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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?

#91

Post by ShouldIPivot »

choxi wrote: post #22

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…

Thank you for the recommendation. I just read it, and I think it's really what I needed to hear: Work on difficult problems for the purpose of self improvement, find intelligent people, and keep my options open - "Stay upwind". This thread has some really great advice, and that essay is a significant part of it.

My university has a Compsci+EE program that I'm going to look into.

If you're already competent, are CS programs less time consuming, or are they easier but still as time consuming? I'm wondering how much time at uni I could spend working on difficult problems in my own time.

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

#92

Post by ShouldIPivot »

zamfi wrote: post #7

> I also just don't find asking a LLM in the "correct" way and having it spit out code trained on millions of other programmers interesting in the slightest. Think broader. Right now our only interface to these powerful models is prompts, but this is an artifact of how we discovered them. Future you will not be (paraphrasing) "finding the right prompt to have an LLM spit out the right code" nor "translating client re…

Yeah, I use copilot quite extensively to help my RSI (though I always know what the expected output is, it doesn't solve problems for me) and that doesn't ruin my enjoyment. If what you describe is how programming ends up, I think I'd enjoy it.

(And my wrists will appreciate it :) )

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

#93

Post by Zetice »

plutoh28 wrote: post #79
0r30 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caveat for finance advice. Investment Banking, trading (quant or otherwise), drastically different pay-grades than corporate finance, intern first to consider quality of life.

All the roles you mention can also be affected by LLM’s

Both of us are assuming OP will figure out his concerns are overblown, so “affected by LLMs” is not a category to avoid.

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

#94

Post by throwawaymar22 »

One way to look at it is if programming is largely automated, then this implies that any thing that is reducible to programming(as in could be modelled on a computer) is as well. This includes all engineering fields that I know of.

So if you want to stay in engineering there are not many options.

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

#95

Post by includeguard »

I'm twice your age. I wouldn't worry. Will things change? Of course. When I was your age the software world couldn't shut up about how programmers would be replaced with UML diagrams. XHTML was gonna be the next big thing for the web, and a social feed was a collection of RSS XMLs.

So, as someone who was also unsure of things once, and also have an interest in physics and engineering at your time: Chances are, even if you pivot to one of those focuses, you'll end up in programming anyways. A lot of physics majors end up in programming, many computer and electrical engineers end up in programming. There's just more of those jobs available. I should know, I was a computer engineering major, I worked in embedded firmware for 2 years before I was pulled back in to web development. I wanted to design processors.

Don't worry about GPT. It's like saying VSCode is going to replace software engineers because it has autocomplete. It's going to make you more productive, it's not going to replace you.

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

#96

Post by turtleyacht »

ShouldIPivot wrote: post #88
turtleyacht wrote: post #48

Study as much math and physics as you can. Study business, accounting, finance, and marketing. Study the classics and philosophy. Once school winds down and life picks up, you'll have less time to sit down and deeply read anything. Build your mental toolkit while you have the luxury of time. At least, that's what I'd tell my younger self. I'm not saying not to study computer science, but a lot of it is free and its a…

This sounds pretty interesting, and not something I'd considered. I've got other interests (geopolitics, military aviation, history) that I've put on hold due to the level of schoolwork. You say to "Build your mental toolkit while you have the luxury of time." What would you say your mental toolkit consists of? Where does classics and philosophy come into it? What do you typically apply that toolkit to, and how does…

> What would you say your mental toolkit consists of?

Not much! In place of the ideal hard science stuff, for a while it's been Stack Overflow, tenacity, and a nose for useful solutions.

I feel if I had educated myself in rigor, I could implement that paper, prove solutions, and have an assortment of physical phenomena at my disposal.

All the books I have and not read speak to the need for knowledge, and while applications abound, words can only be consumed one long tape at a time.

> Where does classics and philosophy come into it?

It's your secret weapon: it's the quote or phrase or context that comes to mind, to flower one's thoughts amid numbers and process, that inspires and renews.

> What do you typically apply that toolkit to, and how does it help you?

Programming, of course! Mostly in pattern recognition for solving problems.

Whatever you decide, I hope you end up owning "something that is yours." It's hard to describe. It could be a business, or a codebase that is maintained a long time.

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

#97

Post by throwawaymar22 »

ShouldIPivot wrote: post #81
angarg12 wrote: post #34

My cynical take is this: if you are worried about LLM taking programming jobs away, why do you think your alternatives are safe? Not gonna lie, as an experienced engineer I'm also worried and anxious about ChatGPT (combined with the economy, tech layoffs, inflation...). But what else can I do? If my job disappears due to LLMs, I can't think of anything else I could do to pay the bills that wouldn't also be at risk. S…

What does your day-to-day work involve? I don't really know what day to day engineering looks like, I just assumed engineering would be more difficult to replace.

If programming can be replaced, then everything can be modelled on a computer will be as well.

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

#98

Post by GianFabien »

ShouldIPivot wrote: post #83
GianFabien wrote: post #24

"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 eng…

Thanks for your response. I have considered other engineering fields. My school also specialises in engineering, many of my friends are studying it, and many areas of it interest me. Nuclear, electrical, and aerospace all interest me. I'd like to learn more about them, and I'm planning to talk to some of the engineering teachers about it. This isn't the first comment saying that programming can be useful as part of a…

If there are any career nights with invited engineers from those fields, then I suggest you attend them and ask questions. If not, then discuss with your careers advisor (I think UK schools have them. It's a thing in Australia) and find out whether such invitations could be extended or even field trips organised.

During your university education you will be required to solve many problems and some might be better done with some programming skills. You might need to use MatLab, etc for simulations. During this time you will gain experience with the sorts of problems that programming / CS / data science even AI could assist with. These days every field of engineering is a heavy user of computers and requires a wide variety of programming skills.

As for your question about what to include on your CV. I recommend the structure of: have solved xyz problem for abc using plx. That is, the CS aspect is the least important. The most important is the problems you have solved and the benefit / value generated. This is a far better way to demonstrate proficiency than listing a bunch of acronyms.

Good luck with your university experiences.

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

#99

Post by Atlas22 »

ShouldIPivot wrote: post #90
Atlas22 wrote: post #49

I think you are worrying yourself about LLMs for no real reason. Dispite what the large LLM investors and irrational fanboys claim, it won't displace _skilled_ workers that evolve themselves like I'm positive you are. That said, you should specialize to some balance of what pays well and your interests. You should consider majoring in something other than CS, not because of LLMs or anything like that but because ther…

Thanks, I'll consider it and take a look at the available CS+EE courses. What would you recommend for learning some electrical engineering before committing myself with a degree in it?

EE is a pretty big field with a lot of different areas so its somewhat difficult to give general recommendations but if you are looking to see what your intro courses will look like you might take a look at MIT's open courseware or edX for intro to circuit analysis or digital logic. Many schools also publish which textbooks they use for most courses which may be helpful if you want to check them out. If you want to get hands on with some circuits, you can make some cool projects pretty quickly with an ardunio (or similar cheaper knockoff) (it uses a subset of C for programming).

If your considering the textbook route, I have some resources in a google drive from my undergrad I can share if you send me an email to add (my email is in profile).

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

#100

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

ShouldIPivot wrote: post #89
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #62

You’re 17 - don’t just think about paying bills. Not yet. If this interest stems from money and ambitions then you’re trying to build your foundations in sand. It’s not really about what you choose but how you do the thing you do. How well you can apply yourself to it. You want to find work that gives you flow state. My 0.2c as a cinema studies/filmmaker turned PM - there are so many soft skills I acquired pursuing a…

> maximize risk for the next few years - you will regret not taking advantage, not developing character, not using your youth to it’s full potential (especially spectacular failure). In what way? This sounds like pretty good advice, but I'm not sure how to practically apply it.

Sorry I haven’t come back around to it.

I meant every type of risk - how you practically apply this sort of advice is 100% your part. You know yourself best, you are at the center of your universe etc.

In a way what you choose will then become an integral part of your identity.

Coming back around to this AI stuff - I think there will be plenty of need for smart people to be doing CS stuff. If that’s who you are - lean into it hard.

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