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Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

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Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#21

Post by dougmwne »

Right now, no one knows. I think we are all exactly as shocked as you are. These LLMs have been a toy for so long that it’s hard to really know where we are going to end up in 5 years.

But personally, if CS is your passion and top choice, go for it and don’t doubt yourself. It’s true the field could be changing, but someone is still going to need to understand something, even if the LLMs do a lot of the lifting. And if you think programming is at risk, there are 100 other roles in the office that are much worse off. The Office 365 demo from this week has got to scare the pants off middle management and anyone who’s job is responding to emails, attending meetings, taking notes, interpreting simple data in excel and summarizing a project status in a PowerPoint deck. And by the way, that tends to be most people in most offices. Actual knowledge work is rare and usually rests on a few shoulders.

Personally, I am betting that the impact is large, but will be spread out over 15 years and create a ton of work for technical folks in the meantime.

Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#22

Post by choxi »

This is possibly my favorite PG essay, the metaphor about gliding seems very relevant to your question: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

My two cents: If you’re interested in engineering and physics, you should explore that. Does your university have a CompE or EE program? At mine a lot of the classes between different eng programs overlapped so it wasn’t difficult to switch.

But you could also just pivot because no one in the tech industry really cares if you have a CS degree, and it sounds like you’d still enjoy coding anyway so you’ll keep learning on your own. The CS curriculum is going to feel painfully old fashioned compared to what you’re learning on your own, though there are some useful fundamentals in there.

Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#23

Post by [deleted] »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #6
karaokeyoga wrote: post #2

My advice as an older programmer who has a son in engineering school (who is asking similar questions) … stay in CS. The world will change as a result of LLMs, of course, but new opportunities emerging will be one of those changes, and a CS background will help you prepare for such opportunities. My $0.02.

Agreed. There will be even more need for humans who understand CS to direct the LLM-based systems.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#24

Post by GianFabien »

"translating client requirements to prompts" (specifications until recently) is exactly what business analysts do and it is amongst the best paid IT jobs. Project managers and security consultants typically earn even more.

In my experience, in both business and academia, bullshit intolerance is a severe career limiting trait.

With your aptitude for physics and mathematics, have you considered some other field of engineering? In all fields of engineering strong programming skills are a strong form leverage for your core work. A friend of mine was in a similar situation to yours many years ago. He choose surveying and he is now the owner of a substantial company, making a comfortable living.

Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#25

Post by ajkjk »

You've been duped by the LLM hype. Naive people (imo) are losing their minds and the rest of us are just left wondering: wtf is wrong with all of you. You don't hear the sober takes ("neat chatbot, who cares, it seems cool but won't be useful for most work, certainly not for decades") because they're not freaking out so they're not as loud.

Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#27

Post by jmillikin »

LLMs automate the uninteresting part of programming, which is the physical typing of code. They are not capable of reasoning or logical induction, so the job of being a programmer is still safe. They're basically just fancy codegen.

A lot of the articles you see floating around about "the end of programmers" are written by people who think software is designed by managers, which is only true in workplaces that you would not want to be in. If you can independently design and implement software, then you can work at a company that treats programmers like craftsmen, which is more rewarding both mentally and monetarily.

That said, the tech industry tends to move faster than undergrad currriculae. It's likely that any specific technologies you learn in school are already obsolete[0]. Focus on the fundamentals (CS as a subdomain of mathematics) and you'll find your knowledge has a much longer shelf life.

[0] When I was in university, the more "vocational" classes offered by the CS department tended to teach libraries and languages that had already fallen into disuse outside. Things like OpenGL immediate mode when the world had moved to shaders, or CVS when everyone used SVN and Git had been just released.

Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#28

Post by q845712 »

yunwal wrote: post #16

My advice: if you major in physics and keep getting A’s, you can still easily get a programming job, and probably in areas that are more AI-proof than webdev. The opposite is not true. IMO, taking programming classes in college is a waste. It’s nearly all the type of thing you can learn on the job or in an online course. The real reason to take CS is if you’re interested in applied math, because most math departments…

I agree there's many courses in a college where you can learn almost as much on your own or through some other mechanism, but I'm not sure that qualifies as a "waste."

there's been other threads on this site where people talk alot about how much they learned in either or both their compilers or operating systems course. This rings true for me -- the value of my first few semesters of CS was that it prepared me fully to tackle a short list of really helpful courses. Honestly finishing the major wasn't all that much more helpful (in terms of what I learned), but the degree itself has worked out fine.

One last thing, but for me there was a sort of retrospective signal -- I did have a second major and other areas of study, but eventually I realized that I had always saved my computer science homework for last because i found it the most fun, and gosh, maybe that was a hint of where to build my career. So to make it more general, the other "use" of a bunch of mediocre CS coursework is that you can gauge your own interest level. We're all built differently, but honestly taking a wide variety of courses to learn what you're interested in while in your late teens / early 20s isn't such a terrible thing (if you can do it without too much debt).

Re: Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

#30

Post by 29athrowaway »

When it comes to developing simple CRUD applications with simple shopping carts and such, there are still gaps to be closed but those gaps will close.

Schmidhuber says that between one key innovation to the next, the time interval is divided by 4. We have entered the most noticeable part of the exponential growth where each year from now to 2040, you will be seeing very noticeable progress.

By 2030 your life as a software engineer will be very impacted.

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