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Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

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Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#21

Post by jillesvangurp »

u20241003 wrote: post #11
cheema33 wrote: post #6

AI is just another tool. A pretty good one. And there is a skill to using it efficiently. If you ask it dumb questions, you will get dumb answers. Garbage in, garbage out. I am a software developer and I hire devs as well. If somebody is ignorant of AI or refuses to use it, that is hard pass for me. It is not all that different from an accountant not wanting to use computers. Sure, you could still do some work. But,…

Damn, I would be sending AI-generated pull-requests your way all day! Closing tickets left and right.

As long as those are good pull requests, more power to you. Why aren't you?

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#22

Post by kolinko »

kachapopopow wrote: post #7
cheema33 wrote: post #6

AI is just another tool. A pretty good one. And there is a skill to using it efficiently. If you ask it dumb questions, you will get dumb answers. Garbage in, garbage out. I am a software developer and I hire devs as well. If somebody is ignorant of AI or refuses to use it, that is hard pass for me. It is not all that different from an accountant not wanting to use computers. Sure, you could still do some work. But,…

Some people are just really good without AI so I wouldn't immediately hard pass on them.

Perhaps if they are super specialised in one narrow niche. The moment they need to write code in a new language/framework/algorirhms/domain, they benefit tremendously from chatgpt.

Or even just redacting their documentation entries.

I’d say the main devs that don’t benefit is mid-level ones. Good enough to do some programming, but not good enough to figure out how to benefit from gpt.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#23

Post by tkgally »

Ever since ChatGPT came out, I’ve been discussing it and other AI tools with the students in the university classes I teach. My impression matches the results of this survey. Some of the students have started following AI developments closely and using the tools, but many of them don’t seem interested and they wonder why I talk about it so much. Even when I told the students that they could use AI when doing some of their assignments, it was clear from their distinctive writing styles and grammatical mistakes that most of them had used it only sparingly or not at all.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#24

Post by lordnacho »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #20
phito wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so, soooo sick of people claiming so certainly AGI will be there in X time. You don't know. Nobody knows. Anyone claiming they know are full of shit. Stop speaking in absolutes.

I still remember people said fusion energy will be available in a few decades, in a few decades ago.

On the other hand, we actually do have a computer, with access to all knowledge, in our pockets, right now.

EDIT.

The point of the comment is not to say that you will in fact have all knowledge available. There's guidelines about how you're supposed to read here on HN.

The point was that this device that people could only dream of a few decades ago actually became available.

Maybe it's worth reminding people that you used to not be able to sit on your butt at home and still access just about any undergraduate level material you could think of, along with a street map of everywhere, as well as a way to take pictures, deal with your finances, and a zillion other applications.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#25

Post by amonith »

Nevermark wrote: post #8
bamboozled wrote: post #4

Who cares what people want \s

I expect most people don’t want their preferences to be coddled in a way that leaves them at a disadvantage when they graduate. AI is improving fast enough that maintaining fluency with its benefits seems like a credible “very good idea” for a lot of people.

Tbh, as a AI power user (dev) - what is there to learn? Maybe one day to figure out that you have to write prompts in a certain way but you don't have to learn that "before the job" in any shape or form. It's way more important to know what to ask about and if the AI is not hallucinating (so, the actual stuff those students learn currently) than any tools. It's pointless like wasting time teaching highschoolers how to fill tax forms.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#26

Post by DiscourseFan »

Its not really useful unless you're a highschool student or something. And even that's bad enough. There are definitely use cases but it will probably take like a decade or so to integrate it properly into industrial processes, and even then it will probably be limited and used in very strange ways you couldn't possibly imagine today. Like, someone is going to come up with something really fucking weird that saves a lot of time on some ultra-specific process and you won't even notice it. Meanwhile, people will expect work emails to be written with more personal expression or else they'll think an AI wrote it (I already know some people who got in trouble for using AI to write important emails and were then threatened with lawsuits for language in those emails that they themselves, of course, did not read).

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#27

Post by nicce »

phkahler wrote: post #13

Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.

They need to learn the material at first. Then, AI is just a tool and you lose if you don’t use it.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#28

Post by danielbln »

phkahler wrote: post #13

Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.

"They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not muck around with computers."

"They need to learn the material and to do their job, not search the Internet."

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#29

Post by joegibbs »

bamboozled wrote: post #4

Who cares what people want \s

It's not really a representative sample of what people want, only 2% responded to the section about AI and only half of those are anti-AI. You'd have to assume as well that the people most likely to respond to the AI section would be the people who hate AI the most.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#30

Post by k__ »

Almondsetat wrote: post #5

Perhaps AI will achieve what Excel, scripting or programming failed at? Education is slow, people still don't know how to use a spreadsheet software or scripting language to enhance their lives/work. Students don't use Excel or python to cheat on their homework or exams, so they don't really have reasons to learn those tools. Meanwhile, user-facing AI tools are often extremely intuitive and feel quite natural to inte…

To be fair, Excel skills are tightly bound to Excel.
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