Semester of Your CS EducationMIT CSAIL · Free
Yes, Weeks 1, 2, 5.
- How to Do a Code ReviewGoogle (eng-practices) · Free, open source
Yes, Week 4.
Risks beyond AI: moderateHiring-cycle risk
Tech headcount moves for reasons unrelated to AI: the 2021–22 hiring surge, the 2022–23 correction, interest rates, and a federal tax rule that from 2022 through 2024 made companies spread deductions for software development pay over five years, now reversed. The supply side is turning in your favor. CS enrollments have started to fall, so a later cohort graduates behind the wave.
Where this could be wrong
- The destination blend is ours. We assumed half of graduates land on software teams and a fifth in IT operations. Your school's placement data would correct it, and the career center has it. If you lean toward IT operations, the share of your week that holds up rises and starting pay falls. Feature teams work the other way.
- The Taulbee cohort is not the country. Its 32,266 degrees come from doctoral-granting departments; NCES, the federal education statistics agency, counted 108,503 CS bachelor's degrees nationally in 2021–22, the latest year we could reach. The enrollment drop may be larger or smaller at schools like yours.
- Three research groups disagree on how much of this is AI. Anthropic calls its hiring result barely significant; Stanford calls its 19% descriptive; the New York Fed's regional firms report retraining, not cuts. We took the middle. The direction is the same either way, though the urgency differs.
- We may be leaning too hard on campus systems work. Not every student can get near it. If that door is closed to you by Week 5, the user-facing move moves to first and your project carries the plan.
Also matched: computer science student, cs student, cs major. Research checked 2026-09-22. Page updated .