In the 2010s, coding emerged as one of the most sought-after skills in the job market. The coding boom spread rapidly—parents pressured their children to abandon English majors in favor of STEM degrees, and former President Barack Obama even encouraged people to learn coding. Obama also became the first president to write a line of code as part of the “Hour of Code”—an online event aimed at promoting Computer Science Education Week.
Conversely, English and liberal arts majors faced scrutiny, with some labeling them “barista degrees” under the assumption that pursuing these fields would inevitably lead to coffee shop jobs due to perceived limited career opportunities.
But the rise of AI is challenging those assumptions—at least according to Palantir co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel. In a clip from a 2024 interview with economist Tyler , Thiel stated that the odds are turning against STEM professionals.
“It seems much worse for the math people than the word people,” he said.
Storytellers are hot on the job market
The billionaire’s remarks mirror an emerging trend in today’s labor market. released a skills study earlier this month titled “” that highlights growing demand for communication and creative thinking abilities. According to the report, communication—alongside leadership and people management—ranks among the most in-demand skills in the current job market.
“Companies are increasingly seeking strong communicators, as effective writing, clarity, and sound judgment still hold value,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told . They noted that “storytelling” has become an especially coveted skill today: “On LinkedIn, job postings mentioning ‘storytellers’ have doubled in the past year.” In fact, some firms are offering salaries exceeding $1 million for storytellers and senior communications professionals. For example, Anthropic is hiring a head of communications with a $400,000 starting salary, and is advertising a senior director of communications role paying between $656,000 and $1.2 million.
To be clear, the report doesn’t mean you should discard your STEM diploma. LinkedIn also identified several technical skills in high demand, including AI prompt engineering and data annotation. However, these skills differ from the core of STEM degrees, as they focus on training AI rather than building it. While some AI prompt engineer job openings require knowledge of programming languages like Python and JavaScript, plus experience with large language models, the postings also stress strong linguistic and creative abilities to refine AI outputs—and pay an average salary of $128,000, per job platform .
As AI development progresses, many leaders and AI experts predict the technology will drastically reshape the job market—and with it, the skills deemed most valuable. In this evolution, some math and other STEM skills face the risk of becoming obsolete.
Boris Cherny, creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code, stated he hasn’t written a single line of code since November (though he still reviews code generated by AI). Meanwhile, AI tools are increasingly moving into fields dominated by STEM experts, such as basic programming and data analysis.
Rumblings in the labor market
While the labor market has been particularly challenging for recent college graduates—their unemployment rate surpassed that of all workers in 2022 and reached 5.6% in 2025—some STEM-focused careers have especially high unemployment rates, according to from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Computer engineering ranks as the major with the second-highest unemployment rate at 7.8%, trailing only anthropology.
But some STEM graduates have unemployment rates below the 3.1% average for all college graduates—including aerospace engineering (2.2%) and engineering technologies (1.7%) majors, respectively.
Still, during the 2024 interview, Thiel argued that even in STEM fields currently unaffected by AI automation, using math skills as an entry requirement will become outdated because of AI.
“If you want to go to medical school, we weed people out through physics and calculus,” he said. “As a neurosurgeon, I don’t really want someone operating on my brain to be doing prime number factorizations in their head while they’re operating on my brain.”