Has this board missed the huge contraction in tech?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Am very involved in the tech ecosystem and live here in DMV. Folks I know in the valley mostly have not found jobs yet. The Meta folks are struggling to find new work.

AI will crush many job types but especially so in tech. AI coding is ready quite good.

A company I know laid off its entire 20 person QA team and replaced with engineers QAing their own code with LLMs

It’s coming very fast. Human brains mostly are not evolving. AI is evolving weekly.

I’ve seen the next generation versions (we are about 6 mos into the public side of this) and they are rapidly evolving.




I don’t mean the world is ending thing. But I do mean that many jobs that we are training what we think are to-be high salaried future college grads for simply won’t be there

Remember how we used to all look at so called White Working Class and say “why are they so angry?”

Now get ready for that with CS grads in 5 years or less. The number of jobs will start to shrink fast. Meanwhile kids graduating with $200k+ of debt from private universities who expected the lifestyle of 150k plus starting comp and way more with RSUs and stock.

I personally would not encourage my kids to go in as CS (plus it’s hard as hell to get admitted given competition)

We need more skilled trades like plumbing and electrical but the DCUM crowd and our peers look down on that work. Just wait til those jobs pay more than tech coding jobs

It’s coming.

Signed,
25 year Silicon Valley guy now living in DC

Telling DCUM crowd to eschew CS for plumbing and electrician work.

Yeah...right.

You missed the point. Laugh all you want but all these CS kids graduating with hundreds of thousands of debt. Let’s see how it all plays out. Everyone is in the denial stage.

Not when you attend a large state school on scholarship with a well respected CS program.

+1 but ITA that having $100K+ debt for a CS degree is not worth it, which is why DC is going in state flagship with merit.

Nobody is graduating with $100k+ of loans from undergrad, unless their parents take out parent plus loans. Federal limit is around 30k. It’s grad school where people end up taking 100k+ in debt.

I'm not sure that's true. CMU, MIT, Stanford undergrad $80K/year. Even Cal oos is $80k/yr.

Yeah, but parents are paying or they’re getting some scholarships. There are limits to how much loans an undergrad can take out and it doesn’t even hit 100k. Their parents would have to take that money out.

https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans

And plenty of parents will take out loans to send their kid to these elite schools, even if they can't cash flow it or have it saved in a 529. So they take $40K/year to pay the rest of the bills, the next year it's $48K as tuition/R&B increases and so on. By time they graduate the parents have taken out ~$200K in loans, the kid has $30k and the parent wants them to help pay off the parental loans as well.

Not a smart idea but plenty of people do it. Plenty do it and are not CS/Engineering majors ---not that that is a smart idea, but at least with a 6 figure income starting out you have a slightly easier path towards paying them off, but it's still stupid thing to do.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:People don't seem to understand that the kids that graduate from a CS program and typically much more intelligent that the others who didn't, especially considering the competition to get into those programs over the past several years. Do you think they won't be able to figure out their careers relative to someone who majored in, what, English?

Omg is this a joke? Like a caricature of how stupid people can be? You actually think a CS degree means someone is smarter than someone with an English degree? It's absurd that people think that all these code monkeys who can do math well are definitively smarter than people in other fields. The ignorance is really astounding.

NP. I was an English major and have learned CS on the job. CS is a very, very much more intellectually challenging field than English.

But that’s beside the point. PPP’s point was that with the intense competition for admission to CS schools, the average graduate tends to be a lot smarter than the average English or Education major because only top students are being admitted to CS programs. Sure, there are very bright people majoring in English, just like there are probably some great athletes pursuing curling. But those curlers are, on average, very much worse athletes than NBA players because the barrier to entry to become a curler is, like to become an English major, almost nonexistent.

NP. I’m a CS major (from MIT no less). I don’t think I’m smarter than my sister who majored in English. The same brain/personality quirks that inspired you (and her) to major in English are why you found CS harder probably just as the brain/personality quirks that make me good as CS caused me to struggle in English and have to retake my foreign language classes twice to actually learn anything. Declaring subjects universely “hard” or “easy” is silly.

I agree that people are wired to do well in say English vs. CS/Math and vice versa. However, I think when the discussion is whether a subject is harder or not boils down to whether someone can at least produce something passable in one area vs. maybe not even understanding much of anything in another.

As an example, I tried to take a higher level math course in college for which I qualified based on prior coursework...and it is was as though I stepped into a different world. I sat at the first class while a professor wrote a massive equation and to me it was just a series of letters and numbers...I couldn't even begin the answer the first set of problems...I didn't even understand what they were aksing. It might as well have been asked in Chinese it was so foreign to me. I knew after the first class I needed to drop and pick something else.

Now, I probably would not have received a stellar grade on some upper level English classes, however, I doubt I would not even understand how the answer the question. The English class likely had more work, however, more work does not mean more difficult (relatively speaking). Again, the math class would be the equivalent of taking an English class and the teacher said...you have to learn and answer in 8th century English vernacular...BTW, I am not going to teach you the 8th century vernacular, you are going to have to learn it on your own just to comprehend and answer the 1st assignment.

+1

I don't think people in a certain degree are necessarily any "smarter" than others, but CS/Engr was 100x more difficult than English at my top 10 school. I wrote more per semester than my English major roommate.

Same with mine. By comparison, they had limitless free time and were always socializing while we worked. In retrospect we would've both benefited from more balance.

[Anonymous]

I guess I shouldn't be surprised how ignorant some posters are about an English major. Just because they think they can string two sentences together, an English major would be easy

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I guess I shouldn't be surprised how ignorant some posters are about an English major. Just because they think they can string two sentences together, an English major would be easy

+1, Being able to read the National Enquirer does not make you an English major.

[Anonymous]

The question is not who is smarter. Which major does the market value more? The answer is obvious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Encouraging my kid to study “traditional engineering” ( semi mfg, mech, chemical, electrical, industrial). Thats where the real demand is going to be in next 5-10 years - and its way more interesting than coding, imo.

The way I see it is coding skills are like reading - people expect u to be able to code. Do a minor in CS!

Coding is really a temporary liberal art. Everyone should be able to at least code a macro and apply simple HTML tags, while those technologies are relevant.

And real CS is more a branch of math or philosophy than coding.

But the problem is that it’s going to be harder for employers to distinguish real CS people from low-level coders.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The question is not who is smarter. Which major does the market value more? The answer is obvious.

Well that’s actually not the question of this thread, which is, has no one picked up on the fact the market has very suddenly changed its math on the value of a SWE?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:How do computer engineers fair in the AI change over?

What changeover? You realize all of CS is not "computer engineers?"

My DC is majoring in Computer Engineering, which is an offshoot of Electrical Engineering at their school. I was asking about computer engineering, not CS. I realize there is some overlap, but am not well versed in all the nuances.

So, will Computer Engineers fair the same as CS majors with the coming AI technology or will they have a different outcome?