The computer science degree isn’t dead
spectrum.ieee.orgAlarming 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?
I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
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.
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.
> 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.
"I Think They Are Lying To You": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfYsSFY4l18
(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.)
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.
CS majors are working towards employment in a specific sector, and aren't likely to accept anything else very readily.
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.
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.
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.
I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.
I guess they could be using third party software but it seems like often they are just using an ancient thing they built themselves.
Accountants and marketers didn't build the legacy tools teams are stuck with.
From my understanding China operates this way. They supposedly have such an oversupply of software engineers that every company just build all the software they need internally. Now with AI they have supposedly been super aggressive in adopting it that its probably even more of the case that everyone is building most of what they need internally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
this does not seem to be an argument for requiring junior employees to focus on using AI tools
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.
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.
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.
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?
That is a really interesting admission upon which to evaluate your other comments here…
I suppose that makes a change from it's not happening or it is happening but it isn't man made or it is man made but we can't do anything about it.
Climate change will have huge effects on everyone's net worth. The process has already started.
Your failure to understand this will not change how it affects you.
It may be a cliche, but it's all connected. In a general sense, programmers at different experience levels are at least partially substitutable goods. A crash in wages on one group will probably affect that other.
In a more specific sense, companies won't pay seniors for skills at mentoring and managing the juniors they won't have.
Unless there's an unexpected jump in AI IQ, vibe-coded projects will start to unravel, but the companies won't have the resources to hire the human coders needed to fix the code.
Meanwhile a lot of people with real skills and ability will have been unemployed long enough to depress spending across the entire economy.
Those same people would have been prime drivers of spending, because they were one of the few demographics with significant disposable income and the ability to afford high rents and property prices.
You can see where this is going.
The people running the companies can't. Or if they can, they maybe believe they have an escape route.
That will turn out to be a fantasy too.
The problem isn't AI. it's an economy running on fantasy numbers that are unmoored from economic and physical reality.
Hope you like being overworked!
When you read an article about a "skills shortage" it's usually more of a pay shortage and/or a terrible working conditions overage.
Idk though, really seems like the "AI layoffs" are just corps shedding headcount bloat accumulated in 2020-23.
I never understood why software engineers were so excited about open source and teaching everyone to code.
Why aren‘t we more like doctors or lawyers?
But the reality is law is primarily about social capital, medicine has more of that than most people realise, and computer people love to pretend social capital is something other people do, and they don't need to.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
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.
That country never ceases to astonish me lol.
I don't think it was worded very well, but I think the parent comment was saying, "the bulk of CS can be covered in a masters program, so take an undergrad degree that has the same overlap in math/science, but a different focus". I'm not sure I agree, spreading the absorption of that knowledge over 4 years can be beneficial.
Guess the standards in your country for logic must be really low lol
All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.
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.
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.
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.
Also an ex-patriate is typically in the professional class. So those "English" teachers who teach in Japan, etc., may think of themselves as ex-pats or try to frequent "ex-pat" hangouts but they aren't necessarily because of two things: one, they have not been working at their home office and then transferred and typically they do not hold prelesional degrees -though they may hold "certificates" or whatever. They are in effect temporary workers on a limited stay visa, often needing annual renewal by hopping to a third country to have it renewed themselves. For ex-pats all this or arranged by their employers.
Here, your theory goes out of the window.
PS I do not disagree that some use cases could include temporariness (wikipedia mentions academic discourse and something about some british civil workers a few decades ago) but this is by far neither the unique nor the most common way it is used nowadays, nor how historically it has often been used long before.
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/expat...
I’m fashionable and have a nice place but nothing says “software engineer that earns more than most doctors”
People that wake up next to me think I earn about 1/3rd to 1/5th of what I earn, I don’t correct them
But at the same time I do want just a little bit of the hypergamy. Unfortunately, broadcasting to that sentiment seems incompatible with staying low key and attracting more collaborative people, but it could be fun which is my goal. I’ve seen how doctors are treated in the attraction game, its strange and downright scary to see some people code switch around them to be seen as eligible mates, I could have that. I’ve been analyzing it and it has very little to do with perceived utility, and almost solely to do with perceived earning potential combined with the idea of other people wanting them.
When I’ve spent extended time in small towns I inherit that treatment. In small towns across the US, you have people aspiring to hook up with entry level military conscripts because “they make so much money”. When you earn an entire order of magnitude more than that, it’s almost impossible to blend in and people can tell, so you get the code switching hypergamy sentiment.
This is the closest parallel to what people are talking about in this thread, because I’m rarely networking. Recruiters reach out to me over email and linkedin and thats it. Do work, get paid, sign off.
Thankful for the group of guys at our neighborhood bar where we play gays vs straights pool and rib about this stuff. Lol, just wanted to share that anecdote tbh
But even then, it's not disinteresting instantly, I'm around a lot of people with similar libidos and interest in sustained variety, who have achieved that, and brought similar people together. So I could really only say thank you for your personal account, it's a very individual journey not reflective of everyone else's experience with abundance.
I haven't really done much with material things, I live in and buy what's comfortable for me. But I know there is a large crowd that finds shiny material things attractive and its always an option when I want to optimize for that.
You only miss a bad job market entry and low salaries, you need every meagre advantage you can get.
100% agree on a degree being a strong signal, by the way.
Maybe, but the degree has to be paid for, with time and money.
I went to a top 10 university, but won't be encouraging my children to go to university at all, nor will I strongly discourage them. But I will make it clear that it is a choice with pros and cons, and in modern times I personally think that the cons outweigh the pros. Of course if they want to do some form of engineering then it will probably be necessary, but there's lots of wild careers like underwater welding that make big $$$, are fun/physical, highly skilled, and you get paid to learn instead of going 6 figures in debt before you even enter the job market. And it's something that will always be needed, everywhere, and isn't going anywhere.
And the reality of life is, like the article says - where you start is not where you end. Once you get your foot in the door pretty much anywhere, your formal title often quickly becomes much less relevant than the skills you have.
Even when you expand to include all schools instead of just top schools, 6 figure debt is rare. Average is about $27k for public universities, $34k for private non-profit universities, and $40k for private for-profit schools.
If someone has 6 figure debt from school they odds are overwhelming that it is from law school or medical school.
I wonder how many excellent students from non-rich families who could easily get into a top school for low cost or even free don't even bother applying because they have heard that myth of widespread 6 figure debt?
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.
But the rest is pretty much true unfortunately, though I wouldn't call the behavior rude because it's not seen as rudeness by people who do it. It's more that being optimistic, feeling surprised by things, expressing strong emotions is all seen as naive and pointless. There is also a strong aversion to taking risks which is pretty frustrating. Even when you can show they are calculated risks.
However not the whole DACH region is the same either, the cultures are pretty different, the only thing in common is really only the language. I had better success in Germany than my own country of Switzerland
Literally the top female figure in the EU structures had married into German nobility. Even without the marriage it's hard to describe the carrier as self-made. Families controlling German automotive industry are interleaved with aristocrats. The trees are obstructing you the view of the forest.
I think the Australian version of naivety is more about meritocratic ideas and flat social hierarchies. Australians aren't usually loud or opinionated. European CEOs may not like it if an employee reaches out to them directly. In Australia, the startup CEO usually tries to be friends with the employees so it feels natural to reach out to the CEO directly and they often reach out to you. In Europe, I get the sense that CEOs believe that they're too important to talk to employees. This has been my experience at startups of similar sizes.
In Switzerland and Germany that's pretty much true, yes. As a contractor I really prefer working with UK and US companies, the communication is as you describe, more friendly and natural, and they are generally more than happy to see someone who wants to take initiatives (in fact it is expected)
I was picking up my buffet dinner at a company event in Europe and the CEO who I somewhat knew was alongside; this was a moderately large company--maybe 10K employees at that point. We went to sit down at a table and the $EUROPEAN_COUNTRY people there were basically "Nah, we'd prefer to speak our own language." So the CEO and I went down to sit at another more welcoming table. (And had a very pleasant discussion about his upcoming family vacation and forwarded him some info.)
Not sure of the point but there are definitely cultural differednces on many dimensions on what you can do and can't do.
I think that is what op meant.
Everyone should do it more, it really helps put the uncompromising convictions of people around you into perspective and see them as what they often are: a lack of understanding for the breadth of human experience.
Australia is extremely egalitarian. I think even more so than the US. In both Australia and the US, you can usually talk to the CEO of the startup directly; they actually like to talk to their staff directly. But in the US, the power differential is usually much bigger, I am more cautious about what I say.
In Germany, there seems to be a more rigid hierarchy and the founders tend to avoid talking to employees directly; they tend to communicate mostly through middle-managers, even in relatively small startups.
IME these mechanisms are a natural outflow of how those with money and power delegate power or invest money.
I have friends with a private plane. I also have friends who are scrambling to make rent, among many other friends always worried about their next paycheck. When you put the two together, you’ll find they can’t really engage in conversation about their lives without extreme embarassment - the plane people could solve most of the immediate problems facing the paycheck folks with barely a dent in their lifestyle.
So the plane people end up around people they can talk about vacation spots with, and the paycheck people hang around people who are empathetic and participate together in mutual aid to get thru. Rarely do the paycheck folks become plane people (they’re too generous or focus on maximizing other aspects of their lives than income). Rarely do the plane people actually help the paycheck people, except indirectly.
Inequality is embarrassing. Our society is embarrassing. That there is no safety net and basic needs being met being demanded by everyone from the poor to the richest of the rich can ONLY happen because they don’t interact. I see a huge backlash coming and it will not hit equally, or fairly. No society can continue like this without breaking down.
I wish you were right, but I think you are wrong. This article on poverty in ancient Rome suggests otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_ancient_Rome "Their society may have consisted of a handful of wealthy individuals that made up 0.6% of the population, an army that made up 0.4% of the population, and the poor masses that made up 99% of the populace." I selected Rome because it's my understanding that this is one of the longest lived empires.
The facts for the Roman Empire are not clear, but it looks like massive inequality is the sad default mode for humanity. One might expect that as literacy and information sharing improved, it would be less tolerable by the populace for this inequality to persist. But it seems about as bad as ever. This may be due to the perception that rich people because they "earned" it, despite the fact that it seems patently obvious (to me at least!) that is not the case.
I've only interacted with people with that level of wealth in a professional capacity. In my personal life, I know a lot of people who own multiple properties and businesses including some of my own family members but I don't think I know anyone with a private jet. The top of the range I know have big boats and big houses.
I feel like there is a social boundary between the old money and the new money.
The new money tends to be much wealthier and they don't like the old money folks. In theory, they could both talk with each other about exotic holiday spots, fine dining and boating/yachting but there is a different discomfort. And it's not about tech understanding because a lot of children of old money went into tech. I think the discomfort is that the new money folks see the old money folks as spoiled brats... But IMO, this is a result of the new money folks not seeing their own privilege; not granted by daddy, sure, but granted by the system itself.
In the USA at least, people in the normal cars aren't "sharing their experiences". They're playing garbage music from their iPhone speakers (technically not allowed - happens anyway), trying to subdue their giggling/crying/screaming children, loudly conversing amongst themselves, etc. It's a zoo.
Not trying to pick apart your post, I liked reading it in general.
*rounded up
There are cultures (e.g. go to Israel) where random people still talk to each other.
I'm not sure I would call what you observed in Europe privilege. I think you were just an outsider/immigrant from a different culture. Different places have different cultures and it takes a long time (if ever) to acquire them. You'll be treated differently if you don't have the right social cues e.g.
In places like the US or Canada this tends to be a lesser effect because it's a big melting point.
I know plenty of really rich people (like billionaire or approaching) that aren't that different than most of us (also rich). You don't magically move to some other "circle" just by having money. It's true there are certain "classes"/cliques in different cultures but it's not as simple as has money vs. hasn't.
so better than expected then
It's no great mystery. Social interaction is a skill that requires practice and effort to develop. Interacting with new people is risky and occasionally painful. Back in the day the punishment for not developing that skill and taking those risks was boredom, but nowadays you can just crawl into your cell phone to while away the hours.
If you have a degree from a 'good school', that gets you some credibility by itself, but mostly a 4 year degree says 'this person can commit to doing difficult things without an immediate payoff for around 4 years' which is a valuable thing for employers.
In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.
Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)
If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.
The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).
I resented being constantly 'corrected' on the local accent I was picking up from school as a child, but now I appreciate that an RP or close to RP accent turns down the difficulty slider in certain British interactions.
Deference is given to your professional title, doctor, lawyer etc.
The accent bit happens in the US too, to an extent. Depending on the accent you grew up with, you get different responses from people in professional or professional-adjacent settings if you forget to switch the knob back to the more homogenized vaguely Iowa-sounding GenAm accent. This covers a gamut of other accents - regional or not (NE, aave, southern, val, etc).
But it's not nearly as bad as RP in England from what I gather - for one, a pretty decent chunk of the population would normally grow up with a GenAm accent with no forcing, unlike in England where it's a pretty hyper local <5% of the native population.
At work nobody knows what degree you've got. I mean some people insist to be called Dr. X if they have a Ph.D. (and in some cultures that's more common). You can have a B.Sc. in biology, or an M.Sc. in EE, or a law degree or no degree and nobody knows. As a manager in a large tech company I didn't even know that for the people I managed. I would usually find out people's background through random talk but it's not information I had access to. I was surprised to find one of the rising stars didn't finish his degree and wanted to take some time off to finish it.
Where it does matter is in the hiring process and especially for juniors and larger companies.
> I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
Sad but my experience as well.
As someone who started being more self-educated (I did learn a lot of theory myself) and only later finished my degree (started, dropped out to do some real work, came back much later) I do think a good CS program teaches a lot of important things. Most importantly the ability to learn and understand research in this area. Not all the specific things you're going to learn are going to be applicable all the time, some will some of the time, and not having that background at all is limiting. You can learn this without going through the academic system but it's much harder and most people don't and stay stuck in some sense.
If the goal is to be good that is fine, but there is little correlation with salary.
In retrospect it was not the best choice because college does give you a unique chance to get connections that let you into "the club" and will send you to the upper echelons of FAANG and early retirement.
I always thought I would just become a better and better engineer cutting my teeth at startups and then make the switch, but now it almost feels like you are a career startup engineer or a career big tech engineer, and making the switch is difficult. One is obviously insanely more lucrative, probably 3-5X with the way equity has exploded.
In the very early 90s, at 15 my part time computer repair job was paying a large share of the family rent, and by 17 I had graduated early and was working full time making 60k/yr. I had scholarships but I didn't take them because by 18 I had a customer base and a reputation. I went back to school in my 30s but it wasn't worth it. School is very help for many people and paths, but not all people and all paths.
L (luck) = D (doing) x T (telling)
Basically, you need to be able to show you are able to do stuff (D) and with enough people seeing this by you sharing (T) through different channels, can open doors. I haven't been doing it as heavily but it has already given me incredible opportunities.
Being at Harvard gets you a lot relative to the population, being around the right clubs at Harvard gives you a lot relative to that. There is meritocracy within the range but nepotism can easily put people in the room. Work at a startup or two run by families of billionaires, and watch their career trajectory, and you will not have any doubt.
But it can't get much less about engineering before rich people become poor in large numbers, and that will start the pendulum back the other way.
Rich people losing money that matters in large numbers is like a soft civil war, everything changes.
Later I joined one of my freelance clients as a co-founder (early 30s), more risky than the FAANG path but we’re on the right path to a comfortable pension.
I wouldn’t trade my life for that of some of my FAANG friends.
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.
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.
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.
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
Very scary for the future, unfortunately.
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
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
i went to a top cs school and loved it, it raised the ceiling of what i thought was even possible, coming from a country where cs was not seen as an interesting or desirable job at the time
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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-grade...
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) 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.
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) 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).
Isn't this just grading on a curve, which has been done probably as long as universities have existed? The key is the instructor making sure a high standard is met (which seems to be the crux of the issue).
The decline in quality of STEM students/graduates is alarming, but the decline in intellectual quality of students is generalised.
Little did Dodson think he was being prophetic when he wrote satirically of Reeling, Writhing, and the arithmetical operations of Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
[0] _ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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.
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.
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.
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?