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Comment by onetimeusename | Hacker News Reader

Just as a side note, at my university about half the CS people are in the AI track. I would guess that number will keep increasing. There is also a separate major that kind of focuses on AI/psychology that is pretty popular but I am not sure how many people are in it. A good number of the students have some kind of "AI startup". Also, although it violates the honor code, I would be willing to bet many students use AI in some way for doing programming assignments.

This isn't to say you are wrong but just to put some perspective on how things are changing. Maybe most new programmers will be hired into AI roles or data science.

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The ask from every new grad to be assigned to ai development is unreasonable right now and they are probably hurting their careers by all going the same direction honestly. It’s a small fraction of our development efforts and we usually hire very senior for that sort of role. We still need people that can program for the day to day business needs and it’s a perfect starting role for a new grad yet almost all of them are asking for assignment to ai development.

I appreciate anyone that can utilise ai well but there’s just not enough core ai model development jobs for every new grad.

Agree and disagree. You do it need a “degree in AI”. However, you need to be using AI in your degree. Really using it.

What are those “day to day business needs” that you think people are going to do without AI?

In my view, this is like 1981. If you are saying, we will still need non-computer people for day-to-day business needs, you are wrong. Even the guy in the warehouse and the receptionist at the front are using computers. So is the CEO. That does not mean that everybody can build one, but just think of the number of jobs in a modern company that require decent Excel skills. It is not just the one in finance. We probably don’t know what the “Excel” of AI is just yet but we are all going to need to be great at it, regardless of who is building the next generation of tools.

Wouldn't the AI track be more about the knowing the internals, being able to build models, ... So in your 1981 example that would be saying about half of the people are enrolling in computer hardware courses, whereas only a fraction of those are needed?

I would assume any other CS course teaches/is going to be teaching how to use AI to be an effective software developer.

I agree with your point in general, but saying one needs to be great at using AI tools gives way too much credit to companies’ ability to identify low performers. Especially in large organizations, optics matter far more than productive output. Being able to use AI tools is quite different from saying you are using AI tools!

An actual hardcore technical AI "psychology" program would actually be really cool. Could be a good onboarding for prompt engineering (if it still exists in 5 years).

Yeah, the younguns smell opportunity and run towards it. They'll be fine. It's younguns) the less experienced folks in the current corporate world that will have the most to lose.

Or perhaps it will be the more experienced knuckle draggers, hardened in our ways.

The really experienced of us will have made this mistake enough times to know to avoid it.

I didn’t get a smart phone until the 2010s. Stupid I know but it was seen as a badge of honour in some circles ‘bah I don’t even use a smart phone’ we’d say as the young crowd went about their lives never getting lost without a map and generally having an easier time of it since they didn’t have that mental block.

Ai is going to be similar no doubt. I’m already seeing ‘bah I don’t use ai coding assistants’ type of posts, wearing it as a badge of honour. ‘Ok you’re making things harder for yourself’ should be the reply but we’ll no doubt have people wearing it as a badge of honour for some time yet.

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