13 ms·

The computer science degree isn’t dead

265 points by jnord 4mo ago

le-mark 4mo ago
> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming. Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
- JCTheDenthog 4mo ago
  I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.
  - LastTrain 4mo ago
    A few major failures will scare the risk mitigating bejesus out of some kinds of businesses, but maybe AI will be better than us at fixing those kinds of problems by then.
    - genxy 4mo ago
      It is, but that isn't how it will be used. The problem isn't the tech, never was, it is how the greedy and stupid deploy it.
  - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
    I sure hope you're right I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
  - dyauspitr 4mo ago
    You know that’s not going to happen. Most of us are past the denial stage now, come join us…
    - otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
      Remember OpenClaw? You know why nobody talks about it anymore? Because the project has been vibe coded to death in the span of a few months. Not only will it happen, it's literally happening right now in front of our eyes.
      - aroman 4mo ago
        Do you have any evidence that the code quality of OpenClaw is to blame for its decline in popularity? I would say far more likely is that its creator was acqui-hired and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage. The reality is that AI is both capable of producing sloppy code and capable of cleaning it up, if directed to do so, just like humans. And, just like humans, code quality is very rarely the make or break factor between success and failure in business, much less popularity.
        otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
        In the case of vibe-coded slop like OpenClaw it's not a question of some vague notion of "code quality", it's a case of the software shitting the bed and not working anymore, with no recourse of fixing it. (Neither humans nor LLMs have the context window to analyse and fix tens of millions of lines of code slop.) > and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage If OpenClaw wasn't broken it would just use a standard token API. But see above - as software it is fundamentally broken and unfixable.
    - JCTheDenthog 4mo ago
      Then why did it take Anthropic over a year just to fix the flickering issue in one of their main products when they have internal access to the latest and greatest models?
      - 4mo ago
  - ekidd 4mo ago
    COBOL was mostly outsourced to India, and it's a terrible professional path for anyone in the EU or US, and has been since the Y2K bugs got fixed at the last minute. (And probably a bad path in India, too, but I have no data one way or the other. It's just that all the excellent Indian devs I know use almost exactly the same tech stacks I do.)
  - SoftTalker 4mo ago
    And since big-name companies will be dealing with this, nobody will get blamed for not seeing this train barreling down the tracks towards them.
- upbeat_general 4mo ago
  I think that figure (haven’t verified it but assuming it’s true) isn’t complete. It hides who and where those people are - for example, I imagine art history skews towards higher ranked schools in the first place.
- rockskon 4mo ago
  Oh good lord not that statistic again. Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take. There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    The article mentions this. Unsurprisingly, the CS grads are more likely to get jobs that require a degree.
  - SoftTalker 4mo ago
    Philosophy and history majors are for people who have no idea what they want to do. So a decent job in any field is as good as any other. CS majors are working towards employment in a specific sector, and aren't likely to accept anything else very readily.
- shagie 4mo ago
  https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (note: Latest Release: February 4, 2026, based on data from 2024) Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%. Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment. The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree. The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor's degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job. Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree. Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest). If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job. Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate. There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
  - RealityVoid 4mo ago
    There is an image crisis. Yes, it's not a badly paid profession. But the perception that it's a dead end will lead to a sharp drop off in the student numbers.
  - Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
    I'm glad you pointed this out because I think the difference is due to philosophy grads being ready and willing to enter the workforce as a welder or an au pair or a restaurant manager, whereas a CS grad is gonna hold out for a CS job. Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.
- jayd16 4mo ago
  Unemployment is based on the amount looking. I gotta say, how many philosophy students do you know actively looking for jobs? Now ask yourself why you think it's zero.
- toyg 4mo ago
  Such a correction was always going to happen. Coders always were the blue-collar workers of the 21st century, and capital ruthlessly optimises for profit. Where you once needed thousands of workers to run an assembly line, you now have dozens; where you once needed hundreds of programmers to run a big SaaS, you will now have a handful. It was always inevitable. That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
  - VBprogrammer 4mo ago
    > They'll just be far fewer than they used to be. I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted. As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause. I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out two of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally. I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
    - Larrikin 4mo ago
      In your example you knew the issues with the original fix, had some ideas to the cause, even if they were wrong, and generally knew where to look. In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.
      - 4mo ago
- rienbdj 4mo ago
  Cut juniors for AI Save money Invest in market share Increase market cap Hire the last remaining seniors at higher rates but only where needed Great time to be a shareholder or staff level engineer. For everyone else, the ladder has been pulled.
- deadbabe 4mo ago
  I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it. What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI. So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway. Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.
  - mxkopy 4mo ago
    I love how the basic expectation of having a job and the life altering circumstance of not having one factors into this not even a little bit
    - deadbabe 4mo ago
      Not sure what you mean, juniors are a poor ROI these days.
      - JesseTG 4mo ago
        They mean that juniors have bills to pay, too.
  - musicale 4mo ago
    > juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI this does not seem to be an argument for requiring junior employees to focus on using AI tools
  - vanuatu 4mo ago
    thats interesting, the HMs where I work love hiring juniors (who pass the bar) because they are so AI-native the more experienced engineers can help with setting guardrails and mentorship, but the juniors come unconstrained by priors on how to use ai in creative ways to solve all sorts of business problems.
- mixmastamyk 4mo ago
  Decades of experience here, and have not worked in over two years. Tell me again how I have nothing to worry about.
  - aduwah 4mo ago
    Experience does not really matter. What matters is a few shiny corp names and titles in your CV. No-one cares with merit these days
- gottorf 4mo ago
  > Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. In my (admittedly vibes-based) opinion, this is just a result of there being a huge supply of CS grads in this country due to it being popularized as a path to a stable, high-paying job. Those degrees are now more often than ever held by people who aren't necessarily passionate about, or good at, the field. The signal-to-noise ratio in hiring, therefore, is worse than ever. AI exacerbates the problem, of course. But I don't think this is an existential crisis; I think the market will sort itself out, as those less-qualified entrants leave.
mamidon 4mo ago
This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?
- antonvs 4mo ago
  Where do you draw the line on that attitude? Do you not care about global warming because in your lifetime, you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live?
  - graphime 4mo ago
    > Where do you draw the line on that attitude? I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth. > Do you not care about global warming because you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live in your lifetime? Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
    - antonvs 4mo ago
      Do you believe in ethics or morality? If I decide you're having a negative impact on my net worth, can I come to your home and shoot you in the head? It seems we need a remedial class in morality here, where we work up to you understanding the golden rule. But perhaps you're not capable of understanding that. Is euthanizing you then the only option?
      - MAustriaGA 4mo ago
        [flagged]
    - LastTrain 4mo ago
      > I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth. That is a really interesting admission upon which to evaluate your other comments here…
    - 4mo ago
photochemsyn 4mo ago
If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too. Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
- wasabi991011 4mo ago
  In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree?
  - lelanthran 4mo ago
    > In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree? They aren't, but your specialist knowledge draws from two disciplines. If you undergrad is in CS, your specialist knowledge is in one discipline exclusively.
- n64controller 4mo ago
  [dead]
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  Isn't it normal to study mathematics in a computer science bachelor program in USA? That country never ceases to astonish me lol.
  - kubb 4mo ago
    They run degree mill programs because their universities are for profit.
    - saturn8601 4mo ago
      Most universities are not for profit at least the ones that are considered any good.
zerobees 4mo ago
My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive: https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney
- senderista 4mo ago
  IEEE has been putting their name on garbage journals and conferences since forever.
  - musicale 4mo ago
    This is unfortunately true. There are tons of IEEE spamferences. Which is a shame because there are also good IEEE-sponsored (or co-sponsored) conferences (I find ISCA, Hot Chips + Hot Interconnects, and SC to all be interesting systems conferences, for example.) However IEEE Spectrum is neither a journal nor a conference - it's the flagship magazine of the IEEE. My impression of IEEE Spectrum (as well as CACM) is that they still feature good technical papers and content written by domain experts, but they also feature junk/filler "articles" and blog posts written by serial contributors who seem to optimize article quantity over quality. Often the title or topic is the only good part.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  Good sleuthing, this really lowers the IEEE's quality in my eyes
- Kwpolska 4mo ago
  IEEE Spectrum is one of the many things that is always high on the HN front page, but is never worth reading.
  - tietjens 4mo ago
    That’s true but often the discussion in the comments are.
taurath 4mo ago
If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning: Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it. It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
- maxk42 4mo ago
  My experience has been quite the opposite. I have done far better than my peers and have less debt. I wonder which country you're in?
- ehnto 4mo ago
  To a much smaller extent due to where I live, I noticed this too. From merely the fact that I had a (local economy relative) high paying software job and that I could "make stuff happen" for people with capital or people in the "boys club", I was introduced to an entirely different layer of the city I had no idea about. I noticed how effortlessly the signals transfer and how it all feels very meritocratic, you don't even notice the layer and you just see the people. Until someone who's not in that layer shows up, and suddenly the doors close, the conversation chills and the barriers to the layer become evident. I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort. I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming. I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
  - anal_reactor 4mo ago
    Honestly I do the reverse of that. I dress like shit and when introducing myself I specifically use the word "immigrant" rather than "expat" because signalling high social position attracts people who want something from me but don't offer anything in return.
alephnerd 4mo ago
People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors. Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
strathmeyer 4mo ago
[dead]
rippeltippel 4mo ago
I agree with the "what" but not with the "how". The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired. In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition. So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment. I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
- Transfinity 4mo ago
  I think interest rates have a lot to do with that mindset. If you view a Jr engineer as a long term investment (in 18 months you get an SDE 2 who knows your business), that's much easier to justify when borrowing money is close to free.
- rienbdj 4mo ago
  Tragedy of the commons. What stops a company taking on the strong junior engineers you just invested time and resources into?
  - rjbwork 4mo ago
    Not a lot, so you should make sure you give them generous raises and other incentives to stay.
jillesvangurp 4mo ago
Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job. I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
- genxy 4mo ago
  A difficult degree in philosophy or english lit also does the same thing. Humans are amazing generalists, and when we practice thinking deeply, that skill transfers and allows us to pickup new domains.
  - fasterik 4mo ago
    Philosophy is excellent training in the analytical skills needed for any knowledge-based job. Critically evaluating information, constructing arguments, thinking of counter-examples, etc.
- camdenreslink 4mo ago
  Getting a PhD is almost never worth the foregone wages if your goal is to be in private industry. For sure, people should get one if they are interested in research, or specific jobs that are only available to people with PhDs. But otherwise it isn't something to get into half-hearted.
  - asdff 4mo ago
    This is only true when you compare the PhD field degree to something like finance where you can make real money at 23 years old. If the alternative is a bs for a path where most people end up going PhD, you will be working for like $20/hr most your life. You will probably be breaking even with what the PhD stipend would have been anyhow and you aren't getting any healthcare benefits.
vanuatu 4mo ago
Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  > who built a product with actual paying users How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
  - keiferski 4mo ago
    There is a weird assumption nowadays that “making money = you’re an expert and know what you’re doing.” The best X is the one that makes the most cash, full stop. Very scary for the future, unfortunately.
    - vanuatu 4mo ago
      hmm i dont think any new grad is an expert and knows what they're doing (if im understanding you right) but the skills we used to look for in new grads are shifting as coding agents make execution easy, a new grad with good business sense is really valuable
      - LtWorf 4mo ago
        All I ask is they are willing to learn to use git decently.
  - vanuatu 4mo ago
    what do you mean? we're hiring new grads because we think they will make the company money. most of our hires are from top schools so they're already proven to be smart right now most resumes are zero signal because any new grad can whip up an impressive sounding project using ai with zero paying users. but knowing what to build, having good product sense and taste, talking to customers, iterating and not giving up are much more desirable skills youd be surprised how many new grads with capital and free time have zero business skills
ameon 4mo ago
my son asked me just that today - should I even go to the uni. The idea is probably circulating somewhere. It is changing for sure but still important. Maybe he will learn new things. Or old things differently. It's not like education becomes suddenly redundant.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
KolibriFly 4mo ago
A degree was never supposed to make someone instantly productive on day one. It was supposed to be paired with junior roles, mentoring, code review
aatd86 4mo ago
Computer Science is still useful. It is software development that is made trivial now that software can write software.
- rienbdj 4mo ago
  Not many people are employed as computer scientists (they are mostly academics) compared to SWEs.
  - aatd86 4mo ago
    I was making the difference between engineering and development too actually. Building react and using react being an illustration of the difference between an engineer and a dev. It is a spectrum however, that's true.
jdw64 4mo ago
Learning can be done without a degree, but building connections and securing funding is difficult without one. A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree. But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself. Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder. Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do. I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.
- 01284a7e 4mo ago
  Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention. I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree. And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out. I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.
  - jdw64 4mo ago
    I respect you. To be honest, I still haven't found my footing. Most of what I earned was squandered paying off debts from being scammed, and my work is irregular. And as you said, the game is always changing, the rules keep shifting. I feel anxious, but reading the words of a senior like you makes me feel better. I lived in a 3 pyeong (about 100 sq ft) space for three years (I wasn't homeless, so I had it better than you). Still, I'm grateful that now I have a small 8 pyeong (about 260 sq ft) space. Thank you for sharing your experiences and emotions. I want to succeed through willpower, just like you. As you know, most of my coding is done better by AI. Unless it's large scale programming, the work that comes to people like us is usually small scale, handled at the level of specific frameworks. Nevertheless, I still believe there is a place for me somewhere (though that might be self hypnosis). Thanks for the comment
karakoram 4mo ago
Related: Do You Really Want That Computer-Science Degree? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418782
0xpgm 4mo ago
Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today? Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art. Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
- lucianbr 4mo ago
  > better compilers, more ergonomic languages If anything it seems wide deployment of LLMs would go against this. When nobody writes code by hand anymore, who will care about the ergonomics of programming languages? And even if a few do care, how would you get adoption? I expect everyone will just use whatever is already used most.
  - __float 4mo ago
    Do you not review the code that LLMs output? It seems that now more than ever, testing is important. But LLMs love to cheat the tests and make them superficially pass. If you're never reading the code, how do you know changes are reasonable?
    - lucianbr 4mo ago
      I do review, if only whatever I do was the norm for everyone :) Do you see lots of posts about new compilers and languages and language features on HN in the last year? Maybe I just missed them. I'd love to read more posts like that and fewer about agent frameworks.
    - strangegecko 4mo ago
      Product does what it should and doesn't what it shouldn't?
  - camdenreslink 4mo ago
    I agree, it seems like the current most popular languages and frameworks will become ossified, because they have the highest amount of training data. It's hard to see a future where Python and JavaScript aren't the most popular languages to use (assuming LLM-assisted development is the norm moving forward).
bossyTeacher 4mo ago
Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned. Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.
bArray 4mo ago
This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished. Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy. Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly. [1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grades-soar-as-professors-see-greater-ai-usage-dwindling-math-skills-in-uc-berkeley/article_16fad0bf-02cb-4b8c-8d88-888ffd9f8608.html https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...
- Der_Einzige 4mo ago
  Good good and good. Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams. All exams should be verbal. The fact that verbal exams are so rare is because teachers/professors are overworked and (outside of AI) underpaid. Too many students, not enough time. The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much. There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
  - bArray 4mo ago
    > Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams. Universities consist of a wide range of people with different incentives, the lecturers typically (in my experience) have very pure motives. It's the management parts that put pressure to pass students, meet metrics, etc. > The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much. Homework is essentially dead post-LLMs. The lecturer's responsibility is to provide guided learning, but also most importantly to assess each student's attempt to learn. > There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway. You'd be surprised how much 1:1 with students there are. One example I'm aware of is CS students getting 4 hours 1:1 for one module per semester - that's a hell of a lot. What you're ultimately up against is cost per student. The overheads in Universities are enormous. It's usually 40:60:+, so £40k pay, £60k overhead plus research and investment (conference paper, travel, journals, new tools, etc).
matteohorvath 4mo ago
First step is denial
analog31 4mo ago
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
- delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
  Why would anyona think Physics degree would be “dead”?
  - analog31 4mo ago
    Employment of physicists has had its ups and downs. Academic physics research was impacted by funding, including a draw-down of defense related funding after the Soviet Union collapsed. Also, during my time as a student, mandatory retirement was outlawed, so there was suddenly a drastic reduction of retirements. The number of people entering graduate study in physics never went down, so the academic career pipeline was flooded with talent. You had to be a research superstar to get a faculty job. I wasn't. Meanwhile, physics had never really laid out a reliable path into industry. Getting an industry job involved a fair amount of luck. Many physics students became programmers. My first job after grad school was for a company owned by a relative of a fellow grad student, and my ancillary skills in programming and electronics have helped lubricate my resume as needed.
ironman1478 4mo ago
It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money. Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this. I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.
fasterik 4mo ago
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation. Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.
- Vegenoid 4mo ago
  If a job is well-paying, there will always be many people going into it for the money. High paying and only people who love it do it are pretty much incompatible.
  - bananaflag 4mo ago
    I would have loved to realize this back in high school, I would have gone into a lower paying field.
teucris 4mo ago
There are two things you can get from a degree: 1. Knowledge and skills 2. A network and a reputation While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.
nicechianti 4mo ago
[dead]
BobbyTables2 4mo ago
Call me biased, but the CS degree always seemed like the “general studies” of computing fields. The interesting areas involve some sort of domain expertise- medical, physics, civil, electrical, chemical engineering, etc. or even pure math in the case of data science. CS lacks all of those, including a strong math background. Sure, for plain “boring” software development, CS is perfectly fine. But in terms of one’s personal education and career trajectory, why not aim higher?
- kmbfjr 4mo ago
  Algorithm analysis and numerical analysis are nothing BUT math.
m3kw9 4mo ago
Who said it was? It’s in fact more important than ever to know how to read and know how coding architecture works

265 points by jnord 4mo ago

> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming. Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?

JCTheDenthog 4mo ago
I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.
- LastTrain 4mo ago
  A few major failures will scare the risk mitigating bejesus out of some kinds of businesses, but maybe AI will be better than us at fixing those kinds of problems by then.
  - genxy 4mo ago
    It is, but that isn't how it will be used. The problem isn't the tech, never was, it is how the greedy and stupid deploy it.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  I sure hope you're right I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
- dyauspitr 4mo ago
  You know that’s not going to happen. Most of us are past the denial stage now, come join us…
  - otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
    Remember OpenClaw? You know why nobody talks about it anymore? Because the project has been vibe coded to death in the span of a few months. Not only will it happen, it's literally happening right now in front of our eyes.
    - aroman 4mo ago
      Do you have any evidence that the code quality of OpenClaw is to blame for its decline in popularity? I would say far more likely is that its creator was acqui-hired and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage. The reality is that AI is both capable of producing sloppy code and capable of cleaning it up, if directed to do so, just like humans. And, just like humans, code quality is very rarely the make or break factor between success and failure in business, much less popularity.
      - otabdeveloper4 4mo ago
        In the case of vibe-coded slop like OpenClaw it's not a question of some vague notion of "code quality", it's a case of the software shitting the bed and not working anymore, with no recourse of fixing it. (Neither humans nor LLMs have the context window to analyse and fix tens of millions of lines of code slop.) > and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage If OpenClaw wasn't broken it would just use a standard token API. But see above - as software it is fundamentally broken and unfixable.
  - JCTheDenthog 4mo ago
    Then why did it take Anthropic over a year just to fix the flickering issue in one of their main products when they have internal access to the latest and greatest models?
    - 4mo ago
- ekidd 4mo ago
  COBOL was mostly outsourced to India, and it's a terrible professional path for anyone in the EU or US, and has been since the Y2K bugs got fixed at the last minute. (And probably a bad path in India, too, but I have no data one way or the other. It's just that all the excellent Indian devs I know use almost exactly the same tech stacks I do.)
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  And since big-name companies will be dealing with this, nobody will get blamed for not seeing this train barreling down the tracks towards them.
upbeat_general 4mo ago
I think that figure (haven’t verified it but assuming it’s true) isn’t complete. It hides who and where those people are - for example, I imagine art history skews towards higher ranked schools in the first place.
rockskon 4mo ago
Oh good lord not that statistic again. Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take. There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  The article mentions this. Unsurprisingly, the CS grads are more likely to get jobs that require a degree.
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  Philosophy and history majors are for people who have no idea what they want to do. So a decent job in any field is as good as any other. CS majors are working towards employment in a specific sector, and aren't likely to accept anything else very readily.
shagie 4mo ago
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (note: Latest Release: February 4, 2026, based on data from 2024) Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%. Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment. The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree. The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor's degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job. Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree. Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest). If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job. Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate. There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
- RealityVoid 4mo ago
  There is an image crisis. Yes, it's not a badly paid profession. But the perception that it's a dead end will lead to a sharp drop off in the student numbers.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  I'm glad you pointed this out because I think the difference is due to philosophy grads being ready and willing to enter the workforce as a welder or an au pair or a restaurant manager, whereas a CS grad is gonna hold out for a CS job. Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.
jayd16 4mo ago
Unemployment is based on the amount looking. I gotta say, how many philosophy students do you know actively looking for jobs? Now ask yourself why you think it's zero.
toyg 4mo ago
Such a correction was always going to happen. Coders always were the blue-collar workers of the 21st century, and capital ruthlessly optimises for profit. Where you once needed thousands of workers to run an assembly line, you now have dozens; where you once needed hundreds of programmers to run a big SaaS, you will now have a handful. It was always inevitable. That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
- VBprogrammer 4mo ago
  > They'll just be far fewer than they used to be. I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted. As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause. I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out two of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally. I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
  - Larrikin 4mo ago
    In your example you knew the issues with the original fix, had some ideas to the cause, even if they were wrong, and generally knew where to look. In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.
    - 4mo ago
rienbdj 4mo ago
Cut juniors for AI Save money Invest in market share Increase market cap Hire the last remaining seniors at higher rates but only where needed Great time to be a shareholder or staff level engineer. For everyone else, the ladder has been pulled.
deadbabe 4mo ago
I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it. What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI. So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway. Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.
- mxkopy 4mo ago
  I love how the basic expectation of having a job and the life altering circumstance of not having one factors into this not even a little bit
  - deadbabe 4mo ago
    Not sure what you mean, juniors are a poor ROI these days.
    - JesseTG 4mo ago
      They mean that juniors have bills to pay, too.
- musicale 4mo ago
  > juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI this does not seem to be an argument for requiring junior employees to focus on using AI tools
- vanuatu 4mo ago
  thats interesting, the HMs where I work love hiring juniors (who pass the bar) because they are so AI-native the more experienced engineers can help with setting guardrails and mentorship, but the juniors come unconstrained by priors on how to use ai in creative ways to solve all sorts of business problems.
mixmastamyk 4mo ago
Decades of experience here, and have not worked in over two years. Tell me again how I have nothing to worry about.
- aduwah 4mo ago
  Experience does not really matter. What matters is a few shiny corp names and titles in your CV. No-one cares with merit these days
gottorf 4mo ago
> Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. In my (admittedly vibes-based) opinion, this is just a result of there being a huge supply of CS grads in this country due to it being popularized as a path to a stable, high-paying job. Those degrees are now more often than ever held by people who aren't necessarily passionate about, or good at, the field. The signal-to-noise ratio in hiring, therefore, is worse than ever. AI exacerbates the problem, of course. But I don't think this is an existential crisis; I think the market will sort itself out, as those less-qualified entrants leave.

mamidon 4mo ago

This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?

antonvs 4mo ago
Where do you draw the line on that attitude? Do you not care about global warming because in your lifetime, you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live?
- graphime 4mo ago
  > Where do you draw the line on that attitude? I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth. > Do you not care about global warming because you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live in your lifetime? Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
  - antonvs 4mo ago
    Do you believe in ethics or morality? If I decide you're having a negative impact on my net worth, can I come to your home and shoot you in the head? It seems we need a remedial class in morality here, where we work up to you understanding the golden rule. But perhaps you're not capable of understanding that. Is euthanizing you then the only option?
    - MAustriaGA 4mo ago
      [flagged]
  - LastTrain 4mo ago
    > I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth. That is a really interesting admission upon which to evaluate your other comments here…
  - 4mo ago

photochemsyn 4mo ago

If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too. Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!

wasabi991011 4mo ago
In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree?
- lelanthran 4mo ago
  > In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree? They aren't, but your specialist knowledge draws from two disciplines. If you undergrad is in CS, your specialist knowledge is in one discipline exclusively.
n64controller 4mo ago
[dead]
LtWorf 4mo ago
Isn't it normal to study mathematics in a computer science bachelor program in USA? That country never ceases to astonish me lol.
- kubb 4mo ago
  They run degree mill programs because their universities are for profit.
  - saturn8601 4mo ago
    Most universities are not for profit at least the ones that are considered any good.

zerobees 4mo ago

My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive: https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney

senderista 4mo ago
IEEE has been putting their name on garbage journals and conferences since forever.
- musicale 4mo ago
  This is unfortunately true. There are tons of IEEE spamferences. Which is a shame because there are also good IEEE-sponsored (or co-sponsored) conferences (I find ISCA, Hot Chips + Hot Interconnects, and SC to all be interesting systems conferences, for example.) However IEEE Spectrum is neither a journal nor a conference - it's the flagship magazine of the IEEE. My impression of IEEE Spectrum (as well as CACM) is that they still feature good technical papers and content written by domain experts, but they also feature junk/filler "articles" and blog posts written by serial contributors who seem to optimize article quantity over quality. Often the title or topic is the only good part.
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
Good sleuthing, this really lowers the IEEE's quality in my eyes
Kwpolska 4mo ago
IEEE Spectrum is one of the many things that is always high on the HN front page, but is never worth reading.
- tietjens 4mo ago
  That’s true but often the discussion in the comments are.

taurath 4mo ago

If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning: Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it. It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.

maxk42 4mo ago
My experience has been quite the opposite. I have done far better than my peers and have less debt. I wonder which country you're in?
ehnto 4mo ago
To a much smaller extent due to where I live, I noticed this too. From merely the fact that I had a (local economy relative) high paying software job and that I could "make stuff happen" for people with capital or people in the "boys club", I was introduced to an entirely different layer of the city I had no idea about. I noticed how effortlessly the signals transfer and how it all feels very meritocratic, you don't even notice the layer and you just see the people. Until someone who's not in that layer shows up, and suddenly the doors close, the conversation chills and the barriers to the layer become evident. I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort. I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming. I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
- anal_reactor 4mo ago
  Honestly I do the reverse of that. I dress like shit and when introducing myself I specifically use the word "immigrant" rather than "expat" because signalling high social position attracts people who want something from me but don't offer anything in return.

alephnerd 4mo ago

People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors. Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.

strathmeyer 4mo ago

[dead]

rippeltippel 4mo ago

I agree with the "what" but not with the "how". The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired. In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition. So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment. I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.

Transfinity 4mo ago
I think interest rates have a lot to do with that mindset. If you view a Jr engineer as a long term investment (in 18 months you get an SDE 2 who knows your business), that's much easier to justify when borrowing money is close to free.
rienbdj 4mo ago
Tragedy of the commons. What stops a company taking on the strong junior engineers you just invested time and resources into?
- rjbwork 4mo ago
  Not a lot, so you should make sure you give them generous raises and other incentives to stay.

jillesvangurp 4mo ago

Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job. I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.

genxy 4mo ago
A difficult degree in philosophy or english lit also does the same thing. Humans are amazing generalists, and when we practice thinking deeply, that skill transfers and allows us to pickup new domains.
- fasterik 4mo ago
  Philosophy is excellent training in the analytical skills needed for any knowledge-based job. Critically evaluating information, constructing arguments, thinking of counter-examples, etc.
camdenreslink 4mo ago
Getting a PhD is almost never worth the foregone wages if your goal is to be in private industry. For sure, people should get one if they are interested in research, or specific jobs that are only available to people with PhDs. But otherwise it isn't something to get into half-hearted.
- asdff 4mo ago
  This is only true when you compare the PhD field degree to something like finance where you can make real money at 23 years old. If the alternative is a bs for a path where most people end up going PhD, you will be working for like $20/hr most your life. You will probably be breaking even with what the PhD stipend would have been anyhow and you aren't getting any healthcare benefits.

vanuatu 4mo ago

Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users

LtWorf 4mo ago
> who built a product with actual paying users How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
- keiferski 4mo ago
  There is a weird assumption nowadays that “making money = you’re an expert and know what you’re doing.” The best X is the one that makes the most cash, full stop. Very scary for the future, unfortunately.
  - vanuatu 4mo ago
    hmm i dont think any new grad is an expert and knows what they're doing (if im understanding you right) but the skills we used to look for in new grads are shifting as coding agents make execution easy, a new grad with good business sense is really valuable
    - LtWorf 4mo ago
      All I ask is they are willing to learn to use git decently.
- vanuatu 4mo ago
  what do you mean? we're hiring new grads because we think they will make the company money. most of our hires are from top schools so they're already proven to be smart right now most resumes are zero signal because any new grad can whip up an impressive sounding project using ai with zero paying users. but knowing what to build, having good product sense and taste, talking to customers, iterating and not giving up are much more desirable skills youd be surprised how many new grads with capital and free time have zero business skills

ameon 4mo ago

my son asked me just that today - should I even go to the uni. The idea is probably circulating somewhere. It is changing for sure but still important. Maybe he will learn new things. Or old things differently. It's not like education becomes suddenly redundant.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

KolibriFly 4mo ago

A degree was never supposed to make someone instantly productive on day one. It was supposed to be paired with junior roles, mentoring, code review

aatd86 4mo ago

Computer Science is still useful. It is software development that is made trivial now that software can write software.

rienbdj 4mo ago
Not many people are employed as computer scientists (they are mostly academics) compared to SWEs.
- aatd86 4mo ago
  I was making the difference between engineering and development too actually. Building react and using react being an illustration of the difference between an engineer and a dev. It is a spectrum however, that's true.

jdw64 4mo ago

Learning can be done without a degree, but building connections and securing funding is difficult without one. A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree. But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself. Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder. Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do. I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.

01284a7e 4mo ago
Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention. I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree. And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out. I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.
- jdw64 4mo ago
  I respect you. To be honest, I still haven't found my footing. Most of what I earned was squandered paying off debts from being scammed, and my work is irregular. And as you said, the game is always changing, the rules keep shifting. I feel anxious, but reading the words of a senior like you makes me feel better. I lived in a 3 pyeong (about 100 sq ft) space for three years (I wasn't homeless, so I had it better than you). Still, I'm grateful that now I have a small 8 pyeong (about 260 sq ft) space. Thank you for sharing your experiences and emotions. I want to succeed through willpower, just like you. As you know, most of my coding is done better by AI. Unless it's large scale programming, the work that comes to people like us is usually small scale, handled at the level of specific frameworks. Nevertheless, I still believe there is a place for me somewhere (though that might be self hypnosis). Thanks for the comment

karakoram 4mo ago

Related: Do You Really Want That Computer-Science Degree? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418782

0xpgm 4mo ago

Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today? Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art. Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?

lucianbr 4mo ago
> better compilers, more ergonomic languages If anything it seems wide deployment of LLMs would go against this. When nobody writes code by hand anymore, who will care about the ergonomics of programming languages? And even if a few do care, how would you get adoption? I expect everyone will just use whatever is already used most.
- __float 4mo ago
  Do you not review the code that LLMs output? It seems that now more than ever, testing is important. But LLMs love to cheat the tests and make them superficially pass. If you're never reading the code, how do you know changes are reasonable?
  - lucianbr 4mo ago
    I do review, if only whatever I do was the norm for everyone :) Do you see lots of posts about new compilers and languages and language features on HN in the last year? Maybe I just missed them. I'd love to read more posts like that and fewer about agent frameworks.
  - strangegecko 4mo ago
    Product does what it should and doesn't what it shouldn't?
- camdenreslink 4mo ago
  I agree, it seems like the current most popular languages and frameworks will become ossified, because they have the highest amount of training data. It's hard to see a future where Python and JavaScript aren't the most popular languages to use (assuming LLM-assisted development is the norm moving forward).

bossyTeacher 4mo ago

Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned. Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.

bArray 4mo ago

This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished. Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy. Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly. [1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grades-soar-as-professors-see-greater-ai-usage-dwindling-math-skills-in-uc-berkeley/article_16fad0bf-02cb-4b8c-8d88-888ffd9f8608.html https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...

Der_Einzige 4mo ago
Good good and good. Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams. All exams should be verbal. The fact that verbal exams are so rare is because teachers/professors are overworked and (outside of AI) underpaid. Too many students, not enough time. The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much. There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
- bArray 4mo ago
  > Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams. Universities consist of a wide range of people with different incentives, the lecturers typically (in my experience) have very pure motives. It's the management parts that put pressure to pass students, meet metrics, etc. > The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much. Homework is essentially dead post-LLMs. The lecturer's responsibility is to provide guided learning, but also most importantly to assess each student's attempt to learn. > There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway. You'd be surprised how much 1:1 with students there are. One example I'm aware of is CS students getting 4 hours 1:1 for one module per semester - that's a hell of a lot. What you're ultimately up against is cost per student. The overheads in Universities are enormous. It's usually 40:60:+, so £40k pay, £60k overhead plus research and investment (conference paper, travel, journals, new tools, etc).

matteohorvath 4mo ago

First step is denial

analog31 4mo ago

This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.

delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
Why would anyona think Physics degree would be “dead”?
- analog31 4mo ago
  Employment of physicists has had its ups and downs. Academic physics research was impacted by funding, including a draw-down of defense related funding after the Soviet Union collapsed. Also, during my time as a student, mandatory retirement was outlawed, so there was suddenly a drastic reduction of retirements. The number of people entering graduate study in physics never went down, so the academic career pipeline was flooded with talent. You had to be a research superstar to get a faculty job. I wasn't. Meanwhile, physics had never really laid out a reliable path into industry. Getting an industry job involved a fair amount of luck. Many physics students became programmers. My first job after grad school was for a company owned by a relative of a fellow grad student, and my ancillary skills in programming and electronics have helped lubricate my resume as needed.

ironman1478 4mo ago

It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money. Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this. I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.

fasterik 4mo ago

Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation. Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.

Vegenoid 4mo ago
If a job is well-paying, there will always be many people going into it for the money. High paying and only people who love it do it are pretty much incompatible.
- bananaflag 4mo ago
  I would have loved to realize this back in high school, I would have gone into a lower paying field.

teucris 4mo ago

There are two things you can get from a degree: 1. Knowledge and skills 2. A network and a reputation While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.

nicechianti 4mo ago

[dead]

BobbyTables2 4mo ago

Call me biased, but the CS degree always seemed like the “general studies” of computing fields. The interesting areas involve some sort of domain expertise- medical, physics, civil, electrical, chemical engineering, etc. or even pure math in the case of data science. CS lacks all of those, including a strong math background. Sure, for plain “boring” software development, CS is perfectly fine. But in terms of one’s personal education and career trajectory, why not aim higher?

kmbfjr 4mo ago
Algorithm analysis and numerical analysis are nothing BUT math.

m3kw9 4mo ago

Who said it was? It’s in fact more important than ever to know how to read and know how coding architecture works