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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?

#71

Post by cirrus3 »

1) yes, if you find something more interesting, go do that

2) no, LLMs are not taking dev jobs anytime soon so you shouldn't worry about that. I know this is probably boring to hear to the point you don't believe it, but LLMs don't and can't replace actual good devs, and yes, someone still needs to translate requirements to code. You may not understand this until you get into some real projects with some real dumb people at a position higher than you for a while to realize that.

You seem to have the same misunderstanding most CS/programmer students have - Your job and your skill is likely not going to be writing code. Writing code is the easy part.

I would love to see a test where a company hires fewer devs and the managers/product teams try to supplement using AI to write the code. It'll never ever ship.

You won't be a "human-bullshit to AI-bullshit translator"... you will be a problem solving human. It's up to you if you want or find value in using AI to help get you past some boilerplate code, but that is a small part of the job.

If you don't think it will pay well, that's maybe a fair gamble, but not one I would take that bet having been in the field for 20 years... even face to face human interactions struggle to do this job well, this IS the job in many ways, not the code itself. AI is pretty far off from filling any gaps besides giving a good answer to a great questions IMO. I have used it in my day job, and it kinda sucks, you have to know what to ask and have to recognize what are bad answers based on experience. It's basically just stackoverflow++ right now.

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

#72

Post by twelve40 »

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…

> taking programming classes in college is a waste

my algorithms class definitely helped me pass interviews like Microsoft. I know many people learn this stuff on their own, and many people don't, but i can't call it a waste by any stretch of my imagination.

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

#73

Post by zamfi »

rektide wrote: post #69
zamfi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if machine learning can take my code, create a builder pattern based off the current constructor, make a config file that allow programmatic defaults, that's a huge time saver of manual labor, not at generating boilerplate, but at helping me shift around what I have. I encourage you to try this in ChatGPT. Give it some code and ask it to refactor out a builder pattern. It won't be perfect, but if it's like anyt…

> an aggressive response to a perceived contentless message says more about you. disagree, thanks again. if you just show up to blindly dunk on my actual-contentful talking without saying a single thing, it's you whose being aggressive. i'm fine with aggression too, but i expect it to actually present a form & not just live in shadows. like you did. ultimately i think i contributed to reason, shared perspective, and…

Good news! You can literally go to chat.openai.com and sign up.

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

#74

Post by jacknews »

xtracto wrote: post #19
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.

Programming in the 2010s was nothing like programming in the 2000s, was nothing like programming in the 1990s, was nothing like programming in the 1980s , was nothing like programming in the 1970s... etc.. I personally experienced the paranoia of the "end of programming " when VisuslBasic was first released, and when UML code generation ('member Rational Rose?) Tools arrived. I'm still doing a good living with my pro…

"('member Rational Rose?)"

I see some of the people involved in that are heavily dunking on GPTs.

While they have a valid point not to get carried away and ascribe capabilities that aren't really there, it seems to me GPTs have perhaps already, in a few months, had more positive impact on code and coding than those methodologies and tools have, ever.

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

#75

Post by rich_sasha »

Even if AI takes over, we will still need people to run it. And stupid people won't be able to do it, just as now they can't use Excel, smart toasters, or understand internet scams.

So even in that pessimistic world view we will need smart problem-solvers, and CS is as good a training for this as any. Enjoy!

And if we don't not even need people to run it, then I hope we enter the glorious future where we don't need to do anything thing anymore. AI will build and run our powerplants and our farms, provide healthcare and brew our whisky, and we can all collectively retire. Somehow I don't see that happening.

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

#76

Post by _nalply »

camhart wrote: post #40

Is my understanding of GPT's "coding" ability wrong? From what I've seen, GPT isn't architecting systems. It writes code snippets--basically the stuff you can copy/paste off stack overflow. The only difference is now instead of Googling and searching for the code snippet, GPT will sometimes just give it to you. But once you need something unique, or something that's not just one little piece of the puzzle, it can't d…

Probably GPT could give answers about architecting systems when prompted right. But I think it still needs an experienced programmer to discern hallucination from useful answers. In other words, dig shit for gold nuggets. Still useful, though.

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

#77

Post by pllbnk »

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…

I think that the next few years will be very interesting where we will see many new companies being created by prompters and many "oh crap" moments when they will be about to hit or start hitting production and just not working, especially if the tests are carried away by the same prompters. Then the hiring pace for programmers will pick up again and we might see a new 2020-2021 boom.

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

#79

Post by plutoh28 »

0r30 wrote: post #31
Zetice wrote: post #11

Take a class on machine learning first. I suspect once you know how the sausage is made, you'll understand how short sighted this question is. Also if you want to make the most money, get the heck out of CS and into finance.

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

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

#80

Post by ShouldIPivot »

outworlder wrote: post #14

Why are you interested in CS in the first place? Computer _Science_ will not be affected by LLMs and other technologies at all. I friend of mine once said that if all computers were wiped off the face of the Earth, her Computer Science research would be unaffected (except that she would have to use typewriters for her papers). One can reason that - barring development of AGI - that improved AI capabilities won't affe…

Thanks for your in-depth response.

> Why are you interested in CS in the first place? Computer _Science_ will not be affected by LLMs and other technologies at all.

I haven't really had a chance to try out pure CS. In my own time I work on practical applications (though a current project involves lots of boolean algebra), and the curriculum at school is mostly things I already know (Sorting algorithms, and we'll do big-O at some point). The practical part of the school curriculum is heavily-OOP C#.

> Now, if you want to go to CS just to get a programming job at some company and you are doing this for money, I would indeed ask you to reevaluate. If you like programming as a hobby, a good way to kill the passion is to turn it into a boring 9/5 job. Physics and engineering may use programming as a tool and that may be more interesting to you?

I'm certainly not doing it for the money - I genuinely love it - but when I'm a 17 year old making pragmatic decisions about my future, "Can I get a job" is a pretty important one. I hope that programming as a job doesn't kill my passion, but that's certainly a concern. How frequent is that?

I'd be interested in programming within other industries, but I'm not sure on a path to doing that. I've had a lot of comments suggesting I take physics/engineering courses at uni in addition, but I'm not really sure how much of an option that is in the UK. I'll ask.

> That said, LLMs will not make a dent anytime soon. Yes they will plagiarize code and spit it out in a way that's similar to what you have requested – and for this very reason, have been banned at my Fortune company (Intellectual property is tricky). But they have no reasoning capabilities, there's still demand for solving actual problems. These days, writing code is a fraction of what I do, a lot of work goes into syncing with other teams and figuring out _what to write_. When I actually sit down to write code, that usually takes just a few days. That pales in comparison to all the architecture and coordination work that had to happen to reach that point.

Yeah, I did a week's work experience with Microsoft research about a year ago. I definitely got that impression - I, the work experience kid with no internal access, given some small projects they hadn't had time to do, programmed far more than the actual programmers on the team because I was in less meetings. I enjoyed the meetings and thinking about how to make the tool practically useful, but I'm not sure if that would continue into a decades-long career. I'll probably be doing it again, so I'll have another opportunity to consider that.

Part of my motivation behind going to uni is that I've had a pretty bad time at school due to bullies, violence, and a serious, ongoing concussion from an attack on me. Going to university and finding a good tech job appeals to me because it would (in theory) mean being surrounded by intelligent, motivated, decent people.

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