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

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

#41

Post by petterroea »

jazz9k wrote: post #20
jtbetz22 wrote: post #4

I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools. Two points of anecdata from that experience: - The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the ta…

When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.

Something tells me it was always like that. My university professors were teaching things nobody wanted to learn, and people were practically begging to be taught more up-to-date hireable skills.

Every time there was project work, we would be recommended using Swing or similar because that is what professors knew, but everyone used React because nobody hires Swing developers.

Someone once said "Our SQL professor's SQL knowledge is 10 years out of date. Probably because he has been a professor for around 10 years at this point" and that kind of stuck with me.

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

#42

Post by rdtsc »

CS may stop being a clear way to a high paying job. “Learn to code and then Google will surely hire you and pay you $250k right off the bat” path may be gone. It may become something like physics or math where only people really motivated or interested in fundamentals regardless of landing at a MAANG job in the end will apply.

So I why is your nephew in CS? Did he want to be there because he likes computing or was he “encouraged” by family members ;-) because it was a path to “success”, Not unlike how families encourage kids to become doctors or lawyers.

AI is not the only headwind. Companies are starting to “tighten their belts” and outsourcing work away from US and laying people off. They like to blame AI but it’s a little hard to take them seriously when they turn around and immediately open 10k jobs in India or Eastern Europe. So I guess it depends where you are. If you’re in those countries, then maybe CS career would work out pretty well.

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

#43

Post by reactordev »

Xelbair wrote: post #24
jazz9k wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.

I wish it was decade for me, in early 2010s they were still teaching 90s approach to handling complex projects(upfront design, with custom DSL for each project and fully modelled by BA without any contact with actual users, with domain experts being siloed away - and all of that connected to codegen tools for xml from the 90s)

Back when soap wasn’t just for hygiene.

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

#44

Post by palata »

titanomachy wrote: post #15
jkbwdr wrote: post #9

currently in cs masters program at ivy: i think it's like thinking that pure math study evaporated when we made the calculator, or that we suddenly shouldn't have bothered with Riemann sums because of the FTC. ai to coding is much the same in the sense of moving to a layer of higher abstraction. i don't think cs curriculums have to change drastically to accommodate this; however, the onus on not getting it wrong incr…

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.

Feels like CS used to be for nerds who wanted to understand how computers work, and then it became much more popular because there were good career opportunities.

Maybe with AI it will go back to "CS for nerds", and those nerds will be the ones landing the jobs that require actual understanding?

Genuinely wondering.

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

#45

Post by sdevonoes »

rdtsc wrote: post #42

CS may stop being a clear way to a high paying job. “Learn to code and then Google will surely hire you and pay you $250k right off the bat” path may be gone. It may become something like physics or math where only people really motivated or interested in fundamentals regardless of landing at a MAANG job in the end will apply. So I why is your nephew in CS? Did he want to be there because he likes computing or was he…

> Learn to code and then Google will surely hire you and pay you $250k right off the bat

Weird. In EU, 99% of graduates didn’t (don’t) have that in mind… A fresh graduate in CS typically earns less than 40-50K (even less depending on the country).

So USA is now like the EU?

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

#46

Post by Andr2Andr »

What I see in a German university - no change for undergraduate CS degree, which still has 50% maths annd theoretical CS and is not affected by LLMs. But in a Master’s degree they offer really lots of ML courses - from basics to CV to hardware aware. Exams in those are written on paper without any aids.

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

#47

Post by tclancy »

Kelteseth wrote: post #27
bradley13 wrote: post #13

"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 s…

Not just that. As a 31 year old developer even I feel like acquiring new skills is now harder than ever. Having Claude come up with good solutions to problems feels fast, but I don't learn anything by doing so. Like it took me weeks to understand what good and what bad CMake code looks like. This made me the Cmake guy at work. The learning curve delayed the port from qmake to CMake quite a bit, but I learned a new sk…

I have a block of code I will put in the CLAUDE.md file of any project where I want to get a better understanding of the tech in use where I ask for verbose explanations, forcing me to write some of the code, etc. Mixed results so far but I think it will get there. The one thing that I have decided: only one new thing per project!

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

#48

Post by compounding_it »

alistairSH wrote: post #34
someguyiguess wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, college CS programs have always been decades behind in my experience. Maybe schools like Stanford and MIT are different but the majority of CS programs are not teaching tech that is actually used in the business world.

Maybe I’m an oddball, but I’d rather hire a new grad with sound fundamentals, but learned on an older tech stack, then somebody with all the buzzwords but no fundamentals. And I’ve always found summer internships to be good way to find out. Even better if the candidate is willing to work part-time through their senior year.

The Pythagoras theorem doesn’t change even if you use an LLM. Fundamentals shouldn’t either. Don’t see why schools should see this any differently.

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

#49

Post by Akuehne »

jazz9k wrote: post #20
jtbetz22 wrote: post #4

I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools. Two points of anecdata from that experience: - The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the ta…

When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.

This is why I have always said, that a degree in CS is useless without some degree of passion towards it.

No professor can enable you for tomorrow, and a CS career is one of constant education.

I'm glad I learned some STM32 assembly, but with the resources available today, I wouldn't get anywhere near as deep as I did in the early 2k's.

I am building a local low power RAG system for the programing languages I like, but I'll still include stm32 asm.

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

#50

Post by nemo44x »

rdtsc wrote: post #42

CS may stop being a clear way to a high paying job. “Learn to code and then Google will surely hire you and pay you $250k right off the bat” path may be gone. It may become something like physics or math where only people really motivated or interested in fundamentals regardless of landing at a MAANG job in the end will apply. So I why is your nephew in CS? Did he want to be there because he likes computing or was he…

Maybe he was there because he wanted to make a better life for himself and his family. Why is learning to do something because it pays well a bad thing? It’s admirable that someone would do that.
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