Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

I’m also interested in what CS curriculums are right now and furthermore what students actually think of it. I suspect nothing has changed in terms of curriculum other than being more rigorous about “academic dishonesty” like detecting if someone used ChatGPT generated answers.

What I hope will change is less people going into the CS field because of the promise of having a high-paying career. That sentiment alone has produced an army of crud monkeys who will overtime be eaten by AI.

CS is not a fulfilling career choice if you don’t enjoy it, it’s not even that high-paying of a career unless you’re beyond average at it. None of that has changed with AI.

I think the right way to frame career advice is to encourage people to discover what they’re actually curious in and interested by, skills that can be turned into a passion, not just a 9 to 5.

"The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era."

I'm a prof, recently retired but still teaching part-time. This is exactly the problem. AI is here, people use it, so it would be stupid (plus impossible) not to let students use it. However, you want your students to still learn something about CS, not just about how to prompt an AI.

The problem we are heading towards as an industry is obvious: AI is perfectly capable of doing most of the work of junior-level developers. However, we still need senior-level developers. Where are those senior devs going to come from, if we don't have roles for junior devs?

I have no reason to believe that you aren't motivated mostly by curiosity and interest, but the mass of CS undergrads are primarily driven by economic incentives.

I am a teen who is hopefully going to go to college (Preferably CS), My reason is and was that I really love tinkering with computers and code related automation/scripts (more importantly thinking about scripts)

And to be honest, my intention with going to college is hopefully to rip off any use of AI that I do or have a more learning experience because right now I am bounded severely with time but my curiosity still exists, so I just build things to "prove" that its possible. But within college, I would be able to give time to the thinking process and actually learn and I do feel like I have this curiosity which I am grateful for.

So to me, its like it gives me 4 years of doing something where I would still learn some immense concepts and meet people interested (hopefully) in the same things and one of the ideas I have within college is to actually open up a mini consultancy in the sense of helping people/businesses migrate over from proprietory solutions to open source self-hosted solutions on servers.

My opinion, is that people need a guy who they can talk to if any solution they use for their personal projects for example go wrong, you wouldn't want to talk to AI if for example you use self-hosted matrix/revolt/zulip (slack alternatives) and I think that these propreitory solutions are so rent-seeking/expensive that even if I have a modest fees in all of this, I wish to hopefully still charge less than what they might be paying to others and host it all on servers with better predictability of pricing.

Solopreneurship is never this easy yet never this hard because its hard to stand out. There was a relevant thread on Hackernews about it yesterday that I read about it, and the consensus there from what I read was that marketing might-work but producthunt/these directories are over-saturated.

Your best options are to stay within the community that you wish to help/your product helps and taking that as feedback.

That's my opinion, at least, being honest, I am not worried about what happens within Uni right now but rather the sheer competition within my country to reach a decent CS uni college as people treat it as heaven or just this race seeing what other people are doing and I feel like I am pissed between these two spots at the moment because to get into CS Uni, you have to study non CS subjects (CS doesn't even matter) but my interest within CS gets so encapsulating that its hard to focus on the other subjects. Can't say if that's good or bad but I really have to talk myself into studying to remind what I am studying for (even after which I can still slip up as I get too interested but that's another matter)

Good reminder for me to study chemistry now... wish me luck :)

You probably should ask about a particular program because there are as many answers to your question as there are programs. Even in a single school there are often several tracks. Some are very theory and math heavy, others are more practical.

The part that hasn’t changed is being in a cohort of people like yourself and living in a community centered around a school (and again this varies from school-to-school). I had a lot of fun and met many interesting people who inspired and motivated me. It’s the fastest way to jumpstart your professional network.

I had moved from a small, boring town to a city and the semi-structured life of a student living on-campus made that transition easy and provided an instant social life.

My regret is that I didn’t take advantage of all the things I could have with respect to my electives. I wish I had taken art history or intro to film or visual arts 101 or modern literature or just about any other humanities course that was available to me.

If you want somebody to tell you to skip school, you’ll probably get that advice here too. If all you are after is the piece if paper at the end you probably should skip school or do it remotely. It’s cheaper and more concentrated but you miss the most valuable part of university life.

If entrepreneurship is your thing, you might be better off in a business program.