Ten years ago if you could write good code you could get a job. Yeah you might not get a FAANG interview if you didn't know anybody and you went to Southern Regional State College or whatever, but you could get a job making twice what your English major friend got, and a lot easier.
Being able to write code is no longer a differentiator. You need to know something about product, or design, or finance, or entrepreneurship, or at least show through the other parts of your resume that you can be a benefit in some of those areas given the opportunity.
The root is that you are not owed a job at all, let a lone a cushy six-figure one where you can type JavaScript into a computer for a couple hours then call it a day. So if you believed the lie of "just go to school for 4 years, major in CS, do what your professors tell you to, and you'll be set for life" then you're in for a rude awakening when September rolls around and you're still looking, or you're writing Java for a bank for $45k/yr.
I was 100% this guy 10 years ago. Engineering school dropout but could build things on a LAMP stack, so I had more work than I could really handle. But it should have been apparent to anyone that this couldn't last, so I went back to school and explicitly avoided software because if I could teach myself this stuff, these econ, finance, and stats people were going to as well. And here we are!
> writing Java for a bank for $45k/yr
Yep that's the type of job you're going to find in Pocatello, Idaho... working for Regional Bank of the West integrating bank software their mobile apps and websites. The interesting jobs are currently going to the mechanical/electrical and hell industrial engineers who did a code bootcamp. This isn't my suspicion, it's what is actually happening on the ground and I hope the 19 year olds feeling a bit of buyer's remorse on their choice of degree program take note.
When consultants come in and ask for data, this is the person that gets them what they need. This is also the person that stays off the chopping block whenever the consultants propose their solution.
I feel like the financial engineers are eating the lunches of CS folks whose only skills is to "sling code". These 22 year old finance kids didn't need a CS degree (or at least major) to develop the coding skills necessary to express themselves and every, single one of them is highly competitive. I know one CS guy who is doing well too, but he's an industrial engineering double major. Definitely hearing a lot of moaning from the CS kids that just followed the curriculum and didn't develop some side hustle already.
Point is that we've very quickly hit a point where the market is saturated for people who can only code and nothing else, at least from my observation in the US mountain west region. School projects and even internships don't seem to be cutting it anymore, at least if you're attending a state school I guess.