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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

• faangguyindia 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
      You need to invest time in learning its configuration and features you probably won't even need.
      • cassianoleal 6mo ago
        Ok, 30 minutes.
  • gjsman-1000 6mo ago
    > the need for SaaS is on decline For 5 minutes. The need for cheap SaaS that one person can build and has no uptime requirements or security requirements or legal requirements or ongoing maintenance requirements is indeed declining.
    • pixl97 6mo ago
      Eh, this said I think SaaS offering had gotten overpriced. Coupled with things like they put up stickers that say "We R havin S3curity" rather than actually having secure systems, oh and constant price increases and methods of locking you into their services there was a need for some pushback in the market.
  • mrkramer 6mo ago
    Some things are better when they are outsourced because other companies specialized for that problem set. Just like you won't roll your own cryptography, you won't and can't do everything in-house.
  • hypeatei 6mo ago
    Isn't it too early to declare the vibe coded uptime monitoring as "good" from a business standpoint? NIH syndrome has always been a thing and I don't see how the downsides of creating bespoke systems have changed in the LLM-era. You're now stuck maintaining this "genius" solution, LLMs or not, and onboarding devs/users gets harder the more churn you have.
    • faangguyindia 6mo ago
      It's 100 lines of code, how hard is it to maintain? It's absolutely better than paying for enterprise license of Uptime robo
      • hypeatei 6mo ago
        Okay, so AI probably wasn't critical to crafting a 100 lines of what I'm assuming is python or some other scripting language that pings a url. Second, I don't think 100 lines is going to be as robust as some pre-packaged monitoring solution (open source or enterprise tier) which has a dashboard and auth story baked in along with proper documentation. If that script works for your use case then great, but I don't see how LLMs were a game changer here.
        • faangguyindia 6mo ago
          Big companies would have rolled out their own anyway, but now 2-3 person companies are also not paying for tools like uptime robots. That's the development LLM brought
      • ModernMech 6mo ago
        Those are some famous last words if I’ve ever heard them.
  • asciii 6mo ago
    $5 VPS + your AI subscription?
  • znpy 6mo ago
    > 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. i'm a sysadmin, so i usually watch these things from the side and usually i get called one or two months in to clean up the mess (it happens almost every time). what you have described is funny to me because uptime monitoring for websites (and also other stuff) is pretty much the use case for prometheus' black-box exporter (https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter). assuming you work at a decent company and already have a decent monitoring system (prometheus/alertmanager) it takes 5 minutes to deploy and maybe ten to configure. if you already have infrastructure then it's basically free. if you already have a kubernetes cluster then it's practically already managed. > 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. at a small scale... maybe. in my experience as soon as you start to reach a decent scale, you'll need experienced engineers (software engineers, system engineers) to actually be at the steering wheel.
    • AndrianV 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • sph 6mo ago
    The reverse Dropbox curlftpfs comment.
• amelius 6mo ago
  > I do believe studying CS can still lead to decent paying careers. Yes, for countries like India. With AI, outsourcing becomes much more effective.
  • RugnirViking 6mo ago
    can you elaborate on your thesis as to why? it seems to me, with raw code being less of a bottleneck, things like understanding the spec, polishing, and doing the fuzzy work around the edges become all the more important. These were never strengths of outsourcing. In fact, I think that the fact that those parts are important is a big reason why the profession as a whole wasnt entirely just outsourced, despite the compelling economic reasons for it.
    • amelius 6mo ago
      See my other comment in this thread.
  • faangguyindia 6mo ago
    I was rich even before I came into this field, my family owns lots of agriculture land and I came to this field for passion of it and was never really motivated by money. Thing is AI is taking outsourced jobs in india at much faster rate than elsewhere. The latest layoff coming from Oracle mostly laid off workers in india.
    • 62727384848 6mo ago
      [flagged]
  • wongarsu 6mo ago
    Isn't it the other way around, AI replacing outsourcing? AI can do the implementation work, but you still need the human who needs to specify what has to be done, give architecture guidance and check and accept the resulting work (or reject it, with notes on what to fix). AI coding is basically outsourcing to AI
• _fat_santa 6mo ago
  I feel like CS is just correcting back to what it was. Even back when I was in college (graduated 2017), I noticed there was this clear bifurcation among the students. Alot of the students at that time did it because you could score a great job after college but the smaller cohort were the students that just loved the game. And even back then we had loads of students wash out or graduate then take other jobs after college from the former group. It's no different today except that the group that did it for money are washing out before they even get to college because they fear that AI will take their jobs, meanwhile the latter group is still here and were able to do more and more with AI. It's a truly wild time to be alive in this industry. Half of us are seeing the doom and gloom of AI and the other half are seeing the "next age" happen right before our eyes. And I'll be honest I kinda feel sad for the folks that take the negative view of AI right now. Cause I'm having more fun than I've ever had before in this industry.
  • mdip 6mo ago
    It's kind of always been a wild time to be alive in this industry. You covered people washing out of CS degrees and people getting degrees and then not, ultimately, doing something in the CS field. But what you see in our field that you don't see as often, elsewhere (or -- at all, depending on regulations) is people who ... (1) washed out of the degree because it was competing with their lucrative career as a software developer (or -- more rarely, successful entrepreneur), (2) got a degree in textual biblical studies and had a long career in software development[0] or, you know, other unrelated degree, (3) none of the above, even sometimes incomplete High School education (also[0]). I've been hiring developers for almost 30 years, now, at a variety of employers -- one global multi-national telecom, one "we make a lot of the products other companies pass off as their own work" IoT/small shop, and a couple of video conference/remote-enabling service shops. There are far more degrees out there, today, than there were 30 years ago. My experience, however, is that the necessity of a degree at the companies I've been employed at has gone down. I suspect that's because I worked for "the giant multinational", first, and all of the rest have been startup or smaller/younger shops (typically 5-10 devs, but no more than ~20 at peek). The giant multi-national, though, during my 17 years, changed (early on) to "or equivalent experience" while rarely hiring someone without a degree for most IT positions to routinely interviewing and hiring people without regard for their degree (and focusing on "code you've written" over "whiteboard exercises", too) while still generally favoring candidates with them. At the best shop I've worked for, it was an even mix of "none", "some", "unrelated", "+bootcamp", "CS degrees" and filled with extremely competent, well-paid, developers. It's a whole lot harder to get the experience required to have "equivalent experience" without university/internships/the like, but getting the degree without any relevant work experience along the way isn't a good way to go, either. Around the late 90s (until the bust) and then again a few years later, everyone was pushing kids into CS degrees and the most "interesting" aspect to many of those kids was the starting/long-term earnings against the cost of the 4-year degree. And while, personally, I think "anyone can do it", not "everyone will find it enjoyable to do" like I do. I'm starting to believe that last part is far more rare than I think it is with my 18-year-old son mostly disliking his introductory computer programming class in High School[1]. I don't push "what I do" on them, just like my Dad didn't, but I expose them to it whenever I can (like my Dad -- kind of -- didn't). And I'll never forget when their Mom looked over at my screen and said "So ... is that what you do all day?", and I beamed "Yes" because it really is the most interesting thing in the world to me, and she said "Wow ... I think I'd kill myself." [0] Ok, so that's a specific example of someone I know. [1] Ultimately coming around at the end when his assignment was "make something you want to make."