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I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from othe
by jtbetz22 7mo ago
I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools.
Two points of anecdata from that experience:
- The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent.
- The professors do not know how to adapt their capstone / project-level courses. Core CS is obviously still the same, but for courses where the goal is to build a 'complex system', no one knows what qualifies as 'complex' anymore. The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era. The capabilities are also advancing so quickly that any answer they arrive at today could be stale in a month.
FWIW.
- nateburke 7mo agoInteresting that the algorithmic finance firms are still recruiting. Perhaps they still need a pipeline of rigorous thinkers, or are unwilling to cede significant influence over P+L to llms.
- dzink 7mo agoBecause the market is eternal competition. If one does something that works others have to figure it out and nobody puts their ideas in open source.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoHow much drastic would things be if these corporations do open source it? I like to think that markets are fairly efficient so they are fighting tooth and nail for micro-percentage points which granted can be billions but usually what these companies really do is short of fraud at times which can be celebrated by finance (Jane Street frauding Indian investors) My opinion is that they aren't worried about their competitors so much as the govt.'s patching the loopholes that they do because the only way they are a net sum positive game (in my opinion) is that they make money from the losses of the average person and that too in fraudulent manners at time. Jane Street's $5 Billion Derivatives Scam Rocks SEBI :https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/jane-street-sebi-scandal-derivatives-trading-india/article69818766.ece https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/jane-street-sebi-scan...
- _se 7mo agoTyping code has never been the difficult part of quant finance.
- red-iron-pine 7mo agoalcohol tolerance, patience, and willingness to work 80 hours a week are probably more important.
- _se 7mo agoDefinitely the first two, but the latter is not particularly common at most firms. It's hard to put in the type of thought that you need when you're working that much. It's not slinging power points. 55-60 is much more common.
- SolubleSnake 7mo agoIn the future it will be considered one of the most unusual cultural/social decisions ever, that large financial services firms are as they are in the Western world. I have never seen a group of people so frantically doing nothing of any value.
- jazz9k 7mo agoWhen I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.
- Xelbair 7mo agoI wish it was decade for me, in early 2010s they were still teaching 90s approach to handling complex projects(upfront design, with custom DSL for each project and fully modelled by BA without any contact with actual users, with domain experts being siloed away - and all of that connected to codegen tools for xml from the 90s)
- super256 7mo agoI had to deal with Java codegens from UML specs in 2021. So, nothing has changed! :')
- Divisibly3 7mo agoStill there, cs bachelor
- reactordev 7mo agoBack when soap wasn’t just for hygiene.
- galangalalgol 7mo agoI still see software sold as soa compliant, whatever that means. I think we have just started recycling and mixing sw memes at this loint. Like you see someone wearing bell-bottoms with an 80s dayglo jacket. We do agile soap waterfall kanban model driven design here.
- reactordev 7mo agoSomeone needs to release SloppyJoe
- fergie 7mo ago> They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus Really? As in FAANG has stopped recruiting graduates?
- karmakurtisaani 7mo agoThey still probably do, but mainly in India.
- compounding_it 7mo agoFAANG employees here are cheap to hire. They work very hard to remain rich or become rich from nothing (50-60LPA will basically make you rich in 5-6 years if you save and invest well). Leetcode grind and competitive problem solving is Indian childhood bread and butter these days. And given how much househelp exists in India this kind of model is perfectly suited to be outsourced to young and middle aged Indians who have virtually no life beyond CTC anymore. I’m just surprised it took them this long to outsource. The risk of course is people start their own companies learning from big tech and Indians get more UPI like tech.
- bdangubic 7mo agoIf the Democrats were smart (they are not) they could landslide next election (and 5 more) by running a simple campaign, “Americans First,” the core of which would be to slap 1000% tax of any job which is outsources. Your company wants to hire someone from X, for every dollar paid in salary you have to pay $100 to the IRS.
- red-iron-pine 7mo agothen they'd immediately create an indian subsidiary, Google SEAsia, and the hire through them that's what many do anyway there could be a tax on offshoring in general but good luck getting that passed, or enforcing it
- 7mo ago
- someguyiguess 7mo agoTo be fair, college CS programs have always been decades behind in my experience. Maybe schools like Stanford and MIT are different but the majority of CS programs are not teaching tech that is actually used in the business world.
- alistairSH 7mo agoMaybe I’m an oddball, but I’d rather hire a new grad with sound fundamentals, but learned on an older tech stack, then somebody with all the buzzwords but no fundamentals. And I’ve always found summer internships to be good way to find out. Even better if the candidate is willing to work part-time through their senior year.
- compounding_it 7mo agoThe Pythagoras theorem doesn’t change even if you use an LLM. Fundamentals shouldn’t either. Don’t see why schools should see this any differently.
- daymanstep 7mo agoI agree. That's why universities should never teach any practical real world programming languages. They should stick to Scheme and MMIX.
- alistairSH 7mo agoNot sure if that's sarcasm or not, but when I was in uni (late 90s), it was C++, which was very much a practical real-world language. There was a bit of JavaScript and web stuff, but not much (but Javascript was only 4 years old when I was a senior, so...).
- lenkite 7mo agoI don't mind Scheme - love it. But MMIX is one heck of a convoluted, "fantasy-alien" assembly language that I cannot stand. Gave up reading TAOCP because of it. Knuth should have stuck to pseudo-code or plain C.
- mathisfun123 7mo ago> Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent. This is the most made up thing I've ever seen on hn. Those firms hire probably 10 new grads a year (maybe combined!). Unless you're saying the collective talent graduating "high-tier CS programs" numbers in the 10s, this is literally impossible.
- _se 7mo agoWay, way more than 10, but I agree with you that they are not taking even 1% of tech talent per year.
- boshalfoshal 7mo agoyeah and 2s has not been doing too hot for a few years now. Jane street I buy - they tend to recruit a lot of CMU students. But definitely less than < 15 of the new grads they hire each year are from CMU. They maybe hire on the order of 50-100 new grad SWEs a year.
- tayo42 7mo ago> but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era. I have no idea what is complicated anymore. You can build a 3d game engine in a weekend or two with Ai.