Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Programming Education

'The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting' 119

Posted by msmash from the existential-questions dept.
theodp writes: The job of the future might already be past its prime," writes The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch in The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting. "For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled. All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs. At Stanford, widely considered one of the country's top programs, the number of comp-sci majors has stalled after years of blistering growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, the chair of Princeton's computer-science department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduating comp-sci majors at Princeton is set to be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The number of Duke students enrolled in introductory computer-science courses has dropped about 20 percent over the past year."

"But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren't waiting to find out whether that's true."

Meanwhile, writing in the Communications of the ACM, Orit Hazzan and Avi Salmon ask: Should Universities Raise or Lower Admission Requirements for CS Programs in the Age of GenAI? "This debate raises a key dilemma: should universities raise admission standards for computer science programs to ensure that only highly skilled problem-solvers enter the field, lower them to fill the gaps left by those who now see computer science as obsolete due to GenAI, or restructure them to attract excellent candidates with diverse skill sets who may not have considered computer science prior to the rise of GenAI, but who now, with the intensive GenAI and vibe coding tools supporting programming tasks, may consider entering the field?

'The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting' More | Reply

'The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting'

Comments Filter:

  • Odd to see a report about the job of the future being dead based on solely on enrollment into old forms of education.

    It's gotten earlier than ever to get access to the latest tools and learn. Why end up going to a college and get saddled with debt just to be given an outdated curriculum.

    • Learning isn't the problem. The problem is you not making it past the HR filters because you lack a degree.

      • The problem is you not making it past the HR filters because you lack a degree.

        The problem is not getting past the HR filters because either HR doesn't put in the correct qualifications in the job listing which results in candidates being filtered out [indiatimes.com], or candidates being interviewed by AI which filters them out because they didn't express the proper body language or facial expression [bbc.com].

  • This has happened before (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @01:42PM (#65475554)

    When companies started exporting coding tasks to cheap countries. The result was pure quality. The problem is going to be even worse with AI because I'm willing to bet that AI is not going to replace senior developers for a long time and you won't have a big market of experience coders. In the end these companies are going to end up paying more especially in 3 to 5 years when the entire industry realizes that you can't just get rid of coders. At the same time there will be a shortage of people entering the market and then you're going to have a real problem of filing positions.

    • This echoes my thoughts. We'll see a contraction until everyone realizes that AI was not a silver bullet and that you can't vibe code solutions to novel problems. The eventual lawsuits that arise when GPL code makes its way into closed source applications are going to cause a lot of companies to reevaluate their cost-benefit analysis as well. I'm also assuming that this kills off CS enrollment in other countries faster than it does for the U.S. as there's little reason to outsource anything an AI can do for

    • You won't have any problems filling positions at all... if you are willing to pay through the nose and not complain that you are now sleeping in the very bed you made.

    • Yep. As a grizzled greying-hair, I'm not super worried about myself. I have the experience and knowledge to continue to do things AI simply can't, and probably won't before I retire. For that, I'll continue to command pretty good pay at a phase in my life when my kids are moving out and my expenses are going down. Bully for me.

      Automation always shoots for low-hanging fruit. When that's factory assembly line workers, it's not such a big deal (it is for the workers, obviously, but I'm talking systemically) be

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonyrnous ( 10465021 )

        I have the experience and knowledge to continue to do things AI simply can't, and probably won't before I retire

        Unless you're planning on retiring some time this year I'd guess you're being very optimistic. Good luck though. I'm in the same boat.

      • I've started using AI at my job and it actually can be pretty helpful but it is easy to see how a junior programmer will code themselves into a corner or get stuck on unsolvable problems. I don't think senior engineers are going to be replaced by AI.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      They'll just do the same thing they did last time - continue to flood the market with H1Bs at a lower pay than they can get domestic workers, and make up for the quality shortfall in volume.

    • especially in 3 to 5 years when the entire industry realizes that you can't just get rid of coders.

      You are thinking too narrowly. They are getting rid of people who can THINK. Not just coders/programmers. Seriously, for a long time now, they have been hiring coders who can't think. Businesses externalize their knowledge needs by hiring contractors. The business itself is full of management and janitors.

  • It's great news for anyone already in CS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lobotomy656 ( 7554372 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @01:43PM (#65475560)
    I'd argue that CS will be the least affected by AI because someone has to work and support all those AIs, interfaces, interconnections and hardware. Additionally if thee will be such a huge shortage of CS graduates it means wages will skyrocket once companies start fighting for whoever is left, once CEOs realize that they still need IT to deploy and maintain those AIs that replaced HR, Legal, Administration etc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Yep. That's the way it's gone for the last quarter century, at least.

      They will, also, invariably seek out people to do 2-3 roles that were previously done by 2-3 people. And they will likely pay only slightly more than skilled labor for those jobs, expecting them to be able to be done by runbook and day contract hires... but it won't be so.

    • I'd argue that CS will be the least affected by AI because someone has to work and support all those AIs, interfaces, interconnections and hardware.

      Maintenance can and will be done by janitors. The only intelligence needed is the one developing the AI. There will be VERY few positions doing that.

  • Wow, alarmist crap from slashdot, who knew that was coming??

  • Almost none of the colleges teaches real world skills and not enough math or science to require smart students. It was the new English major program from the start.

    The advent of the H1-B Bangladesh slop "coders" killed the entry level programming jobs and now AI will kill off that garbage.
    The question will be how will the USA train sr. level programmers when the boomers and Gen X die off? You already have to have a CCNA/I and some sort of cyber cert to get a chance of an interview outside of programming.

  • The bottle was leaking for years (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @02:03PM (#65475628) Homepage
    We're looking to hire a new developer, out of 169 resumes, 3 were good enough to warrant a first round, which is 1.77% or 1.8%. The last time we looked for a developer, out of 700 resumes, 25 were good enough to warrant a first round, that's 3.7%. People go into computer science / computer engineering, but lack skills ranging from basic literacy, through to fundamentals.

    The job ad lists four languages, JavaScript, TypeScript, GO and C#. JS/TS are required because we work in Angular, GO and C# are only "Nice-to-Have", and I don't bother listing HTML / CSS because if you know JS/TS, you're good to go. That's a simple development language stack, you need to know JavaScript or TypeScript, and have used Angular, or a close enough framework, I'd honestly accept React.

    At least 50% of the applicants were Java developers, not JavaScript, Java! At least 25% used the term / number method, where you include every term you've ever heard, or throw around numbers like 25%, 50%, 40+, in hopes to pass an AI scanner. 75% of the resumes were junk before I started, but I have a policy to read every single resume from every applicant. Out of the last 25%, or 43 resumes, 30 of them had serious spelling / grammar errors, and not "You used American English, not Canadian English", actual errors. A few misspelled "English", some of them had term names wrong, like Angueact, or Axure, and others had missing date ranges, bad formatting, bad colours, contrast issues, and so on.

    Out of the resumes that include portfolio sites, or personal sites, most were broken, some had TLS errors, and except for two, they were hosted on a site builder. Out of the resumes which included GitHub / GitLab links, except for three, showed no work, were missing, or, were forks of other projects, and they didn't clean their fork up.

    I could keep going, but the main issue I'm getting at is we had no bubble QA, and so many of the people who graduated, found work, and then got laid off, aren't worth hiring. It's difficult to fake skill, if your skill review is being done by someone who cares, and has knowledge to call you out. When you say you're "detailed oriented" (never put that in a resume), and then misspell "English", include a GitHub that is all forks, showing no work, include a personal site, you didn't make, and seemingly have used every technology that ever existed, while improving processes by 100 000% in two days, what do you expect to happen?
    • This is my take as well.

      We have a bunch of graduates who are literally fucking skills-incompetent for the job we need.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kick6 ( 1081615 )

      . It's difficult to fake skill, if your skill review is being done by someone who cares, and has knowledge to call you out.

      It's also difficult to ACQUIRE skill when the dev world is so insanely fractionated and ever changing as you've clearly laid out in your job description. And that's the real problem: people with a BS in CS don't know their ass from a hot rock, no hiring manager wants to help them sort that out, and then those same managers 3 years later are butthurt that nobody meets their "experience required" job requirements.

      • The problem is getting a resume through HR to one who is actually qualified to appreciate what you have put into it.

    • Re the java thing, here in the UK certain unscrupulous job agencies do bare bones pattern matching on CVs they have on file and shotgun them to a ton of companies so long as the candidate just says ok in a response to an email that is auto generated in the 1st place. I've had agencies trying to send me for stuff I didnt and have never had on my CV.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      The job ad lists four languages, JavaScript, TypeScript, GO and C#. JS/TS are required because we work in Angular, GO and C# are only "Nice-to-Have", and I don't bother listing HTML / CSS because if you know JS/TS, you're good to go. That's a simple development language stack, you need to know JavaScript or TypeScript, and have used Angular, or a close enough framework, I'd honestly accept React.

      At least 50% of the applicants were Java developers, not JavaScript, Java!

      To be fair, if you can code in Java, you can code in TypeScript or JavaScript. I mean, the object declaration syntax is an abomination, but other than that, there's nothing super complex about moving from one object-oriented programming language to another, though you may get non-idiomatic stuff. (As they say, "A good Java programmer can write Java in any programming language.")

      At least 25% used the term / number method, where you include every term you've ever heard, or throw around numbers like 25%, 50%, 40+, in hopes to pass an AI scanner. 75% of the resumes were junk before I started, but I have a policy to read every single resume from every applicant. Out of the last 25%, or 43 resumes, 30 of them had serious spelling / grammar errors, and not "You used American English, not Canadian English", actual errors. A few misspelled "English", some of them had term names wrong, like Angueact, or Axure, and others had missing date ranges, bad formatting, bad colours, contrast issues, and so on.

      That's sad.

      Out of the resumes that include portfolio sites, or personal sites, most were broken, some had TLS errors, and except for two, they were hosted on a site builder. Out of the resumes which included GitHub / GitLab links, except for three, showed no work, were missing, or, were forks of other projects, and they didn't clean their fork up.

      It's probably worth noting that anyone with experience in industry probably doesn't have a portfolio site, so if you e

      • I understand that you can move from Java, Rust, Perl, to anything else, but there's no really no need to rely on that. If we were looking for a COBOL developer, we might have to settle for a Java person, and let them learn, but TypeScript / JavaScript? I'm actually not picky if you know Angular, I'd take React, Vue, Next, just show you have some experience.

        The thing about the personal sites, and the portfolio sites, why include them, if you don't want me to look at them? I don't mandate them, for the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kertaamo ( 16100 )

        "They" would be wrong. I would love to see a Java programmer try and write Java in Rust. Of course forcing the style/idiom/paradigm of the one language you know onto some other language would be rather incompetent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Can I ask what level developer you're hiring for, and what you're paying? That might be why you appear to be only getting Indian scammer applicants.

      • Sure, 5+ years experience, the current range on the ad is 70-120k / year, so an intermediate developer. I'm going to keep stating this, I review every single resume that shows up, without exception. There is no AI processing, there is no HR processing, I read each one, and give it a real review, before saying Yes or No, and I'm the one who will do your second or and third round, I'm one of the technical leads, and a co-founding developer of the company.
    • You're not using AI or non-technical recruiters to screen the resumes, but many companies are: it is quite hard even for qualified people to get through the filters and get their resume in front of someone qualified to evaluate it. So in the end applicants at every level of skill spam their resume everywhere, while doing whatever they can to get them through the filters (which includes stuffing them with keywords). The only ones who avoid that slog are those with connections to directly get an offer, but no
      • That doesn't make an absolute statement of quality, but we've never broken 5% as a pass rate. I understand that many companies use AI and screening software, but why does mean you can't write a resume? Why does that mean you can't make sure your links work? The resume is your chance to get someone to gain interest in you, so why not put effort into making it great?

        I understand that schools teach / taught to throw everything at the wall approach to resume design, but that was stupid, wrong, and I've pe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      I love using Axure; I'm quite proficient in it.
      • That resume had the "Detail Oriented" statement in it, which always makes me laugh. It was also written in Microsoft Word, but encoded poorly, used a closed source font that I didn't have (and was a pain to get), and then didn't have the colour information correct for the fonts and highlights. That being said, I got everything working and still reviewed it, in MS Office Cloud, and on LibreOffice.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )
          Kudos to your diligence.

          That reminds me of when I put a pale graphic banner down the left side of my resume to make it attractive. Then I FAXED it (back then) where the fax machine made the banner opaque, obscuring part of the resume text!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kertaamo ( 16100 )

      Back in the day I worked for a company making radars. Think military radars. One guy applied for a job elsewhere. His CV told his story story in one line, something like this:

      "I designed every radar signal processor this company has built in the last 10 years"

      Which was true. No mention of education, skills or technology used. Why would there be, every project employed different technology as things developed, likely whatever he wanted to do would be different again. Besides a lot of it was military secrets.

      • If I read that resume, I would write something like: "We need to talk to this guy!", and pass him up to a second round just so I could hear his story. He's either going to be qualified to a level that even the radar systems bow in respect, or, he's going to be crazy uncle racist tinfoil trump supporter.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      I hate to be blunt, but what has any of that got to do with Computer Science? This is the problem. To quote Dijkstra - "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes".

      People wanting vocational programming degrees or courses should get them. Computer science is not about teaching Angular. And from my own observation over the years, I can clearly remember the first time I interviewed a programmer who clearly had no idea how a computer worked, or any of the theory behind one.
      • I'm not being critical because people don't know Angular, I'm being critical that people seem functionally retarded. I'm not annoyed that one Java developer applied accidentally, I'm annoyed that 50% of the applications were from Java developers. Furthermore, I'm not annoyed that one GitHub link showed no work, I'm annoyed most of them showed nothing. The issue I'm getting at is that people are failing at basic, simple activities, how are you going to convince me you can write code, when you can't write

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mccalli ( 323026 )
          But what I'm saying is that's all vocational. Computer science is basic information theory, patterns, HCI...all of that kind of thing. I'm a graduate of Comp. Sci myself, though in the UK from 1992. During that time we were taught a programming language as an abstract for various concepts (I was taught ADA, for instance) but it was assumed you would go and teach yourself any language you were interested in. I self-taught myself C for instance.

          What you seem to be looking for isn't Computer Science grads,

  • More an indictment of Universities... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shellster_dude ( 1261444 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @02:08PM (#65475642)
    While I'm sure some of this is doom and gloom about AI "takin' yer jobs". I think more of it is that CS at universities has strayed further and further from practical coding skills while charging more and more, and the value of said degree as a credentials has continued to plumet. I recently started looking for a new job opportunity, the thing that has been conspicuously absent from the list of requirements for the majority of the jobs is a "CS degree or equivalent". 10 years ago, that absolutely was not the case. 4-6 years of actual coding experience, or even 3-6 months corpus of cool programming opensource projects is worth way more on a job application that a crusty old CS degree (and I have one).

    It's totally fine to say CS degrees aren't about teaching practical skills and about theory. That may be true (it certainly is in practice if not in theory), but don't think that Universities are gong to continue to see high enrollment for a degree that teaches very little that is practical for most of the programming field, while charging exorbitant amounts of money. The cost benefit analysis is simply not there.

    • Re:More an indictment of Universities... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @03:34PM (#65475894) Homepage

      While I'm sure some of this is doom and gloom about AI "takin' yer jobs". I think more of it is that CS at universities has strayed further and further from practical coding skills while charging more and more

      It may be the other way around: that the industry's idea of what "practical skills" means is changing faster than the universities' ability to keep up. By the time the Unis have adopted a technology, come up with a curriculum around it, found professors to teach it, and taught it to a graduating class of students, that technology is already considered obsolete and is no longer of much value to anyone looking to hire.

      Dunno what the solution to that is, other than teaching the fundamentals and leaving it up to the students to apply them to technology stack du jour after they graduate.

  • Of Programming, Coding, ICs, PCB, and the Electronics manufacturing process under your belt... Lateral moves are effortless. To say, Automation, Robotics, AI, Manufacturing, and other sectors. The key in technology is to always broaden your skillset, stay interested in everything, and never slow down. If you think learning one style, language, or methodology will get you through life/career, that is a pipe dream for most anymore. Your talents need to cover a wider range to make you shine for the money being

    • Of Programming, Coding, ICs, PCB, and the Electronics manufacturing process under your belt... Lateral moves are effortless

      Except they aren't, because the employers will always want you to be buzzword-compliant and have 5 years of experience in whatever tech stack they most recently deployed or will want to deploy (often even if it's only 2 years old). See the guy above insisting on Angular and C# and Go for example. Embedded people want you to know their particular RTOS. PCB and Electronics industry peo

      • I've managed to seamlessly transition in just the last 10 years, From a network engineer, to industrial automation, to 3D Design and FDM production, to design layout and fabrication of PCBs. Now if you are trying to be at the "Top" of these fields, then yes, its going to take a particular focus to address those things you mentioned. But in a general sense, in the mid-level careers in those fields, its much less focused and easier to break into with a generally tech focused skillset. But for the top levels o
    • There's nuance continuum between a jack of all trades and master of one. Some people aren't good in anything, some are pretty good in multiple areas.

  • Programmers will still be needed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @02:10PM (#65475650) Homepage

    Most of my job isn't typing lines of code into a computer screen. It's gathering requirements from the real world (and the people in it) and then inventing/designing a system (or a modification to an existing system) that will actually accomplish the goal. People have an innate advantage over an AI because we live in the world where the problem exists. We understand both the problem domain (the world) and the solution domain (what a computer program is capable of doing) and we're imagining a solution, and even imagining what it would be like for a human being to use that system.

    That's even assuming that the AI hype is real and that they're going to reach AGI. I don't see any evidence that LLMs are going to lead to AGI. The current crop of LLMs don't even come close to what an experienced programmer can do. And no amount of simply adding CPU and memory is going to get them there.

    You can all avoid getting a CS major if you want. That's great news for my wages when companies can't hire anyone who actually knows how to program, and their vibe-coded solution erases their database and nobody knows why.

    • Most of my job isn't typing lines of code into a computer screen. It's gathering requirements from the real world (and the people in it)

      Would you say you are a people person? (Office Space reference)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RobinH ( 124750 )
        LOL. Since I'm the one who actually implements the solution as well, we don't actually have the Jump to Conclusions guy in our company.

  • The age of magicians (Score:5, Insightful)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @02:26PM (#65475696)

    Now, as then, to most people, computers are complex, magical things, and they rely on magicians to keep it all working. It may as well be magic; that's how much most people care. And sadly many young people feel that way about technology today. They are digital natives who have always been exposed to the most fantastic technologies we could only dream of, but have zero interest in how it actually works. The old joke about getting children to do tech support for their parents no longer works.

    Interest in computer science was always among a very small number of people (us nerds I suppose). Perhaps we're returning to how things were when I was a freshman CS major. My class was full of kids who had been hacking on computer code in some informal way since they were children. But we were not at all common.

    None of our uni courses taught us how to code in particular languages; we were all expected to already know how to do that to have done it for years. We were expected to pick up new languages very quickly with minimal instruction, which we did. What the course taught were formal introductions to algorithms, complexity, run times, abstraction, lambda calculus, etc. Not how to code, but how to construct efficient programs and how to reason about problem solving. Most importantly, how to recognize when a task a boss asked us to do was impossible (please solve the traveling salesman problem for me in O(n) time and give me the provably shortest solution) and how to punt (heuristics).

    I know longer do any software development for a career, but the skills I learned in my degree apply to my work every day in some way.

    • > I know longer do any software development for a career
            ^^^^

      Good. Now is the time to brush up on Basic English.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Thank you. I was waiting for a post like yours. Nope, my english is fine. Taking time to proof read after typing fast, on the other hand, not so much!

        Classic case of the fast, automatic part of our brain getting out ahead of the slow, thinking part (see Veritasium's video "The Science of Thinking"). It's really interesting to notice how this works.

  • Another Bubble (Score:4, Interesting)

    by databasecowgirl ( 5241735 ) on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @02:28PM (#65475700)
    Yet another bubble. Just like the dot com, it will shake out the coders from the gold diggers. Fair play.

    It's a game that moves as you play and most programs in the US are light on the basics in order to meet market demand. That's really what needs to change. If I had a nickel for every software engineer who couldn't explain Big O or various sorting algorithms... It's like focusing on the needs of Big Lit using shortcuts to matriculating classes of English majors who couldn't tell you what a gerund is. Annoying.

    ThIng is, writing AI applications requires a lot more maths and a totally different toolset than writing a J2EE portal so most coders will need to either retool or change their line of work. I've been building AI tools for two decades and I am back in school to level up. It's not a whole new world, just an ever raising bar.
    • The thing that will be nice to see are the companies who said they'd only use AI coding - and then they fail utterly and go out of business.
  • *Hopefully, it drives the money-seeking jobbers elsewhere and leaves real CS/EE tinkerers.

  • There were just people trying to get a good job easy. But unless you are really interested and have real talent, forget doing anything STEM. You will never get good at it and you will never enjoy doing it.

  • I doubt it a lot. The journalist is reassuring himself. You can't write a descent novel but a descent news article yes. Journalists have been hurt by AI already, coders I'm not so sure. Hiring freeze is not related to AI, it could be in the future if they achieve their goal of creating the definitive white collar as a service.

  • > A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI

    I'm not sure that will turn out to be true. Perhaps more reflection on how little the average non-developer knows about what the job entails.

    All jobs that can be done sitting in front of a computer are likely to be among the first affected by, or replaced by AI, but the ones to fall first will most likely NOT be those not requiring deep and exact reasoning. Jobs where today's generative AI is already

    • "requiring", not "not requiring".

      It's 2025 - where is my edit button?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        It's 2025 - where is my edit button?

        It's right there after you hit the "Preview" button. Then you have the choice of clicking on the "Submit" button or the "Continue Editing" button.

  • Oh good grief, Instead, take a bigger look at what's happening in higher education in general right now. How about lowering TUITION, THAT's the real bubble that's bursting. Occam's razor.

  • This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs.

    At my university, we've seen an 8% decline in CS enrollment since Fall 2022. It will probably be even worse when the Fall 2025 numbers are tallied. On the plus side, students are rapidly moving back into other engineering majors again, with several seeing 20% to 60% growth over that time.

    Unfortunately, our adminstration decided

  • Companies always have hated sw developers guts because they are: 1) indispensable for modern companies, 2) pricey 3) hard to train.

    So the bosses of said companies are now ecstatic because these chatbots can spawn infinite lines of code, and as long as they're concerned, that's all developers do.

    Of course, they're wrong. They're just creating an astronomic amount of technical debt that someone would have to come up and fix later.

    Yes, you guessed, more developers. Which would be probably less by then,

    • Companies always have hated sw developers guts because they are: 1) indispensable for modern companies, 2) pricey 3) hard to train.

      It's not the "hard to train" part which bothers them. The first two, yes. The well-paid important people in any hierarchy are all supposed to be managers, people who get people to do things. It offends the natural order (in the eyes of management) when mere doers are so highly paid.

  • Yet the story before is now Americans are scammed out of 44Billion/year in banking fraud. There’s just going to increasing work for CS capable people as the world goes all in on digital everything just trying to keep it all working.

  • Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words.

    I see zero evidence of this. I HEAR it all the time in articles like this, but as far as people I work with or code I experiment with myself using AI, AI has proven to be maybe break-even for very simple, limited-domain things (basically the rough equiv of looking up an answer on stackexchange), and far worse than nothing when doing complex system design (during which I spend so much time shaking out the plausible-sounding but ultimately-bullshit answers that I net lose time).

    I know I'm just an anecdote and a small sample base, but I do this for a living, and I don't see anything approaching the benefit that such articles spin.

    Ask yourself: if it's so easy to use, where are all the apps written by your neighbors, and the local firemen, and the grocery store folks, and so on?

  • The death of computer programming is greatly exaggerated.

  • Javascript programmers never really deserved the term. Anyone with skills is just a valuable and hard to find as ever. Today, AI is just another tool in the toolkit of a skilled developer.

  • I learned software engineering in the 70s. Back then there were not very many of us and even fewer who were good at it. Based on the laws of supply and demand, we were paid well. Then the word spread that software engineering paid well and a flood of people of varying talent jumped in. The word on the street was that everybody should learn to code. The truth is, talent is real. It takes a special kind of mind to be good at designing software. During the peak of boom times, lesser talented people got hired.

  • This is like saying 'physics is looking less popular'.

    There's no computer science bubble. There are a lot of people who can't tell the difference between consumerism and computer science, and the author explains in the first paragraph that she is one of them.
    There's also a bunch of other people who want to conflate the sales that rely on computer science with the extents of computer science, but in merit of their inability to recognise when their part is a subset (among other things)... they're wrong and we

  • ...the number of actually *good* programmers has remained roughly constant.
  • Anyone with an actual computer science degree should be ok. However, most universities don't teach computer science anymore. They teach IT or programming.

    Computer scientists are taught how to think and problem solve. They are mathematicians and sometimes physicists with keyboards.

    The applied computer skills like Cyber Security never belonged in the university except as an add-on.

    My daughter starts her summer internship on Monday. The largest university in this country has a total of 9 students in entering t

Slashdot Top Deals

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

Close