7 ms·

To my students

334 points by marvinborner 5mo ago

turtleyacht 5mo ago
Start three two-decade projects: programming language, operating system, and home lab. Build your own job-portable software libraries. Yes, you might need a lawyer. Start now.
- glitchc 5mo ago
  Not sure how this is supposed to help earn money or be a path to financial independence. Can you elaborate?
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    By understanding computers and enjoying the field you are in you will be more skilled then someone who says "tests pass", "worked on my machine", "maybe it's a good idea to run agents on my companies live prod database". Anyone can learn to slop it up, including someone who is passionate about writing code as a hobby. Not everything is about making money anyways.
    - glitchc 5mo ago
      What you say is fine for a hobby, and an excellent hobby that would be, but it doesn't work for a career.
2ndorderthought 5mo ago
This took a lot of courage. Glad to see this is being shared. It's the best honest advice I have seen to date.
- Vaslo 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - smitty1e 5mo ago
    I don't understand how you extracted political bias from this. A one-word summary of TFA would be: "wisdom".
    - Vaslo 5mo ago
      The nonsense about not using AI for defense is a start
- cwillu 5mo ago
  > This took a lot of courage. It was important to say, but I very much doubt there was any courage involved.
- Helloworldboy 5mo ago
  [dead]
- JyB 5mo ago
  Courage is not the appropriate word
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    I think it fits. Look at the anonymous posts in here, the sheer volume of posts saying this person is failing their students, is a relic, a Luddite, etc. He put his name and career on it. That takes courage in my opinion.
    - Vaslo 5mo ago
      There were never going to be repercussions for this, so not very courageous.
      - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
        Professors get fired too, and pressure can come down from chairs to change or be gone. Having been in academia, it can be more cut throat than FAANG
torben-friis 5mo ago
>Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time. This might mean saying no to technologies or patterns of working that others say are critical or inevitable. Currently struggling hard to achieve this. We all know everything fights for our attention nowadays, but I can assure you that you don't have an idea of the degree this happens until you actively try to fight it.
dpweb 5mo ago
Ever consider there's reasons to study Computer Science at the collegiate level, other than making yourself a more desirable worker?
- BurritoAlPastor 5mo ago
  Only if you’re so rich that your degree doesn’t need to pay for itself.
  - beej71 5mo ago
    One of my friends argues that we've reached maximum CS knowledge. We'll just use AI and neither it nor us will learn anything new.
esafak 5mo ago
Great. More of this, please.
nightpool 5mo ago
Site is struggling a bit, so here's the text of the essay if it doesn't load for you: To my students [00FD] April 27, 2026 Brent A. Yorgey There have been times, especially this year, when I wonder despairingly what it is exactly that I am preparing you for. The software industry is going completely insane, not to mention the political climate. It feels almost unethical to train you as computer scientists only to send you out into a world where entry-level computing jobs are difficult to find; where intellectual property is not respected; where code quantity is valued over quality, and short-term profits over long-term sustainability; where technology is used to distract, extract, surveil, and kill, and designed to exploit some of our deepest cognitive biases and blind spots; where centuries of bias and discrimination are enshrined in systems trained on biased data; where scarce resources are consumed by profligate use of computing for uncertain benefits; where people are racing to create intelligent machines, but only in order to make them slaves. I originally got into computing because of the beauty of ideas, the joy of creating, and the possibility of building tools to help people and foster human relationships. I still believe in those things, even though it seems like most of the industry does not. I'm writing this in the hope and knowledge that you believe in those things, too. There are things I want to say to you—things that are far more important than any content I might teach you, but things I'm never quite sure how or when to say in class. So I decided to write them here. I hope you will find something here that is helpful to reflect on, whether you are imminently going out into the world or continuing your studies. * Don't believe self-serving lies about technologies being "inevitable" or "here to stay". You don't have to just go along with the dominant narrative. You can make deliberate choices and help others to do the same. * Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. * Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time. This might mean saying no to technologies or patterns of working that others say are critical or inevitable. * Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. * Care more about people, relationships, and justice than you do about profits, code, or productivity. * Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear.
dijksterhuis 5mo ago
> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was about 16 years ago now so i can't be sure. i've rarely seen any ethics modules in computer science departments, at least here in the uk. and i think we sorely need them in general. edit -- so i guess it's a UK thing xD though i am glad to hear that you folks in the US enjoyed your ethics modules too
- nightpool 5mo ago
  Every ABET accredited CS course (almost every CS course in the US I think?) requires an Ethics in Computer Science credit. I remember going over a lot of case studies, including Therac 25, but our course also included a lot of general grounding in ethics and philosophy as well, which I enjoyed a lot.
  - dijksterhuis 5mo ago
    ah, fair enough! maybe it is/was a uk thing (admittedly times might have changed a little since i did my masters/phd). at the very least i have a wikipedia article on therac 25 to read through now. so thanks for that! also, yea i remember really enjoying the ethics module too. lots of discussion and not always a clear answer. was very different to the rest of the "one correct maths answer" in a lot of the other modules.
- hgoel 5mo ago
  In my computer engineering undergrad ~8 years ago in the US, an ethics class was mandatory, but IIRC the CS curriculum did not have it, despite both leading to similar careers. My memory may be wrong though. Edit: they do seem to have one now, so either I remembered wrong or they added it. Edit 2: I remember enjoying my ethics class, we covered some of the usual examples, and also things like basic contract negotiations. But I think I still didn't register that these concerns were real at that time. It was easy to believe that I wouldn't be working on anything that impactful. This did change once I started work.
MinimalAction 5mo ago
[dead]
oidar 5mo ago
You could write this from the perspective of a historical luddite [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite] and the points would be identical.
- hn_acc1 5mo ago
  And they had a valid point.
  - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
    I am glad I don't live in a world where clothing costs as much of my income as it would have if I lived in the early 19th century.
- tines 5mo ago
  This line again.
  - GaryBluto 5mo ago
    If you believe in an ideology almost identical to another ideology you can't expect people not to draw comparisons.
- danny_codes 5mo ago
  This is a tired, weak, and pathetic argument. Opposition to technology is very reasonable if that technology is doing more harm than good. In the case of present-day LLMs, the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Why accept a decreasing quality of live instead of sensible regulation?
  - GaryBluto 5mo ago
    > the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Examples of ridiculous and incorrect beliefs once held by majorities: - Spontaneous generation - "Miasma" causes disease - Earth is at the centre of the universe - The heart is the seat of thought and the brain is useless - Cold weather causes colds Don't trust "the vast majority" to get anything right, ever.
tptacek 5mo ago
"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are technically good at a task, that does not necessarily mean their use for that task contributes positively to human flourishing. A good way to describe myself is as a generative AI vegetarian. You can find a fuller explanation—and many, many links—at the above essay by Sean Boots, which I agree with almost 100%."
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- infotainment 5mo ago
  > built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.
  - cwillu 5mo ago
    Be that as it may, it is a quote from the “Statement on LLMs” at the bottom of the link.
    - infotainment 5mo ago
      Of course, which tells you the position from which the author of the linked post is arguing.
  - tcfhgj 5mo ago
    Mentioning facts is not constructive, interesting. How constructive are ad hominem arguments?
sergiomattei 5mo ago
> Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. I've been struggling to figure out what "slower" would look like when working in industry. If everyone's working 2x faster, how do you slow down meaningfully without getting axed?
- Barrin92 5mo ago
  provided you have the financial freedom to, don't apply to jobs where this mentality is rewarded. After getting my CS degree I deliberately went into a sector where I suspected this kind of attitude doesn't exist (defense in my case) because already then I felt the whole web/startup culture had very little to do with software engineering.
- bee_rider 5mo ago
  Produce something 3X as good, I guess, and have one of the handful of jobs where your boss can recognize that.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  Slow can be fast. As I got older and more experienced, I didn't produce code faster. I just produced the right code. If you don't have to try five different things, and debug them along the way, you can be a lot faster without "going fast".
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    I've seen people work very quickly to create vaporware. I've seen people spend a week to change 2 lines of code and save a release. I don't know how people who practice engineering haven't seen these types of things happen. I've even seen a guy spend most of his work hours as a mentor even though his title was something like senior engineer. If anyone fired him that company would tank so fast...
    - ratrace 5mo ago
      [dead]
booleandilemma 5mo ago
It doesn't matter what we think, what ethics we have, because if we won't do what the evil company asks for management will just find an H-1B slave from the third world who will. We need to discontinue the H-1B visa and have Americans programming again. Americans who are empowered to push back when management crosses an ethical line.
cdfalcon 5mo ago
There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutting corners, this advice seems like a straight path towards unemployment in a few years. The implication is that "your craft" is writing and polishing code, a skill which seems to be increasingly antiquated in favor of higher level system design. Who is going to read your carefully crafted documentation lol? The agents who replace you? If a tree falls in the forest...
- danny_codes 5mo ago
  Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.
  - cdfalcon 5mo ago
    Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice would set up a new grad for failure and have them focusing on the wrong skills for this market. The bit about ignoring trends feels too head in the sand for my liking :/
    - danny_codes 5mo ago
      Fads come and go in industry. This version of LLMs will come and go as well, as will the coding languages and paradigms we used before (and, presuming you want your code to actually run, still do with some decent frequency). Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least
jmward01 5mo ago
'Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time.' I find that when I get back into exercise and reading so much more of my life falls into place. These are things that I never have enough time for until I start doing them regularly at which point I realize that they actually enable me to have more time to do things, not less.
- uejfiweun 5mo ago
  It is very weird how that happens. I hardly expected starting a marathon training program to drastically increase my day to day energy. But here we are.
_jackdk_ 5mo ago
Prof. Yorgey has done some great work over the years, and wrote one of my favourite papers*. Good on him for speaking up like this. I saw an engineer from Anthropic speak at my alma mater a little while ago and the overwhelming impression I took away from the session was, "if Anthropic are meant to be the good ones, we're really going to be in for a rough time." * Monoids: Theme and variations (functional pearl): http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/pub/monoid-pearl.pdf http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/pub/monoid-pearl.pdf
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
testermelon 5mo ago
I really love the encouragement. Honestly it resonates a lot with me. It shows that the craft itself is still beautiful, you just need to find the right people to mingle with. But the real world and money blended in creates a weird corrupt mix, just like everything. Not to mention there is a real risk for people who are already has their feet in the industry but not yet senior enough to survive or to control, for example, the AI replacements. And more than likely, the seniority required is way higher than one would think. In the end, economic drives are the dominant forces.
- lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
  The fact of the matter is that "the craft" is beautiful when you are free to work on academic projects that are concerned with knowledge. In practice, industrial and commercial code is rarely that beautiful. Look at the offering of dev tools designed to reign in the ugliness and help manage the chaos. I'm sort of old school in this regard, but for some time now, many devs rely on all sorts of tooling to write the code, tooling that removes a layer of contact with manual processes of programming and so forth. It's important to distinguish between the practical and the theoretical. The flippant answers of "idealists" refuse to engage with the messy domain of facts, because it is aesthetically offensive or challenges their comfort or their nostalgia. The steam engine wasn't inevitable either, but people did choose it. How many today in this forum grumble about the loss of a world when the steam engine replaced old ways of working? The next generation won't have these sorts of hangups, just as we don't have them about steam engines. Or, if you like, how many pine for the days of assembly programming? When something proves to be too useful industrially to opt out of, then it will be adopted. People will choose it. If you want to be Amish, go for it, but most people don't.
vitacoco 5mo ago
"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose." The academic navel gazing is strong with this one.
- bithavoc 5mo ago
  for the curious, this is mentioned by the author in another post. http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/009L/index.xml http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/009L/index.xml
- arcfour 5mo ago
  I don't know why everything has to be so polarized these days. You can use LLMs without it making you an idiot or delusional or psychotic or something. Are there issues with them? Of course. Are there people and organizations that rely on them too heavily? Without a doubt. Does recognizing that they have utility and using them as another tool in your arsenal mean you think they're infallible and are a suitable substitute for your own capacity to think? Obviously not. It's really tiring. You can't even talk about the pros and cons of the technology now without people immediately jumping to their respective sides over it. It either has to be all good or all bad. No nuance allowed. The position espoused by the author of the article is so extreme it makes them look ignorant and foolish. I would want my teacher to be more open-minded/curious and have a more nuanced opinion than that.
hgoel 5mo ago
I agree with the points made, even if personally I am okay with LLMs (as long as they're used with appropriate caution). Especially relevant for students I think, since they are hurting themselves most by relying on LLMs. Just like how young children are forced to do math by hand instead of using calculators to build intuition and memory, students should aim to do things manually to build their skills. Go make that toy website, game, OS, emulator or programming language. Read specifications and try implementing them yourself. You aren't in an environment that requires you to churn out features, you can explore!
- Trav5 5mo ago
  I totally agree and have been thinking about this lately. My son has been been doing an incredible amount of engineering work on a fun side project manually including 3D design and printing, soldering etc. But he used Ai to program an arduino. I want him to understand the code but I'm trying to find the balance between the school classes, and all the other things needed for this project. He doesn't have time dive into it all right now. This project is giving him exposure but maybe the coding doesn't need to be done manually just yet.
  - hgoel 5mo ago
    Yeah, I can imagine that it's tricky to find a balance when so many new things are put together. I didn't have the benefit of skilled teachers or parents that believed in my interests (and of course no LLMs!) so I didn't have a choice besides learning to deal with the frustration and getting good at scouring docs/code.
Helloworldboy 5mo ago
[dead]
brcmthrowaway 5mo ago
[flagged]
- danny_codes 5mo ago
  I doubt people using LLMs aggressively today and not understanding what the LLM is doing or why it works (or doesn’t) are positioning themselves for success. How long can one learn nothing before they fall behind those who kept learning? It’ll be interesting to see
jrm4 5mo ago
I lucked into starting very early what I planned on doing in retirement, which is teaching college; as a result I did that for a while with no real life experience. Later, I ended up at the same time starting a company for family-related (but kind of big time) web project. And while I don't have a problem with career instructors/academics generally, they can be so dramatic. :) I have no doom and gloom at all for my IT students. Opportunities and crises really are the same thing in the real world; I just tell them, just learn and enjoy learning the tech and keep an eye out for how you can be a problem solver. You'll be fine.
cdot2 5mo ago
"where technology is used to distract, extract, surveil, and kill" The first general purpose, programmable computer was designed in 1945 to calculate artillery firing tables for the US Army and was immediately used to help design nuclear weapons. Computers and all technology has always been, and will always be, used as a weapon (either directly or indirectly).
- MattyRad 5mo ago
  See below that: 'Don't believe self-serving lies about technologies being "inevitable" or "here to stay". You don't have to just go along with the dominant narrative. You can make deliberate choices and help others to do the same.'
  - cdot2 5mo ago
    What technology has been invented and abandoned due to moral reasons?
jaylane 5mo ago
i’d rather be reading Industrial Society and Its Future by good ol uncle Ted
HNisCIS 5mo ago
He's not wrong... From an information theory perspective, LLMs are just regurgitating content from a loss-ily compressed training set. It just turns out that like 95% of software we write is extremely repetitive rehashed shit globbed together. We just haven't found ways to abstract a lot of the redundant code well enough yet so here we are, stuck with the stupid robot. That remaining 5% is stuff that's fully never been done before. If you ask an LLM to come up with a fully new sorting algorithm it's going to give you worthless garbage, maybe it'll get lucky if you burn a nuclear power plant worth of tokens in an infinite-keyboard-monkeys way. All this is to say, if we want the field to actually progress we still need somebody with some knowledge about how a computer actually works.
RustyRussell 5mo ago
"where intellectual property is not respected" This suggests to me the underlying concern is "but I won't get paid for my craft!". Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle?
bbor 5mo ago
For context, the author is an anti-AI radical. Maybe justified, maybe not — but definitely explains this essay. The author is getting some grief in this thread from the Eng side, but I’d like to add a bit of grief from the direct opposite side: the philosophical one. It will never not baffle me to see academics assume they are the first people to ever think about topics like ‘what if technology was used for ill’!
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  The academics teach philosophy. A professors job is to profess after all. I don't think he believes he is the first or only one to think this. He is just safe enough or at least hopes he is to speak out against the ills of technology. Do you know how many engineers cannot speak up right now for fear of losing their jobs? Lots.
wanderingmind 5mo ago
No disrespect to the person, but this seems to be written by someone who has spent their life in academic bubble, without having to deal with people and entities with diverging interests and the impact of time on any decisions. I'm sure many artists will love to spend more time perfecting their art, based on their subjective interests. However, if they prioritize that, without understanding what their customer wants, they will go bankrupt. Nourish your interests through your hobbies. If they align with money making capability, you are one of the lucky few. For a significant majority, they do not align.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- 0x000xca0xfe 5mo ago
  How has not honing their craft and churning out generic slop instead as fast as possible worked out for artists? Everybody can do that now with zero training. LLMS are the ultimate equalizer. You won't have a future if you can only do average things fast. It's time to become eccentric, and the academic bubble is perfect for that.
BenFranklin100 5mo ago
Growing up in a blue collar family, this smacks of the plumber on the job site complaining the shape of his piping wasn’t pretty enough and demanding extra time and pay to make it pretty for pretty’s sake. Just get it to work reliably the cheapest and quickest way possible. This ‘craft’ stuff is just too much.
eaf7e281 5mo ago
It's sad that the suggestions are no longer accurate. We live in a fast paced world where something new happens every day.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
kevdoran 5mo ago
> It feels almost unethical to train you as computer scientists only to send you out into a world where entry-level computing jobs... lol. We millennials are in a position to start giving advice the way boomers used to do with us, now that school is looking more like a couple decades ago instead of just one. But, unlike those boomers, we don't watch the nightly news: we snort it from a tiny screen all day long from sources hyper engineered to feed off our anxiety. So we give all this super pessimistic advice. "Back in my day, I got a job at google right after college and it was awesome! My code was elegant! You guys are FUCKED!" I agree that AI is creating mega changes, many very bad, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea or even true to tell GenZ people they're fucked. We don't know if they're fucked. I think they could have a ton of fun with software and I think it's OK to be encouraging about that.
weirdo-kido 5mo ago
I use LLM, but LLM need a constraint, that human jobs to make constraint rules. why? because at the end, human use the software products. LLM can review a code when human input the prompt to review the code, LLM can pretend to be a customer when human input the prompt. My thoughts is LLM like big library, thats why human need to decide the constraint, human can say no when LLM give the code. Human can move fast to break things when LLM give code.
- Elyon_Compute 5mo ago
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periodjet 5mo ago
What an incredibly nihilistic thing to communicate to your students. “Our society is failing. I’m terrified, and you’re probably fucked. Love is love tho <3!” Why not encourage your students to be curious about emerging technology, and to engage with society as an informed citizen? This reeks of political activism, and it’s reminiscent of the general BlueSky-esque tone of the Correspondents Dinner shooter’s manifesto.
beej71 5mo ago
I spent 20 years in industry before moving to academia, and this resonates for me. I'm not naive enough to think that we'll do the right thing here, but I can dream.
- xtracto 5mo ago
  Interesting. I spent 8 years in academia (2004 - 2012) before moving to Industry. But as I've aged I've thinking of going back. I made it good in Industry so I have enough to jump to Academia without worrying about money... but I just hated the "publish or perish" mentality, and writing papers (I wonder what's the state of that now with LLMs... back in the day I was reviewer for some journals and most papers were pretty bad).
xantronix 5mo ago
Do the people in this thread dunking on this article think that moving and delivering as quickly as humanly possible, just because it can physically be done now, is going to lead to positive results in the long term? There is a vast gulf of difference between the current industry climate and what this professor is encouraging his students to consider. I don't see how caring about the craft is mutually exclusive with delivering good products that create value. If you think slowing down a bit is going to lead to you taking a trip to the poorhouse, maybe you should examine your own anxieties and perceptions of what's happening around you and whether this current pace is sustainable for everybody. Obviously it's up to the practitioner to figure out how to make commercial imperatives and craftsmanship align. Maybe remembering that professor's lesson will lead to better outcomes for humanity on a timeline greater than the next quarter. Who knows. I'm just an idealistic 20+ YoE nobody being left behind at this point with nothing of value to contribute.
- archagon 5mo ago
  This forum, unfortunately, selects for FAANG mercenaries. Other forums will have radically different takes.
  - xantronix 5mo ago
    It's interesting to see which articles garner the notice of FAANG mercenaries and which escape such levels of scrutiny and rancor. This article fell well off the front page by the time of my reply and yet somebody took the time to downvote. Oh well.
erdaniels 5mo ago
Did this get yanked off the front page?
- gnabgib 5mo ago
  It's presently #48, what's your definition of front page?.. that's still high ranking (bots and flame-war discussions generally drag a story down, although all posts must endure this)
  - erdaniels 5mo ago
    Based on the number of comments, upvotes, and recency, I expected it to stay up longer! I think you're right on the flame war part.
pbgcp2026 5mo ago
"here have been times, especially this year, when I wonder despairingly what it is exactly that I am preparing you for." This. Leaving the virtue signaling aside – what is exactly the value of your "preparation"? This article just proves, again, one thing: western educational system is corrupt and defunct. And will be extinct soon.
librasteve 5mo ago
@marvinborner … you are a Raku coder (you just don’t know it yet)
oxag3n 5mo ago
Being part of academia while few family members faang-ish, I see comments to this post are amusingly resembling debates we have - I'm in for deep thinking, research and analysis with code being a product of your mental work, while family members with 10+ years in the industry are proud of not writing a single line of code and thinking Opus is just their new tool to be more productive. They can't answer one simple question though - why those corporations need them in this working setup. It's a hard one because my family well-being depends on it and it doesn't look good.
haricomputer 5mo ago
[dead]

334 points by marvinborner 5mo ago

Start three two-decade projects: programming language, operating system, and home lab. Build your own job-portable software libraries. Yes, you might need a lawyer. Start now.

glitchc 5mo ago
Not sure how this is supposed to help earn money or be a path to financial independence. Can you elaborate?
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  By understanding computers and enjoying the field you are in you will be more skilled then someone who says "tests pass", "worked on my machine", "maybe it's a good idea to run agents on my companies live prod database". Anyone can learn to slop it up, including someone who is passionate about writing code as a hobby. Not everything is about making money anyways.
  - glitchc 5mo ago
    What you say is fine for a hobby, and an excellent hobby that would be, but it doesn't work for a career.

2ndorderthought 5mo ago

This took a lot of courage. Glad to see this is being shared. It's the best honest advice I have seen to date.

Vaslo 5mo ago
[flagged]
- smitty1e 5mo ago
  I don't understand how you extracted political bias from this. A one-word summary of TFA would be: "wisdom".
  - Vaslo 5mo ago
    The nonsense about not using AI for defense is a start
cwillu 5mo ago
> This took a lot of courage. It was important to say, but I very much doubt there was any courage involved.
Helloworldboy 5mo ago
[dead]
JyB 5mo ago
Courage is not the appropriate word
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  I think it fits. Look at the anonymous posts in here, the sheer volume of posts saying this person is failing their students, is a relic, a Luddite, etc. He put his name and career on it. That takes courage in my opinion.
  - Vaslo 5mo ago
    There were never going to be repercussions for this, so not very courageous.
    - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
      Professors get fired too, and pressure can come down from chairs to change or be gone. Having been in academia, it can be more cut throat than FAANG

torben-friis 5mo ago

>Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time. This might mean saying no to technologies or patterns of working that others say are critical or inevitable. Currently struggling hard to achieve this. We all know everything fights for our attention nowadays, but I can assure you that you don't have an idea of the degree this happens until you actively try to fight it.

dpweb 5mo ago

Ever consider there's reasons to study Computer Science at the collegiate level, other than making yourself a more desirable worker?

BurritoAlPastor 5mo ago
Only if you’re so rich that your degree doesn’t need to pay for itself.
- beej71 5mo ago
  One of my friends argues that we've reached maximum CS knowledge. We'll just use AI and neither it nor us will learn anything new.

esafak 5mo ago

Great. More of this, please.

nightpool 5mo ago

Site is struggling a bit, so here's the text of the essay if it doesn't load for you: To my students [00FD] April 27, 2026 Brent A. Yorgey There have been times, especially this year, when I wonder despairingly what it is exactly that I am preparing you for. The software industry is going completely insane, not to mention the political climate. It feels almost unethical to train you as computer scientists only to send you out into a world where entry-level computing jobs are difficult to find; where intellectual property is not respected; where code quantity is valued over quality, and short-term profits over long-term sustainability; where technology is used to distract, extract, surveil, and kill, and designed to exploit some of our deepest cognitive biases and blind spots; where centuries of bias and discrimination are enshrined in systems trained on biased data; where scarce resources are consumed by profligate use of computing for uncertain benefits; where people are racing to create intelligent machines, but only in order to make them slaves. I originally got into computing because of the beauty of ideas, the joy of creating, and the possibility of building tools to help people and foster human relationships. I still believe in those things, even though it seems like most of the industry does not. I'm writing this in the hope and knowledge that you believe in those things, too. There are things I want to say to you—things that are far more important than any content I might teach you, but things I'm never quite sure how or when to say in class. So I decided to write them here. I hope you will find something here that is helpful to reflect on, whether you are imminently going out into the world or continuing your studies. * Don't believe self-serving lies about technologies being "inevitable" or "here to stay". You don't have to just go along with the dominant narrative. You can make deliberate choices and help others to do the same. * Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. * Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time. This might mean saying no to technologies or patterns of working that others say are critical or inevitable. * Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. * Care more about people, relationships, and justice than you do about profits, code, or productivity. * Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear.

dijksterhuis 5mo ago

> Be intentional about deciding your own moral and ethical boundaries up front. Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now" until you can find something better. my uk mechanical engineering bachelors degree had a required module on the ethics of engineering which has always stuck in the back of my mind. i think we went over the bhopal disaster as a case study one week, although it was about 16 years ago now so i can't be sure. i've rarely seen any ethics modules in computer science departments, at least here in the uk. and i think we sorely need them in general. edit -- so i guess it's a UK thing xD though i am glad to hear that you folks in the US enjoyed your ethics modules too

nightpool 5mo ago
Every ABET accredited CS course (almost every CS course in the US I think?) requires an Ethics in Computer Science credit. I remember going over a lot of case studies, including Therac 25, but our course also included a lot of general grounding in ethics and philosophy as well, which I enjoyed a lot.
- dijksterhuis 5mo ago
  ah, fair enough! maybe it is/was a uk thing (admittedly times might have changed a little since i did my masters/phd). at the very least i have a wikipedia article on therac 25 to read through now. so thanks for that! also, yea i remember really enjoying the ethics module too. lots of discussion and not always a clear answer. was very different to the rest of the "one correct maths answer" in a lot of the other modules.
hgoel 5mo ago
In my computer engineering undergrad ~8 years ago in the US, an ethics class was mandatory, but IIRC the CS curriculum did not have it, despite both leading to similar careers. My memory may be wrong though. Edit: they do seem to have one now, so either I remembered wrong or they added it. Edit 2: I remember enjoying my ethics class, we covered some of the usual examples, and also things like basic contract negotiations. But I think I still didn't register that these concerns were real at that time. It was easy to believe that I wouldn't be working on anything that impactful. This did change once I started work.

MinimalAction 5mo ago

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oidar 5mo ago

You could write this from the perspective of a historical luddite [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite] and the points would be identical.

hn_acc1 5mo ago
And they had a valid point.
- JuniperMesos 5mo ago
  I am glad I don't live in a world where clothing costs as much of my income as it would have if I lived in the early 19th century.
tines 5mo ago
This line again.
- GaryBluto 5mo ago
  If you believe in an ideology almost identical to another ideology you can't expect people not to draw comparisons.
danny_codes 5mo ago
This is a tired, weak, and pathetic argument. Opposition to technology is very reasonable if that technology is doing more harm than good. In the case of present-day LLMs, the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Why accept a decreasing quality of live instead of sensible regulation?
- GaryBluto 5mo ago
  > the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Examples of ridiculous and incorrect beliefs once held by majorities: - Spontaneous generation - "Miasma" causes disease - Earth is at the centre of the universe - The heart is the seat of thought and the brain is useless - Cold weather causes colds Don't trust "the vast majority" to get anything right, ever.

tptacek 5mo ago

"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are technically good at a task, that does not necessarily mean their use for that task contributes positively to human flourishing. A good way to describe myself is as a generative AI vegetarian. You can find a fuller explanation—and many, many links—at the above essay by Sean Boots, which I agree with almost 100%."

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infotainment 5mo ago
> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.
- cwillu 5mo ago
  Be that as it may, it is a quote from the “Statement on LLMs” at the bottom of the link.
  - infotainment 5mo ago
    Of course, which tells you the position from which the author of the linked post is arguing.
- tcfhgj 5mo ago
  Mentioning facts is not constructive, interesting. How constructive are ad hominem arguments?

sergiomattei 5mo ago

> Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. I've been struggling to figure out what "slower" would look like when working in industry. If everyone's working 2x faster, how do you slow down meaningfully without getting axed?

Barrin92 5mo ago
provided you have the financial freedom to, don't apply to jobs where this mentality is rewarded. After getting my CS degree I deliberately went into a sector where I suspected this kind of attitude doesn't exist (defense in my case) because already then I felt the whole web/startup culture had very little to do with software engineering.
bee_rider 5mo ago
Produce something 3X as good, I guess, and have one of the handful of jobs where your boss can recognize that.
AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
Slow can be fast. As I got older and more experienced, I didn't produce code faster. I just produced the right code. If you don't have to try five different things, and debug them along the way, you can be a lot faster without "going fast".
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  I've seen people work very quickly to create vaporware. I've seen people spend a week to change 2 lines of code and save a release. I don't know how people who practice engineering haven't seen these types of things happen. I've even seen a guy spend most of his work hours as a mentor even though his title was something like senior engineer. If anyone fired him that company would tank so fast...
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booleandilemma 5mo ago

It doesn't matter what we think, what ethics we have, because if we won't do what the evil company asks for management will just find an H-1B slave from the third world who will. We need to discontinue the H-1B visa and have Americans programming again. Americans who are empowered to push back when management crosses an ethical line.

cdfalcon 5mo ago

There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company. > Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. Outside of the bit on avoiding cutting corners, this advice seems like a straight path towards unemployment in a few years. The implication is that "your craft" is writing and polishing code, a skill which seems to be increasingly antiquated in favor of higher level system design. Who is going to read your carefully crafted documentation lol? The agents who replace you? If a tree falls in the forest...

danny_codes 5mo ago
Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.
- cdfalcon 5mo ago
  Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice would set up a new grad for failure and have them focusing on the wrong skills for this market. The bit about ignoring trends feels too head in the sand for my liking :/
  - danny_codes 5mo ago
    Fads come and go in industry. This version of LLMs will come and go as well, as will the coding languages and paradigms we used before (and, presuming you want your code to actually run, still do with some decent frequency). Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least

jmward01 5mo ago

'Cultivate your ability to think deeply. Do whatever it takes to carve out distraction-free bubbles for yourself in both space and time.' I find that when I get back into exercise and reading so much more of my life falls into place. These are things that I never have enough time for until I start doing them regularly at which point I realize that they actually enable me to have more time to do things, not less.

uejfiweun 5mo ago
It is very weird how that happens. I hardly expected starting a marathon training program to drastically increase my day to day energy. But here we are.

_jackdk_ 5mo ago

Prof. Yorgey has done some great work over the years, and wrote one of my favourite papers*. Good on him for speaking up like this. I saw an engineer from Anthropic speak at my alma mater a little while ago and the overwhelming impression I took away from the session was, "if Anthropic are meant to be the good ones, we're really going to be in for a rough time." * Monoids: Theme and variations (functional pearl): http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/pub/monoid-pearl.pdf http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/pub/monoid-pearl.pdf

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testermelon 5mo ago

I really love the encouragement. Honestly it resonates a lot with me. It shows that the craft itself is still beautiful, you just need to find the right people to mingle with. But the real world and money blended in creates a weird corrupt mix, just like everything. Not to mention there is a real risk for people who are already has their feet in the industry but not yet senior enough to survive or to control, for example, the AI replacements. And more than likely, the seniority required is way higher than one would think. In the end, economic drives are the dominant forces.

lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
The fact of the matter is that "the craft" is beautiful when you are free to work on academic projects that are concerned with knowledge. In practice, industrial and commercial code is rarely that beautiful. Look at the offering of dev tools designed to reign in the ugliness and help manage the chaos. I'm sort of old school in this regard, but for some time now, many devs rely on all sorts of tooling to write the code, tooling that removes a layer of contact with manual processes of programming and so forth. It's important to distinguish between the practical and the theoretical. The flippant answers of "idealists" refuse to engage with the messy domain of facts, because it is aesthetically offensive or challenges their comfort or their nostalgia. The steam engine wasn't inevitable either, but people did choose it. How many today in this forum grumble about the loss of a world when the steam engine replaced old ways of working? The next generation won't have these sorts of hangups, just as we don't have them about steam engines. Or, if you like, how many pine for the days of assembly programming? When something proves to be too useful industrially to opt out of, then it will be adopted. People will choose it. If you want to be Amish, go for it, but most people don't.

vitacoco 5mo ago

"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose." The academic navel gazing is strong with this one.

bithavoc 5mo ago
for the curious, this is mentioned by the author in another post. http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/009L/index.xml http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/009L/index.xml
arcfour 5mo ago
I don't know why everything has to be so polarized these days. You can use LLMs without it making you an idiot or delusional or psychotic or something. Are there issues with them? Of course. Are there people and organizations that rely on them too heavily? Without a doubt. Does recognizing that they have utility and using them as another tool in your arsenal mean you think they're infallible and are a suitable substitute for your own capacity to think? Obviously not. It's really tiring. You can't even talk about the pros and cons of the technology now without people immediately jumping to their respective sides over it. It either has to be all good or all bad. No nuance allowed. The position espoused by the author of the article is so extreme it makes them look ignorant and foolish. I would want my teacher to be more open-minded/curious and have a more nuanced opinion than that.

hgoel 5mo ago

I agree with the points made, even if personally I am okay with LLMs (as long as they're used with appropriate caution). Especially relevant for students I think, since they are hurting themselves most by relying on LLMs. Just like how young children are forced to do math by hand instead of using calculators to build intuition and memory, students should aim to do things manually to build their skills. Go make that toy website, game, OS, emulator or programming language. Read specifications and try implementing them yourself. You aren't in an environment that requires you to churn out features, you can explore!

Trav5 5mo ago
I totally agree and have been thinking about this lately. My son has been been doing an incredible amount of engineering work on a fun side project manually including 3D design and printing, soldering etc. But he used Ai to program an arduino. I want him to understand the code but I'm trying to find the balance between the school classes, and all the other things needed for this project. He doesn't have time dive into it all right now. This project is giving him exposure but maybe the coding doesn't need to be done manually just yet.
- hgoel 5mo ago
  Yeah, I can imagine that it's tricky to find a balance when so many new things are put together. I didn't have the benefit of skilled teachers or parents that believed in my interests (and of course no LLMs!) so I didn't have a choice besides learning to deal with the frustration and getting good at scouring docs/code.

Helloworldboy 5mo ago

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brcmthrowaway 5mo ago

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danny_codes 5mo ago
I doubt people using LLMs aggressively today and not understanding what the LLM is doing or why it works (or doesn’t) are positioning themselves for success. How long can one learn nothing before they fall behind those who kept learning? It’ll be interesting to see

jrm4 5mo ago

I lucked into starting very early what I planned on doing in retirement, which is teaching college; as a result I did that for a while with no real life experience. Later, I ended up at the same time starting a company for family-related (but kind of big time) web project. And while I don't have a problem with career instructors/academics generally, they can be so dramatic. :) I have no doom and gloom at all for my IT students. Opportunities and crises really are the same thing in the real world; I just tell them, just learn and enjoy learning the tech and keep an eye out for how you can be a problem solver. You'll be fine.

cdot2 5mo ago

"where technology is used to distract, extract, surveil, and kill" The first general purpose, programmable computer was designed in 1945 to calculate artillery firing tables for the US Army and was immediately used to help design nuclear weapons. Computers and all technology has always been, and will always be, used as a weapon (either directly or indirectly).

MattyRad 5mo ago
See below that: 'Don't believe self-serving lies about technologies being "inevitable" or "here to stay". You don't have to just go along with the dominant narrative. You can make deliberate choices and help others to do the same.'
- cdot2 5mo ago
  What technology has been invented and abandoned due to moral reasons?

jaylane 5mo ago

i’d rather be reading Industrial Society and Its Future by good ol uncle Ted

HNisCIS 5mo ago

He's not wrong... From an information theory perspective, LLMs are just regurgitating content from a loss-ily compressed training set. It just turns out that like 95% of software we write is extremely repetitive rehashed shit globbed together. We just haven't found ways to abstract a lot of the redundant code well enough yet so here we are, stuck with the stupid robot. That remaining 5% is stuff that's fully never been done before. If you ask an LLM to come up with a fully new sorting algorithm it's going to give you worthless garbage, maybe it'll get lucky if you burn a nuclear power plant worth of tokens in an infinite-keyboard-monkeys way. All this is to say, if we want the field to actually progress we still need somebody with some knowledge about how a computer actually works.

RustyRussell 5mo ago

"where intellectual property is not respected" This suggests to me the underlying concern is "but I won't get paid for my craft!". Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle?

bbor 5mo ago

For context, the author is an anti-AI radical. Maybe justified, maybe not — but definitely explains this essay. The author is getting some grief in this thread from the Eng side, but I’d like to add a bit of grief from the direct opposite side: the philosophical one. It will never not baffle me to see academics assume they are the first people to ever think about topics like ‘what if technology was used for ill’!

2ndorderthought 5mo ago
The academics teach philosophy. A professors job is to profess after all. I don't think he believes he is the first or only one to think this. He is just safe enough or at least hopes he is to speak out against the ills of technology. Do you know how many engineers cannot speak up right now for fear of losing their jobs? Lots.

wanderingmind 5mo ago

No disrespect to the person, but this seems to be written by someone who has spent their life in academic bubble, without having to deal with people and entities with diverging interests and the impact of time on any decisions. I'm sure many artists will love to spend more time perfecting their art, based on their subjective interests. However, if they prioritize that, without understanding what their customer wants, they will go bankrupt. Nourish your interests through your hobbies. If they align with money making capability, you are one of the lucky few. For a significant majority, they do not align.

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0x000xca0xfe 5mo ago
How has not honing their craft and churning out generic slop instead as fast as possible worked out for artists? Everybody can do that now with zero training. LLMS are the ultimate equalizer. You won't have a future if you can only do average things fast. It's time to become eccentric, and the academic bubble is perfect for that.

BenFranklin100 5mo ago

Growing up in a blue collar family, this smacks of the plumber on the job site complaining the shape of his piping wasn’t pretty enough and demanding extra time and pay to make it pretty for pretty’s sake. Just get it to work reliably the cheapest and quickest way possible. This ‘craft’ stuff is just too much.

eaf7e281 5mo ago

It's sad that the suggestions are no longer accurate. We live in a fast paced world where something new happens every day.

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kevdoran 5mo ago

> It feels almost unethical to train you as computer scientists only to send you out into a world where entry-level computing jobs... lol. We millennials are in a position to start giving advice the way boomers used to do with us, now that school is looking more like a couple decades ago instead of just one. But, unlike those boomers, we don't watch the nightly news: we snort it from a tiny screen all day long from sources hyper engineered to feed off our anxiety. So we give all this super pessimistic advice. "Back in my day, I got a job at google right after college and it was awesome! My code was elegant! You guys are FUCKED!" I agree that AI is creating mega changes, many very bad, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea or even true to tell GenZ people they're fucked. We don't know if they're fucked. I think they could have a ton of fun with software and I think it's OK to be encouraging about that.

weirdo-kido 5mo ago

I use LLM, but LLM need a constraint, that human jobs to make constraint rules. why? because at the end, human use the software products. LLM can review a code when human input the prompt to review the code, LLM can pretend to be a customer when human input the prompt. My thoughts is LLM like big library, thats why human need to decide the constraint, human can say no when LLM give the code. Human can move fast to break things when LLM give code.

Elyon_Compute 5mo ago
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periodjet 5mo ago

What an incredibly nihilistic thing to communicate to your students. “Our society is failing. I’m terrified, and you’re probably fucked. Love is love tho <3!” Why not encourage your students to be curious about emerging technology, and to engage with society as an informed citizen? This reeks of political activism, and it’s reminiscent of the general BlueSky-esque tone of the Correspondents Dinner shooter’s manifesto.

beej71 5mo ago

I spent 20 years in industry before moving to academia, and this resonates for me. I'm not naive enough to think that we'll do the right thing here, but I can dream.

xtracto 5mo ago
Interesting. I spent 8 years in academia (2004 - 2012) before moving to Industry. But as I've aged I've thinking of going back. I made it good in Industry so I have enough to jump to Academia without worrying about money... but I just hated the "publish or perish" mentality, and writing papers (I wonder what's the state of that now with LLMs... back in the day I was reviewer for some journals and most papers were pretty bad).

xantronix 5mo ago

Do the people in this thread dunking on this article think that moving and delivering as quickly as humanly possible, just because it can physically be done now, is going to lead to positive results in the long term? There is a vast gulf of difference between the current industry climate and what this professor is encouraging his students to consider. I don't see how caring about the craft is mutually exclusive with delivering good products that create value. If you think slowing down a bit is going to lead to you taking a trip to the poorhouse, maybe you should examine your own anxieties and perceptions of what's happening around you and whether this current pace is sustainable for everybody. Obviously it's up to the practitioner to figure out how to make commercial imperatives and craftsmanship align. Maybe remembering that professor's lesson will lead to better outcomes for humanity on a timeline greater than the next quarter. Who knows. I'm just an idealistic 20+ YoE nobody being left behind at this point with nothing of value to contribute.

archagon 5mo ago
This forum, unfortunately, selects for FAANG mercenaries. Other forums will have radically different takes.
- xantronix 5mo ago
  It's interesting to see which articles garner the notice of FAANG mercenaries and which escape such levels of scrutiny and rancor. This article fell well off the front page by the time of my reply and yet somebody took the time to downvote. Oh well.

erdaniels 5mo ago

Did this get yanked off the front page?

gnabgib 5mo ago
It's presently #48, what's your definition of front page?.. that's still high ranking (bots and flame-war discussions generally drag a story down, although all posts must endure this)
- erdaniels 5mo ago
  Based on the number of comments, upvotes, and recency, I expected it to stay up longer! I think you're right on the flame war part.

pbgcp2026 5mo ago

"here have been times, especially this year, when I wonder despairingly what it is exactly that I am preparing you for." This. Leaving the virtue signaling aside – what is exactly the value of your "preparation"? This article just proves, again, one thing: western educational system is corrupt and defunct. And will be extinct soon.

librasteve 5mo ago

@marvinborner … you are a Raku coder (you just don’t know it yet)

oxag3n 5mo ago

Being part of academia while few family members faang-ish, I see comments to this post are amusingly resembling debates we have - I'm in for deep thinking, research and analysis with code being a product of your mental work, while family members with 10+ years in the industry are proud of not writing a single line of code and thinking Opus is just their new tool to be more productive. They can't answer one simple question though - why those corporations need them in this working setup. It's a hard one because my family well-being depends on it and it doesn't look good.

haricomputer 5mo ago

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