AI now writes 25% of code in the US: Should Computer Science students rethink their career plans?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think students who love CS should major in it. Those who were doing so only for a high paying career (or because their parents were forcing it) should not. There will always be CS jobs, just not as many if the lower level coding types of jobs.

Correct. It is more important than ever to go to a high-quality school that is known for rigorous CS with curriuculum in AI and emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving. The CS bubble started to break for graduates in 2024. The schools that have done well in placement despite the bubble are the same set of schools that are highly regarded for engineering and adjacent fields: MIT, calTech, Stanford, UCB, CMU, GaTech, UIUC, &the ivies that are at the top of stem(Princeton, Penn, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia), probably a couple more close. Higher level CS positions available to students with a bachelors have always preferentially hired from these schools. Good but not highly rigorous programs mainly send students to lower-level coding positions after a bachelors. Hiring managers look at the courses taken and the most rigorous schools tend to have the highest percent of students who have taken rigorous coursework, often grad level if available, and have extensive coding experience through on-campus and summer internships/research. It is much more cost effective to recruit at colleges where the vast majority of students are desirable, not just the top 5%.

I read a book saying the US was producing too many CS graduates in 2010. It's up and down.

[Anonymous]

I think it is much higher than that at most companies. On the NYT Hard Fork podcast they brought in some honest tech company owners who admitted that, yes, they were trying to pare down their staff and hire less by using AI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think students who love CS should major in it. Those who were doing so only for a high paying career (or because their parents were forcing it) should not. There will always be CS jobs, just not as many if the lower level coding types of jobs.

This begs the question: if there are many fewer entry-level coding jobs, how will new entrants start this career path?

Yes.

If they won't hire entry level, and in so many years the midlevel workers start retiring, who is going to fill those mid/sr level positions?

Industries are very shortsighted. They are reactionary, but the job market usually has dips and highs. This is one of the dips, unfortunately.

FWIW, my kid is a senior in college as a dual CS/math major focusing on ML, and planning to get a masters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hmm. At my work we have a custom IT project and are employing developers and there's no out of the box AI that will work for our purposes.

They are turning on AI features all over the place and encouraging us to use it. But apparently it's not available for the purpose where we actually would like to try it.

What I find interesting is the reason that AI is able to code currently is because it’s been trained on tons of code and stack overflow questions. If nobody is creating new code or asking new questions on SO, where does new original content come from?

I do admit that ChatGPT does an excellent job of writing specific snippets of code; you’ll still need someone good to understand and integrate, and to design the system architecture.

As a software engineer I tried a snippet of code from Google Gemini once. It was wrong.

I have co-workers who swear by various code AIs to give them ideas, but even they have to already understand the language and algorithms in order to filter the junk from the useful bits.

And like you said, whose writing the new, fast compression algorithm (insert Silicon Valley TV show reference here) if it's all just regurgitated SO question answers - of which I have personally written many.

yes, you can use AI to generate the code but you still need a human to QA it.

My CS major kid said he uses AI to check his work. He still needs to be able to write the code to understand what the AI is spitting out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Too many CS students went into it because they saw a day in the life tiktok video of a Google SWE.

agree. Most probably couldn't even pass a Google SWE interview.

Low level programming jobs have been declining for decades. They were offshored. Now they are being replaced by AI, but again, you still need someone to QA it.

[Anonymous]

I'm more worried about humanities majors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hmm. At my work we have a custom IT project and are employing developers and there's no out of the box AI that will work for our purposes.

They are turning on AI features all over the place and encouraging us to use it. But apparently it's not available for the purpose where we actually would like to try it.

What I find interesting is the reason that AI is able to code currently is because it’s been trained on tons of code and stack overflow questions. If nobody is creating new code or asking new questions on SO, where does new original content come from?

I do admit that ChatGPT does an excellent job of writing specific snippets of code; you’ll still need someone good to understand and integrate, and to design the system architecture.

As a software engineer I tried a snippet of code from Google Gemini once. It was wrong.

I have co-workers who swear by various code AIs to give them ideas, but even they have to already understand the language and algorithms in order to filter the junk from the useful bits.

And like you said, whose writing the new, fast compression algorithm (insert Silicon Valley TV show reference here) if it's all just regurgitated SO question answers - of which I have personally written many.

yes, you can use AI to generate the code but you still need a human to QA it.

My CS major kid said he uses AI to check his work. He still needs to be able to write the code to understand what the AI is spitting out.

It's this. Kids who are integrating AI into their work are highly sought after because it makes a SWE much more efficient, however, you need to know your stuff to begin with, to quickly see where it may be making an error and correct it.

My kid works at a start-up and that start-up did an analysis and said that it would cost them $1MM/year to use AI instead of hiring a human SWE. However, even they admit it is really just a simplistic analysis of how much they would spend on using an LLM and other hard costs and it assumed that the AI they use is super reliable. That number was like $3MM the year before, so it is coming down, though they expect the rate of decrease will reduce...it needs to get much lower than the cost of a human (say $100k for these positions) to decide they won't hire that next SWE and instead use AI (managed by the existing force).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think students who love CS should major in it. Those who were doing so only for a high paying career (or because their parents were forcing it) should not. There will always be CS jobs, just not as many if the lower level coding types of jobs.

This begs the question: if there are many fewer entry-level coding jobs, how will new entrants start this career path?

Yes.

If they won't hire entry level, and in so many years the midlevel workers start retiring, who is going to fill those mid/sr .

You are assuming technology remains static. AI advances very rapidly, by the time coders retire, technology will be dramatically more advanced than right now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think students who love CS should major in it. Those who were doing so only for a high paying career (or because their parents were forcing it) should not. There will always be CS jobs, just not as many if the lower level coding types of jobs.

This begs the question: if there are many fewer entry-level coding jobs, how will new entrants start this career path?

Yes.

If they won't hire entry level, and in so many years the midlevel workers start retiring, who is going to fill those mid/sr .

You are assuming technology remains static. AI advances very rapidly, by the time coders retire, technology will be dramatically more advanced than right now.

Colleges are usually a bit behind in industry, so new advancements will cause colleges to pivot, albeit a bit later. At some point, that technology will become obsolete, and the cycle will continue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it is much higher than that at most companies. On the NYT Hard Fork podcast they brought in some honest tech company owners who admitted that, yes, they were trying to pare down their staff and hire less by using AI.

Anybody who thinks that AI is being developed for any reason other than the above is very dumb.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm more worried about humanities majors.

The % unemployed at the 6month mark is higher in CS major than humanities majors at many T50s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm more worried about humanities majors.

Hey, at least they’re studying something they enjoy. I feel so bad for the CS students who aren’t passionate about it and went into it for the money, but now can’t find a job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Too many CS students went into it because they saw a day in the life tiktok video of a Google SWE.

More likely their parents are tech immigrants. Now CS is the only viable job they could imagine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Too many CS students went into it because they saw a day in the life tiktok video of a Google SWE.

More likely their parents are tech immigrants. Now CS is the only viable job they could imagine.

Why always assume immigrant parents? At least the CS majors can perform jobs that Humanities majors not vice versa

[Anonymous]

LLM train on what they can get...so slop in, slop out. llm is trained on just private internal code of high quality is a different beast.

CS majors will be fine so long as they can think critically. The days of stembots with poor social skills getting fat jobs are over for sure.