4 ms·

Computer science enrollment data suddenly shows a big drop

47 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago

garbawarb 7mo ago
There was a golden age (2010-2020 or so?) when a CS degree of as basically an easy ticket to the upper middle class. Unlike similar well-paying jobs like law or medicine, a bachelor's degree was enough. Now it's not easy to get a job as a new grad, so there are fewer people getting into the discipline whose primary reason to study it was money.
- fatnoah 7mo ago
  CS started as a major for "computer nerds" who were very into computers. Computers were a hobby for virtually every one of my CS classmates in the 90's. Studying computer science was an extension of that interest, so majoring in CS made sense. Fast forward a decade or two, and it is like you said, people who don't have a strong interest in computers starting taking CS as a major as a path to jobs and income. Now, as a manager of engineering teams, I'm constantly surprised by Software Engineers that don't even own their own computers and/or have very little knowledge about how they work.
  - lvl155 7mo ago
    So you hire people who “don’t even own their own computers?” You might be the problem then.
- stvltvs 7mo ago
  CS hiring has always been very cyclical, and there have been more flush times prior to 2010 where CS more or less guaranteed a good paying job.
- bluGill 7mo ago
  There have always been ups and downs in the economy. This isn't the first recession where programmers were hit harder than other jobs. There have been other recessions where programmers were one of the few places where everyone was hiring. You can substitute every single possible profession for programmers above and still have a trust. Even things like groceries (everyone needs to eat) still has ups and downs (some recessions people go to restaurants less and so are good; others they switch to low margin staples and profits go down).
- goodcanadian 7mo ago
  CS was viewed as a golden ticket at least as far back as 2000. Even then, there were people doing the degree who had no interest in the subject, but thought it would get them a good salary.
  - jgwil2 7mo ago
    Seemed to really accelerate around 2007-2008 when Facebook became massive and turned a bunch of kids into billionaires overnight. After that it sort of turned into a gold rush, and we were the shovels.
- TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
  > There was a golden age (2010-2020 or so?) Also during the Dot Com era. Pretty much every cycle lead to more people getting into the field.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
cedws 7mo ago
Gen Z has a very doomeristic view towards CS careers now due to social media influencers prematurely dismissing CS/software paths as a dead end or impossible to break into because of AI. I know the job market can suck for graduates right now, but I do believe studying CS can still lead to decent paying careers. There's always going to be demand for people who understand code, who can break down complex problems and bring a problem solving mindset. LLMs don't solve everything. The drop in CS students ironically may create a vacuum that allows us employed engineers to demand even higher compensation.
- faangguyindia 7mo ago
  It's not doomerism. I've seen this happen at companies. I was talking to a guy who wanted uptime monitoring. So, he told the executive who called the uptimerobot but then other guy rolled out his uptime robot using AI in 60 minutes and deployed along with centralized logging and it costs the company only $5 VPS. And honestly it works just as good, I've seen companies are refusing to pay for external tools and building leaner version using AI. You can build a SaaS faster now but the need for SaaS is on decline. I've moved to deploying on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, why? Because devops is completely reduced to few minutes worth of work using agents.
  - cassianoleal 7mo ago
    You don't need AI for that. Just deploy Uptime Kuma or similar to a VPS and job done. I can do that in about 15 min vs. your 60 min. Of course, this is not a production-grade deployment. To get there, I'd need to build images on pipelines, scan them, test them, publish artefacts, write up the IaC to manage the cloud resources, add monitoring around the solution, ... Deploying a simple piece of software on a custom server was never difficult or slow to do.
    - faangguyindia 7mo ago
      You need to invest time in learning its configuration and features you probably won't even need.
eleventen 7mo ago
https://archive.ph/IbTFW https://archive.ph/IbTFW
62727384848 7mo ago
[flagged]
alexfromapex 7mo ago
Our government failed the citizens and let outsourcing and wage suppression destroy the US tech industry...positioning the country far behind other countries in technology supremacy for at least a decade to come
- adjejmxbdjdn 7mo ago
  And yet, CS was the fastest growing employment category with some of the highest and among the fastest growing salaries in the nation for the past 2 decades despite the fact that outsourcing has been around since the 90s. The fact that this changed in the last 2 years right when AI became feasible is just a coincidence. It’s actually finally outsourcing destroying the grad job market nearly 3 decades later.
  - bluGill 7mo ago
    Nothing changed in the past 2 years except we had another recession. Just like very other recession, people are looking for something to blame. Out sourcing has long been a popular thing to blame. This time blaming AI is the fad. There will be more recessions in the future and people will blame some other fad next time (or perhaps the same). In the end though it is the economy.
- bmurphy1976 7mo ago
  It started long before tech. It started with manufacturing. Everything has been replaced with financial manipulation and rent-seeking.
- selectodude 7mo ago
  You don’t have a god given right as an American to a mid-high six figure income working in tech and I’m not sure how you can see Anthropic playing whack-a-mole trying to keep the Chinese from distilling their models and say that the US isn’t still on the inside track with this stuff.
  - nslsm 7mo ago
    Corporations don’t have a God-given right to manipulate the market by outsourcing the work to the detriment of the natives, yet they make good use of it!
ModernMech 7mo ago
I was just at the largest career / college expo for high schoolers in the greater NYC area yesterday. It’s anecdotal but the two most asked about majors at the fair were #1 mechanical engineering and #2 computer science. I gave away all the materials we had and I had left thinking “this will be plenty”. So let’s just wait a bit before we say it hit a wall.
hgoel 7mo ago
We can count on the racists to come out of the woodworks to comment on this.
- gjsman-1000 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - hgoel 7mo ago
    Every racist claims to be justified in their prejudices against and generalizations of large groups of people.
zipy124 7mo ago
People realised that acamedia is not set up to train people for jobs, but set up to teach people. These two roles are at odds with each other.
- KerrAvon 7mo ago
  Care to elaborate? This sounds like a prelude to an argument to funnel more people into vocational schools/more funding for vocational schools. (Not a criticism! I don't personally feel informed enough to have an opinion on this subject.)
  - zipy124 7mo ago
    I don't personally have an opinion yet on what is the correct way to do things, I can only talk from my own personal experience within Academia in the UK as both a student and teacher with Computer Science. The prime example is that most software roles in the economy are (or where, perhaps AI will change this, I do not know) simple web-dev/CRUD/SQL roles. Specifically Python/JS was a high-demand skill. This pushed universities to get rid of lower level courses such as concurrency/computer architecture, C/C++/assembly, or more maths based modules such as logic, in favour of more web-dev/software/AI/data-science modules. One could (and I do) argue that this is effectively turning computer science degrees into more of a software engineering degrees piece by piece, thus turning univerisities into vocational schools. Now here lies the question. Is this correct? Should universities be vocational schools? Or should they be seperate? Personally my feeling is that universities are not set up well for this method of teaching, and it would be much better for everyone involved if the students were instead taught through apprenticeship or vocational schools, which tend to be significantly cheaper (or even pay) for the student, whilst making sure that the university degree can stay focused within academia and funneling a good research pipeline. Instead my view is that politicans have pushed many young adults into expensive degree programs that they did not need, with the false promise that it would give them emplolyement (which was never the goal of a university in the first place). This isn't good for the students (who are saddled with debt), the employers (who end up having to train the juniors anyway) or the economy (which now has less money in it due to the large drain on disposable income from student loan repayments).
rizza 7mo ago
The same thing happened in dentistry, law, EE, some medical specialties, vets. Job path gets seen as a golden ticket to high pay for low to medium effort and people pile into the profession and saturate the market. Then some thing happens, a recession, technological innovation, or geopolitical/geo-economic shift, and the demand changes dramatically. These things work in cycles, happened before in the .com bust, and this will take 5-10 years to work its way out. The good news is that for the new grads who manage to hang on they will make a killing as the demand for mids and seniors will be insane due to the lack of qualified candidates available.
- someguydave 7mo ago
  Uhh dentists doctors and EEs are low effort jobs?
  - zetsurin 7mo ago
    seriously. I don't see how CS is low effort either, maybe they mean physically low effort.
    - znpy 7mo ago
      > I don't see how CS is low effort either, maybe they mean physically low effort. It's pretty common in the us to sell software engineering-centric courses (bachelors) for computer science courses. software engineering is a thing, computer science is something else. actual computer science is not trivial at all. the math gets hard. software engineering on the other hand is way more shallow in this sense... rightfully so, don't get me wrong.
      - wakawaka28 7mo ago
        Software engineering is not necessarily shallow in any sense. Reasoning about large and imperfect systems can be so much harder than finding average publishable CS results. But the difficulties are often so particular to the software and situations that it isn't of interest to academics.
farceSpherule 7mo ago
[dead]
jerf 7mo ago
It is easy to forget sometimes in the excitement, but nobody has been using (2026) AI for 20 years. We're all still new. I am sure that in the next year, something will be found that is fairly exciting, and something we could all be doing right now, but it's simply that nobody has thought of it yet. Or something that is today common practice will become generally considered an anti-pattern and common practice will have some replacement for it that, again, nothing stops us from doing it today but nobody has thought of it yet, because we're all newbs. (One candidate example for this is the discussion I've seen in the last few days about not trying to negate something, to say "Don't do X", but instead stay positive because eventually the negation gets lost in the context window and you're better off just not putting the idea in the LLM's mind at all, where "Don't do X" comes to be seen as an LLM antipattern.) One of the consequences of none of us having used AI for long enough is that we don't know how to onboard developers in an age of AI. This will be, by necessity, transient. Eventually we're going to max out what a person can do and we'll need more people. The supply of existing engineers will be limited. We will be forced to discover how to onboard new engineers. But at the moment we've got our hands full, and we don't know how to do it. The irony is, the best time to join a field is often exactly when the enrollment dips and the worst can be precisely when it is the most popular. Start a programming college program today and the odds that in 4 years we'll have onboarding figured out and have developed some sort of need for fresh developers is pretty decent. But I don't know what to do about the fact that the standard CS curriculum was already of debatable relevance to me in the late 90s and I don't know of what relevance it will be in four years except to guess that it very likely to be even less. I do know that we are again affected by the fact nobody has been doing this for 20 years, like I mentioned above. There is no body of "wisdom" for an AI-powered world to draw on to construct a new curriculum. Universities would be inclined to do the obvious thing and try to chase our current practices with AI but those aren't going to be stable enough to build a curriculum on any time soon, and a real fundamentals-based curriculum may involve less AI than people may think. I know one advantage I have over my younger peers at this point is just a knowledge of what terms to say to the AI to get it to do what I want, words like "event sourced" or "message bus" or "stored procedures", where simply knowing that the concept exists is the bottleneck. I could see a programming curriculum based on touring through a whole whackload of concepts with their pros and cons, or at least, where that is a much larger portion of it. Ask me in 5 years though and I'd almost certainly suggest a completely different curriculum than I would now, though.
incomingpain 7mo ago
My local post-secondary dont teach AI at all. Not even like a teaser course or anything. Technically speaking, they are leftists who publicly oppose AI. They created the new Chief of AI Officer who has no support at all from the univeristy, had to go to politicians for support. Whereas the college straight up opposes AI. But what value is any of their degrees anymore? Suspicious at best.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  So they don't have a machine learning class? Teaching AI is a rather large field are you talking about LLMs/transformers? Are you talking about working with LLMs, which is something that seems to change every 6 months?
  - incomingpain 7mo ago
    >So they don't have a machine learning class? They do! It's a 1 year course about "Introduction to Python" and that's it.Wild. >Teaching AI is a rather large field are you talking about LLMs/transformers? Are you talking about working with LLMs, which is something that seems to change every 6 months? That's a valid point. But that means education is more important as opposed to dont teach it at all.
- louis_fyne 7mo ago
  > they are leftists who publicly oppose AI. They created the new Chief of AI Officer who has no support at all from the univeristy The "leftist" administration created a position while at the same time speaking out against AI? Doesn't seem realistic. > Whereas the college straight up opposes AI. Opposes AI in what way? No courses on it? Does not allow students to utilize it? I have a hard time believing they do not offer a single course on any AI subject. Many colleges are offering it as a post-grad option, at least in Canada. > But what value is any of their degrees anymore? Suspicious at best. In general? I don't understand what you are getting at here.
  - incomingpain 7mo ago
    >The "leftist" administration created a position while at the same time speaking out against AI? Doesn't seem realistic. It is an interesting situation to be sure. Not my place to say what they say or do. I'm just commenting about the situation. >Opposes AI in what way? No courses on it? Does not allow students to utilize it? I have a hard time believing they do not offer a single course on any AI subject. Publicly opposed to the use of AI. If a student is found using it, they are expelled. There's 1 public case where a student used Em-dashes and got accused of cheating. GPTzero says human written, but they got expelled. Probably just 1 extreme story, but i dont know. As for courses. If you look up the 'courses' they do have a machine learning course where it has a single class. "Introduction to Python" That's it. And that's a course, not even a degree or certification. They have a 1 year 'data analytics' masters but it explicitly says it's not machine learning or AI. Here I am thinking university is rarely 2 years, always 3+. Yet this is just 1 year? Odd. >Many colleges are offering it as a post-grad option, at least in Canada. In fact, this was the more interesting case. I go to one of the networking events put on by the college, as a professional and not student. Nothing about AI technically, but the subject comes up often and almost always in negative light. I looked into like being a teacher of AI at the college, but they have nothing at all. >In general? I don't understand what you are getting at here. Sorry. My bad. I have autism and dont communicate well.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
gogobio 7mo ago
I've been in CS professionally for 12 years. This a perfect example of normal distribution at work. By increasing the population, you simply increase the number of people across the entire curve, bumping up the number of high, medium, low paid, as well as unemployed folks with the degrees. The real issue has always been greed - people disproportionately dove into CS because like all hype movements it promised significant income after just 2-4 years, and sometimes not even that, but a month long bootcamp. Once it was sold to the masses as a get rich quick scheme - the disappointment paired with a number of low-achieving grads tripling was unavoidable.
- wakawaka28 7mo ago
  It definitely was oversold, but I don't think it's right to fault people for picking CS because of the money. That is essentially the point of getting a job, and most people do not actually get to live their "passion" -- even those of us who DO truly have a passion for programming. Most careers are only as good as the jobs you get, and most jobs are not amazing. If I have to do something I'm not crazy about, we're talking about degrees of misery and cost/benefit ratios, and that is very personal.
xphos 7mo ago
I think AI emphazes brain dead computer science and script kiddy culture. It just lowers the bar enough to make bad ideas easy enough to implement quickly but good ideas still take longer to produce and argue for. Maybe its a skill issue on my part but I've watch my team rebuild a model I maintain, with AI for been estimating performance changes based on trace following. The Model isn't accurate and was build to bypass working on the real model. They spend someone's full time work for 4 months at this point but the thing they wanted modeled took 1 day by just adding it to the real model. The managers and everyone are so excited by the fact the person did it with AI but I just get really confused because it seems like they just made some worse that has less value because it cannot actually correctly simulate the thing we want to test. Maybe i am being petty and salty but I think the that this is time wasted by any measure. And net-negative value but the team wants to emphasize we are using AI. There have been some productive uses but the productivity trap-doors are about the same as with normal development just people seem more willing to take the trap door ideas now.
- krackers 7mo ago
  >just people seem more willing to take the trap door ideas It's mainly due to pressure from above. People who want to do a good job and are allowed the time to will be fastidious with or without AI. But now AI provides a shortcut and band-aid where things can be papered over or products can be launched quickly. Ship fast and then iterate" doesn't work when you're building on shaky foundations, but good luck convincing people of that.
- sph 7mo ago
  Dunning-Kruger as a service.
rbancroft 7mo ago
When I attended back in the late 90’s, there was a view that once y2k was over and that crisis was dealt with the industry would collapse and there wouldn’t be any jobs. What’s happening now reminds me a lot of that.
juancn 7mo ago
We have an oversupply of CS majors. Lot's of people came to the craft chasing the money. It's probably a good thing that the hype starts to die and we're seeing a market correction, hopefully back to a saner structure.
rdudek 7mo ago
This just reminds me of that old meme where a product manager says something like "Why am I paying you $200k/yr when I can just copy code from StackOverflow?" and the engineer responded "You pay me that because I make sure the code you copied is the right code". I have a feeling we're in a similar situation here for AI. Sure, anyone can create AI slop code, but to fully take advantage of it, you need someone that understands the whole chain of design and development to make it fully work and integrate with existing systems. I think we're in for an era where many folks will be filtered out and those who know and understand code, will be in high-demand.
yardie 7mo ago
Xennial here! Graduated after Y2K, 9-11, and the dot bomb era. A lot of us lost 3-4 years of early career advancement due to layoffs that primarily affected the tech industry. It was interesting times to go into job interviews as a new graduate and find former Yahoo/AOL/SGI/Intel engineers sitting for the same entry-level developer role. You knew you weren't getting that job, when you can get a highly experienced dev for the same pay. I'm not sure what the future will bring but stay humble and hungry.

47 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago

There was a golden age (2010-2020 or so?) when a CS degree of as basically an easy ticket to the upper middle class. Unlike similar well-paying jobs like law or medicine, a bachelor's degree was enough. Now it's not easy to get a job as a new grad, so there are fewer people getting into the discipline whose primary reason to study it was money.

fatnoah 7mo ago
CS started as a major for "computer nerds" who were very into computers. Computers were a hobby for virtually every one of my CS classmates in the 90's. Studying computer science was an extension of that interest, so majoring in CS made sense. Fast forward a decade or two, and it is like you said, people who don't have a strong interest in computers starting taking CS as a major as a path to jobs and income. Now, as a manager of engineering teams, I'm constantly surprised by Software Engineers that don't even own their own computers and/or have very little knowledge about how they work.
- lvl155 7mo ago
  So you hire people who “don’t even own their own computers?” You might be the problem then.
stvltvs 7mo ago
CS hiring has always been very cyclical, and there have been more flush times prior to 2010 where CS more or less guaranteed a good paying job.
bluGill 7mo ago
There have always been ups and downs in the economy. This isn't the first recession where programmers were hit harder than other jobs. There have been other recessions where programmers were one of the few places where everyone was hiring. You can substitute every single possible profession for programmers above and still have a trust. Even things like groceries (everyone needs to eat) still has ups and downs (some recessions people go to restaurants less and so are good; others they switch to low margin staples and profits go down).
goodcanadian 7mo ago
CS was viewed as a golden ticket at least as far back as 2000. Even then, there were people doing the degree who had no interest in the subject, but thought it would get them a good salary.
- jgwil2 7mo ago
  Seemed to really accelerate around 2007-2008 when Facebook became massive and turned a bunch of kids into billionaires overnight. After that it sort of turned into a gold rush, and we were the shovels.
TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
> There was a golden age (2010-2020 or so?) Also during the Dot Com era. Pretty much every cycle lead to more people getting into the field.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

cedws 7mo ago

Gen Z has a very doomeristic view towards CS careers now due to social media influencers prematurely dismissing CS/software paths as a dead end or impossible to break into because of AI. I know the job market can suck for graduates right now, but I do believe studying CS can still lead to decent paying careers. There's always going to be demand for people who understand code, who can break down complex problems and bring a problem solving mindset. LLMs don't solve everything. The drop in CS students ironically may create a vacuum that allows us employed engineers to demand even higher compensation.

faangguyindia 7mo ago
It's not doomerism. I've seen this happen at companies. I was talking to a guy who wanted uptime monitoring. So, he told the executive who called the uptimerobot but then other guy rolled out his uptime robot using AI in 60 minutes and deployed along with centralized logging and it costs the company only $5 VPS. And honestly it works just as good, I've seen companies are refusing to pay for external tools and building leaner version using AI. You can build a SaaS faster now but the need for SaaS is on decline. I've moved to deploying on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, why? Because devops is completely reduced to few minutes worth of work using agents.
- cassianoleal 7mo ago
  You don't need AI for that. Just deploy Uptime Kuma or similar to a VPS and job done. I can do that in about 15 min vs. your 60 min. Of course, this is not a production-grade deployment. To get there, I'd need to build images on pipelines, scan them, test them, publish artefacts, write up the IaC to manage the cloud resources, add monitoring around the solution, ... Deploying a simple piece of software on a custom server was never difficult or slow to do.
  - faangguyindia 7mo ago
    You need to invest time in learning its configuration and features you probably won't even need.

eleventen 7mo ago

https://archive.ph/IbTFW https://archive.ph/IbTFW

62727384848 7mo ago

[flagged]

alexfromapex 7mo ago

Our government failed the citizens and let outsourcing and wage suppression destroy the US tech industry...positioning the country far behind other countries in technology supremacy for at least a decade to come

adjejmxbdjdn 7mo ago
And yet, CS was the fastest growing employment category with some of the highest and among the fastest growing salaries in the nation for the past 2 decades despite the fact that outsourcing has been around since the 90s. The fact that this changed in the last 2 years right when AI became feasible is just a coincidence. It’s actually finally outsourcing destroying the grad job market nearly 3 decades later.
- bluGill 7mo ago
  Nothing changed in the past 2 years except we had another recession. Just like very other recession, people are looking for something to blame. Out sourcing has long been a popular thing to blame. This time blaming AI is the fad. There will be more recessions in the future and people will blame some other fad next time (or perhaps the same). In the end though it is the economy.
bmurphy1976 7mo ago
It started long before tech. It started with manufacturing. Everything has been replaced with financial manipulation and rent-seeking.
selectodude 7mo ago
You don’t have a god given right as an American to a mid-high six figure income working in tech and I’m not sure how you can see Anthropic playing whack-a-mole trying to keep the Chinese from distilling their models and say that the US isn’t still on the inside track with this stuff.
- nslsm 7mo ago
  Corporations don’t have a God-given right to manipulate the market by outsourcing the work to the detriment of the natives, yet they make good use of it!

ModernMech 7mo ago

I was just at the largest career / college expo for high schoolers in the greater NYC area yesterday. It’s anecdotal but the two most asked about majors at the fair were #1 mechanical engineering and #2 computer science. I gave away all the materials we had and I had left thinking “this will be plenty”. So let’s just wait a bit before we say it hit a wall.

hgoel 7mo ago

We can count on the racists to come out of the woodworks to comment on this.

gjsman-1000 7mo ago
[flagged]
- hgoel 7mo ago
  Every racist claims to be justified in their prejudices against and generalizations of large groups of people.

zipy124 7mo ago

People realised that acamedia is not set up to train people for jobs, but set up to teach people. These two roles are at odds with each other.

KerrAvon 7mo ago
Care to elaborate? This sounds like a prelude to an argument to funnel more people into vocational schools/more funding for vocational schools. (Not a criticism! I don't personally feel informed enough to have an opinion on this subject.)
- zipy124 7mo ago
  I don't personally have an opinion yet on what is the correct way to do things, I can only talk from my own personal experience within Academia in the UK as both a student and teacher with Computer Science. The prime example is that most software roles in the economy are (or where, perhaps AI will change this, I do not know) simple web-dev/CRUD/SQL roles. Specifically Python/JS was a high-demand skill. This pushed universities to get rid of lower level courses such as concurrency/computer architecture, C/C++/assembly, or more maths based modules such as logic, in favour of more web-dev/software/AI/data-science modules. One could (and I do) argue that this is effectively turning computer science degrees into more of a software engineering degrees piece by piece, thus turning univerisities into vocational schools. Now here lies the question. Is this correct? Should universities be vocational schools? Or should they be seperate? Personally my feeling is that universities are not set up well for this method of teaching, and it would be much better for everyone involved if the students were instead taught through apprenticeship or vocational schools, which tend to be significantly cheaper (or even pay) for the student, whilst making sure that the university degree can stay focused within academia and funneling a good research pipeline. Instead my view is that politicans have pushed many young adults into expensive degree programs that they did not need, with the false promise that it would give them emplolyement (which was never the goal of a university in the first place). This isn't good for the students (who are saddled with debt), the employers (who end up having to train the juniors anyway) or the economy (which now has less money in it due to the large drain on disposable income from student loan repayments).

rizza 7mo ago

The same thing happened in dentistry, law, EE, some medical specialties, vets. Job path gets seen as a golden ticket to high pay for low to medium effort and people pile into the profession and saturate the market. Then some thing happens, a recession, technological innovation, or geopolitical/geo-economic shift, and the demand changes dramatically. These things work in cycles, happened before in the .com bust, and this will take 5-10 years to work its way out. The good news is that for the new grads who manage to hang on they will make a killing as the demand for mids and seniors will be insane due to the lack of qualified candidates available.

someguydave 7mo ago
Uhh dentists doctors and EEs are low effort jobs?
- zetsurin 7mo ago
  seriously. I don't see how CS is low effort either, maybe they mean physically low effort.
  - znpy 7mo ago
    > I don't see how CS is low effort either, maybe they mean physically low effort. It's pretty common in the us to sell software engineering-centric courses (bachelors) for computer science courses. software engineering is a thing, computer science is something else. actual computer science is not trivial at all. the math gets hard. software engineering on the other hand is way more shallow in this sense... rightfully so, don't get me wrong.
    - wakawaka28 7mo ago
      Software engineering is not necessarily shallow in any sense. Reasoning about large and imperfect systems can be so much harder than finding average publishable CS results. But the difficulties are often so particular to the software and situations that it isn't of interest to academics.

farceSpherule 7mo ago

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jerf 7mo ago

It is easy to forget sometimes in the excitement, but nobody has been using (2026) AI for 20 years. We're all still new. I am sure that in the next year, something will be found that is fairly exciting, and something we could all be doing right now, but it's simply that nobody has thought of it yet. Or something that is today common practice will become generally considered an anti-pattern and common practice will have some replacement for it that, again, nothing stops us from doing it today but nobody has thought of it yet, because we're all newbs. (One candidate example for this is the discussion I've seen in the last few days about not trying to negate something, to say "Don't do X", but instead stay positive because eventually the negation gets lost in the context window and you're better off just not putting the idea in the LLM's mind at all, where "Don't do X" comes to be seen as an LLM antipattern.) One of the consequences of none of us having used AI for long enough is that we don't know how to onboard developers in an age of AI. This will be, by necessity, transient. Eventually we're going to max out what a person can do and we'll need more people. The supply of existing engineers will be limited. We will be forced to discover how to onboard new engineers. But at the moment we've got our hands full, and we don't know how to do it. The irony is, the best time to join a field is often exactly when the enrollment dips and the worst can be precisely when it is the most popular. Start a programming college program today and the odds that in 4 years we'll have onboarding figured out and have developed some sort of need for fresh developers is pretty decent. But I don't know what to do about the fact that the standard CS curriculum was already of debatable relevance to me in the late 90s and I don't know of what relevance it will be in four years except to guess that it very likely to be even less. I do know that we are again affected by the fact nobody has been doing this for 20 years, like I mentioned above. There is no body of "wisdom" for an AI-powered world to draw on to construct a new curriculum. Universities would be inclined to do the obvious thing and try to chase our current practices with AI but those aren't going to be stable enough to build a curriculum on any time soon, and a real fundamentals-based curriculum may involve less AI than people may think. I know one advantage I have over my younger peers at this point is just a knowledge of what terms to say to the AI to get it to do what I want, words like "event sourced" or "message bus" or "stored procedures", where simply knowing that the concept exists is the bottleneck. I could see a programming curriculum based on touring through a whole whackload of concepts with their pros and cons, or at least, where that is a much larger portion of it. Ask me in 5 years though and I'd almost certainly suggest a completely different curriculum than I would now, though.

incomingpain 7mo ago

My local post-secondary dont teach AI at all. Not even like a teaser course or anything. Technically speaking, they are leftists who publicly oppose AI. They created the new Chief of AI Officer who has no support at all from the univeristy, had to go to politicians for support. Whereas the college straight up opposes AI. But what value is any of their degrees anymore? Suspicious at best.

pixl97 7mo ago
So they don't have a machine learning class? Teaching AI is a rather large field are you talking about LLMs/transformers? Are you talking about working with LLMs, which is something that seems to change every 6 months?
- incomingpain 7mo ago
  >So they don't have a machine learning class? They do! It's a 1 year course about "Introduction to Python" and that's it.Wild. >Teaching AI is a rather large field are you talking about LLMs/transformers? Are you talking about working with LLMs, which is something that seems to change every 6 months? That's a valid point. But that means education is more important as opposed to dont teach it at all.
louis_fyne 7mo ago
> they are leftists who publicly oppose AI. They created the new Chief of AI Officer who has no support at all from the univeristy The "leftist" administration created a position while at the same time speaking out against AI? Doesn't seem realistic. > Whereas the college straight up opposes AI. Opposes AI in what way? No courses on it? Does not allow students to utilize it? I have a hard time believing they do not offer a single course on any AI subject. Many colleges are offering it as a post-grad option, at least in Canada. > But what value is any of their degrees anymore? Suspicious at best. In general? I don't understand what you are getting at here.
- incomingpain 7mo ago
  >The "leftist" administration created a position while at the same time speaking out against AI? Doesn't seem realistic. It is an interesting situation to be sure. Not my place to say what they say or do. I'm just commenting about the situation. >Opposes AI in what way? No courses on it? Does not allow students to utilize it? I have a hard time believing they do not offer a single course on any AI subject. Publicly opposed to the use of AI. If a student is found using it, they are expelled. There's 1 public case where a student used Em-dashes and got accused of cheating. GPTzero says human written, but they got expelled. Probably just 1 extreme story, but i dont know. As for courses. If you look up the 'courses' they do have a machine learning course where it has a single class. "Introduction to Python" That's it. And that's a course, not even a degree or certification. They have a 1 year 'data analytics' masters but it explicitly says it's not machine learning or AI. Here I am thinking university is rarely 2 years, always 3+. Yet this is just 1 year? Odd. >Many colleges are offering it as a post-grad option, at least in Canada. In fact, this was the more interesting case. I go to one of the networking events put on by the college, as a professional and not student. Nothing about AI technically, but the subject comes up often and almost always in negative light. I looked into like being a teacher of AI at the college, but they have nothing at all. >In general? I don't understand what you are getting at here. Sorry. My bad. I have autism and dont communicate well.

deleted 7mo ago

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gogobio 7mo ago

I've been in CS professionally for 12 years. This a perfect example of normal distribution at work. By increasing the population, you simply increase the number of people across the entire curve, bumping up the number of high, medium, low paid, as well as unemployed folks with the degrees. The real issue has always been greed - people disproportionately dove into CS because like all hype movements it promised significant income after just 2-4 years, and sometimes not even that, but a month long bootcamp. Once it was sold to the masses as a get rich quick scheme - the disappointment paired with a number of low-achieving grads tripling was unavoidable.

wakawaka28 7mo ago
It definitely was oversold, but I don't think it's right to fault people for picking CS because of the money. That is essentially the point of getting a job, and most people do not actually get to live their "passion" -- even those of us who DO truly have a passion for programming. Most careers are only as good as the jobs you get, and most jobs are not amazing. If I have to do something I'm not crazy about, we're talking about degrees of misery and cost/benefit ratios, and that is very personal.

xphos 7mo ago

I think AI emphazes brain dead computer science and script kiddy culture. It just lowers the bar enough to make bad ideas easy enough to implement quickly but good ideas still take longer to produce and argue for. Maybe its a skill issue on my part but I've watch my team rebuild a model I maintain, with AI for been estimating performance changes based on trace following. The Model isn't accurate and was build to bypass working on the real model. They spend someone's full time work for 4 months at this point but the thing they wanted modeled took 1 day by just adding it to the real model. The managers and everyone are so excited by the fact the person did it with AI but I just get really confused because it seems like they just made some worse that has less value because it cannot actually correctly simulate the thing we want to test. Maybe i am being petty and salty but I think the that this is time wasted by any measure. And net-negative value but the team wants to emphasize we are using AI. There have been some productive uses but the productivity trap-doors are about the same as with normal development just people seem more willing to take the trap door ideas now.

krackers 7mo ago
>just people seem more willing to take the trap door ideas It's mainly due to pressure from above. People who want to do a good job and are allowed the time to will be fastidious with or without AI. But now AI provides a shortcut and band-aid where things can be papered over or products can be launched quickly. Ship fast and then iterate" doesn't work when you're building on shaky foundations, but good luck convincing people of that.
sph 7mo ago
Dunning-Kruger as a service.

rbancroft 7mo ago

When I attended back in the late 90’s, there was a view that once y2k was over and that crisis was dealt with the industry would collapse and there wouldn’t be any jobs. What’s happening now reminds me a lot of that.

juancn 7mo ago

We have an oversupply of CS majors. Lot's of people came to the craft chasing the money. It's probably a good thing that the hype starts to die and we're seeing a market correction, hopefully back to a saner structure.

rdudek 7mo ago

This just reminds me of that old meme where a product manager says something like "Why am I paying you $200k/yr when I can just copy code from StackOverflow?" and the engineer responded "You pay me that because I make sure the code you copied is the right code". I have a feeling we're in a similar situation here for AI. Sure, anyone can create AI slop code, but to fully take advantage of it, you need someone that understands the whole chain of design and development to make it fully work and integrate with existing systems. I think we're in for an era where many folks will be filtered out and those who know and understand code, will be in high-demand.

yardie 7mo ago

Xennial here! Graduated after Y2K, 9-11, and the dot bomb era. A lot of us lost 3-4 years of early career advancement due to layoffs that primarily affected the tech industry. It was interesting times to go into job interviews as a new graduate and find former Yahoo/AOL/SGI/Intel engineers sitting for the same entry-level developer role. You knew you weren't getting that job, when you can get a highly experienced dev for the same pay. I'm not sure what the future will bring but stay humble and hungry.