As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.
I went to university 2005-2008 and I was advised by many people at the time to not go into computer science. The reasoning was that outsourced software developers in low-cost regions like India and SEA would destroy salaries, and software developers should not expect to make more than $50k/year due to the competition.
Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year.
This might be the professional/career version of "buy when there's blood in the streets."
You nailed it on the head, down to the exact examples.
I was still in high school in 2010, and was told the same thing about outsourcing to India/SEA/etc. making a CS degree/career (in the US) a terrible choice. It wasn't just random people saying this either, I was reading about it in the news, online, had some family acquaintances with alleged former software dev career, etc. I didn't listen, and I am glad I didn't.
As I was graduating from college, and deep learning was becoming a new hot thing, I heard the same thing about radiologists, and how they are all getting automated away in the next 5 years. I had no plans to go to med school, and I didn't know anyone at the time who went through it, so I didn't know much about the topic. On the surface, it seemed like a legitimate take, and I just stored it in my head as "sounds about right."
Cue to now, I know more than a few people who went through med school, and am in general more attuned to the market. Turns out, all of that was just another genpop hype, those news articles about "omg radiologists are all getting replaced by computers" stopped from showing up on any of my news feeds, and not a single radiology-specialized med school graduate I know had any issues with getting a job (that paid significantly more than an entry level position at a FAANG).
I have zero idea what point I was trying to make with this comment, but your examples mirror my personal experience with the topic really well.
I went for CS in my late 20s, always tinkered with computers but didn't get into programming earlier. College advisor told me the same thing, and that he went for CS and it was worthless. This was 2012.
I had a job lined up before graduating. Now make high salary for the area, work remotely 98% of the time and have flexible schedule. I'm so glad I didn't listen to that guy.
The one thing I learned in college is that the advisors are worthless. There's how many students? And you are supposed to expect they know the best thing for you? My advisor told me that all incoming freshmen must take a specific math class, a pre-calculus course, totally ignoring all of my AP exams that showed I was well beyond that. Wasted my time and money.
haha, I was working in the industry around that time, though quite young and inexperienced and had someone pull me aside to tell me I needed to get out of coding because soon the business PM type guys (like he was) wouldn't need "guys like you" soon.
His two points were one, 'no code' tools (they didn't call it that back then); this idea that full on business apps could get created by non programmers by just tweaking some XML.
Then he was convinced the rest would be done just by cheap indians and chinese programmers.
Yup hearing big talk about competition and doom is a strong signal that there is plenty of demand.
You can either bet on the new unproven thing claiming to change things overnight, or just do the existing thing that's working right now. Even if the new thing succeeds, an overnight success is even more unrealistic. The insight you gain in the meantime is valuable for you to take advantage of what that change brings. You win either way.
When there is no competition that is a sign there is no demand.
There can sometimes be too much competition, but often there is only the illusion of too much if you don't look at quality. You can find a lot of cheap engineers in India, but if you want a good quality product you will have to pay a lot more.
My take is that these are not binary issues. With outsourcing, it is true that you can hire someone cheaper in Asian countries but it cannot kill all jobs locally. So what happens is that the absolute average/mediocre get replaced by outsourcing and now with AI while the top talent can still command a good salary because they are worth it.
So I think that a lot of juniors WILL get replaced by AI not because they are junior necessarily but because a lot of them won't be able to add great value compared to a default AI and companies care about getting the best value from their workers. A junior who understands this and does more than the bare minimum will stand out while the rest will get replaced.
> So I think that a lot of juniors WILL get replaced by AI not because they are junior necessarily but because a lot of them won't be able to add great value compared to a default AI and companies care about getting the best value from their workers. A junior who understands this and does more than the bare minimum will stand out while the rest will get replaced.
Again this is what people said about outsourced developers. 2008 logic was, why would anyone hire a junior for $50k/year when you could hire a senior with 20 years experience for $10k/year from India?
Reality: for 5+ years you could change careers by taking a 3-6 month JavaScript bootcamp and coming out the other end with a $150k job lined up. That's just how in demand software development was.
> Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year.
At the end of the day, radiologists are still doctors.
Can anyone really blame the students? If I were in their shoes, I probably wouldn't bother studying CS right now. From their perspective, it doesn't really matter whether AI is bullshit in any capacity; it matters whether businesses who are buying the AI hype are going to hire you or not.
Hell, I should probably be studying how to be a carpenter given the level at which companies are pushing vibe coding on their engineers.
"after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major"
That's such a terrible trend.
Reminds me of my peers back in ~2001 who opted not to take a computer science degree even though they loved programming because they thought all the software engineering jobs would be outsourced to countries like India and there wouldn't be any career opportunities for them. A very expensive mistake!
Certainly, I even know of experienced devs switching out of tech entirely. I think the next couple of decades are going to be very good for software engineers. There will be an explosion of demand yet a contraction in supply. We are in 2010 again.
There will be programmers of the old ways, but AI is basically code 2.0, there are now a lot of things that are AI specific that those with traditional software development skills can’t do.
Train the models to perform high level tasks with complex datasets that are generated using highly technical rules to achieve extremely particular results. Its a completely different kind of programming that regular Comp Sci just doesn't cover since no Comp Sci profs have to do it.
It's backpedaling but I don't think it's planning ahead to prevent a developer shortage - rather it's pandering to the market's increasing skepticism around AI and that ultimately the promised moonshot of AI obsoleting all knowledge work didn't actually arrive (at least not in the near future).
It's similar to all those people who were hyping up blockchain/crypto/NFTs/web3 as the future, and now that it all came to pass they adapted to the next grift (currently it's AI). He is now toning down his messaging in preparation of a cooldown of the AI hype to appear rational and relevant to whatever comes next.
You are right, perfect amount of false humility and balance. The wage suppression is an accidental biproduct and not the intent. Collateral damage if you will.
Perhaps, their own hiring pipeline is suffering, too. With most companies out there cutting internships and hiring of people with no experience "because AI will replace them" for the past 2-3 years we probably having a large dip in number of prospective candidates with 2-3 years of experience today.
Historically, these candidates have been the hiring sweet spot: less risky than brand new engineers, still small enough experience to efficiently mold them into your bespoke tools and processes and turn them into long-term employees, and still very cheap.
Or maybe they realize the AI needs humans in the loop for the foreseeable future for enterprise use cases and juniors (and people from LCL areas) are cheaper and make the economics make some sort of sense.
The problem is that it genuinely is. One of the appeals of AI is that you can focus on planning instead of actually doing running the commands yourself. If you're educated enough to be able to validate what the commands are doing (which you should be if you're trusting an AI in the first place), then if you have to individually approve pretty much everything the AI does you're not much faster than just doing it yourself. In my experience, not running in YOLO mode negates most advantages of agents in the first place.
AI is either an untrustworthy tool that sometimes wipes your computer for a chance at doing something faster than you would've been able to on your own, or it's no faster than just doing it yourself.
The entire comment is a direct quote from the article. I don't think it was meant as an insult, just a note that the author of the article already was exempting the top level poster from any of the suggestions the article was making.
You absolutely can, but it's way more common to only know how to create a blank site with a framework than to migrate an existing site. React used to have a section in its documentation for how to add it to your site without adding a build system (not common knowledge, unless it's setting up a blank site through a script) and they've since replaced it with a brief tutorial telling you to migrate your website to a JS module with a link to a suggested build system.
All of this matters because the person that has to do this setup might not be you. It's certainly a problem with the frameworks themselves that porting a website (even just to add a little functionality) isn't as easy as setting one up initially but there's not really much an individual can do here. It's one reason I like frameworks like Preact so much, they're actually trying to fix this.
I'm glad someone here says this. I'm also an amateur radio operator, and I very frequently see people who are otherwise against public resources being exploited for commercial purposes arguing against many of the regulations that ham radio requires, oftentimes the restriction on encryption. Few other hobbies have the idea of protecting their existence as baked in as amateur radio, and it keeps me hopeful that it will continue to exist as the years go on.
Not a Tesla owner but I would have thought that Musk & co would be able to state exactly when the Autopilot wasn't engaged and when it was just from the logs and yet they are 'unclear'. Is that another way of saying that the AP bailed and went "here human, fix this" in the final seconds? I mean, how hard can it be to check the logs from moment of impact backwards and state "it wasn't turned on for the journey" or "it was turned off 3 minutes before the crash". Unclear huh?
Sounds like a symbiotic relationship to me. The attackers get to advertise their capability for pulling off attacks, and Google gets to advertise their ability to stop them.
Almost all (but not all) of these attacks are based on some kind of problem that leads to amplification. Advertizing that people should fix these points of exploit help everyone on the internet.
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