I'm a 23-Year-Old CS Student. Here's What Actually Gets You Hired in 2026.

field note

I’ve spent the last four articles in the developer trenches. OpenClaw’s security apocalypse. Karpathy’s CLAUDE.md revolution. The coding tool wars. The vibe coding crisis.All of those are about tools. Today is about you.Specifically, if you’re a CS student, a junior developer, someone’s kid who just changed their major, or anyone who’s been lying awake at 2 AM wondering whether they chose the wrong career... this one’s for you.Because the narrative is “AI killed CS jobs.” And the data is way more complicated. And nobody is giving you the real picture.Let me fix that.The Numbers That Don’t Make Sense TogetherHere’s why this story is confusing. Because the data contradicts itself.CS admissions are cratering.Computer and information science enrollment dropped 8.1% in the 2025-2026 school year. The steepest decline of any field of study. Computer science specifically plummeted 11.2%. At the University of California system, CS enrollment fell for the first time in 20 years. The Computing Research Association surveyed academic departments and found 31% reported enrollment drops of more than 20%.Students are leaving. Not sl