Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you're screwed unless you take action | Hacker News Reader

Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you're screwed unless you take action

ghuntley.com

40 pointsarrowsmith30 comments

University-taught computer science curriculum is going to have to change drastically.

Disclaimer: I am not a CS degree holder. But I did attempt a masters in software engineering and it was really eye-opening to me to see how far behind "traditional" curriculum was when compared to real-world opportunities. My university completely overlooked things like front-end web development and a host of other modern needs at the time; when I spoke to the dean, he recommended the school might just not be a fit.

So if we're leaving students behind for AI outputs and shutting the door in favor of the old guard, what happens to the new wave? Will schools train them to get to the point of working with systems enough to call bullshit on AI? Are schools even teaching students AI right now?

I ask sincerely just because when I pushed for change in curriculum, I basically was shown the door that led to me dropping out and (thankfully) landing a gig at a startup that opened up another (better) door for me.

If you were looking for learning front end development in a CS masters program, I would agree with the dean.

There must be plenty of opportunities to learn that also in USA.

That was just an example, not strictly what I was there for. I just pointed it out to the dean as something that was always mentioned, but glanced over like "ew, this doesn't matter so much".

It, in fact, ended up mattering a lot.

To some extent, AI needs less extensive teaching than the problem-solving skills taught in school because it works in natural language anyways and builds off whatever else you know. You can easily talk to an AI about CS if you know CS, or even use it for coding, but not so much if you only know "AI".

It's not that learning AI isn't important, it's just that school isn't necessarily the place for it: AI is always changing, and can be learned relatively easily online, while properly learning something like linear algebra or operating systems online is pretty unlikely except for a very motivated student.

I disagree that front end web development should be taught in a computer science curriculum. It seems like it's more of a designer job rather than science/engineering. I am currently in university, and machine learning is a mandatory part of the curriculum. I think most universities do AI in one form or another actually.

Modern frontend development often involves a large degree of cross-domain expertise that extends well beyond design, so much that in large enough companies, the designer is a dedicated role, and the frontend developer simply implements their design according to spec. In even larger companies, you will see further specialized roles such as UX engineer.

If you think of FE web development as just HTML, CSS, JS and the framework de jour then I could see that. However, the most skilled FE engineers I know aren’t just doing that. It involves handling CI/CD, performance profiling/enhancements, CDNs, debugging node environments, asset management, caching strategies and the list goes on. I’m not necessarily arguing that it should be included in CS degrees but all of that is surely not a designers job.

I think there should be a new SE field for this.

They weren't in a CS curriculum, they said they were pursuing software engineering.

Ah I see, I got confused because they mentioned not holding a CS-degree.

In general the dean of any institution oversees dozens of departments. The CS department chair or department head is the person who actually understands and represents the department and its specific curriculum.

I probably am misremembering then and just use the dean as a generalized title. This was almost 13 years ago. This person was definitely in charge of curriculum, I remember that much, so probably not the dean. Thanks for correcting my misuse of the word.

Computer science is about the science of computing not the latest trends in software development. Those don't change the fundamentals of computer science.

I mean I guess but CS is also the track you get put on if you want to be a SWE. I would make an even stronger statement that within a rounding error 0% of the students in a given CS course will go on to be computer scientists. So while what you're saying is literally true there is a real disconnect between what students in CS programs want to learn and the skills they want to acquire and what is being taught. The parent is very reasonably picking up on that.

This isn't really limited to CS programs either, something is deeply wrong with the system when college grads are only marginally more prepared to enter their chosen field than HS grads. One of my friends does work building cutting edge sensors for scientific equipment— literally the ideal case for an academic curriculum. They not two months ago rejected an ivy ECE major in favor of a guy with no degree but who builds custom toy drones as a hobby.

My 2 year college taught web, linux scripting, C, C++, Java, C#, even Android and iOS, and I studied from 2011 to 2013. I definitely think some schools are more behind than others in terms of what they teach.

It's a shame since once you have the foundation, the degree is irrelevant imho. You continue learning on the job and off the job.

Computer Science curriculum is often different from the practice of software development or "software engineering," in practice, which academic-learning departments may consider too-vocational and to the detriment of their students.

Some programs have had to supplement their CS-curriculum with courses incorporating instruction on software engineering practices (e.g. version control). The "AI" being sold today isn't going to replace these practices.

Great piece. I recruit engineers and data scientists. Have had one clear instance of a candidate sneakily using an LLM during the interview, to answer a verbal scenario question.

Trouble is I work in a lab building GenAI products. You can't play a player. Remember kids, your fingers move when they type and your eyeballs move left to right when you're reading.

CV was also full of exaggerations that were generated.

Candidate rejected without feedback. We were lucky, suspect someone else has been stuck with the gpt copy&paster.

Pretty soon you’ll see people bridging audio with llm voice responses to their headset.

I’ve had interviews where people have their friend bridging calls and doing the lookups. Some were incredibly stupid that we heard the typing from the next room lol.

Anyway remote interviews are a nightmare already.

It seems easier to me to just learn half-way decent programming skills than play all these games. Only half joking.

>> ... and your eyeballs move left to right when you're reading.

How long until this is also fixed by the software? :-) This is within the state of the art now.

>> CV was also full of exaggerations that were generated.

+1. I see companies offering AI-generated CVs which barely even ask about the work a candidate has done. One of them stated that the customer should refine the AI-generated CV to match their actual skills and experience, but did not say anything about how their product/service helps with this. It's just left at AI-autogenerated CV. (Shame on such companies.)

If I wanted an AI-generated CV, I could just ask ChatGPT to make one. Why would I pay a company to do it for me?

+1.

There are many companies (startups) in AI these days that are just creating prompts/templates. Their value addition is just from more experimentation with models and prompts than an average user. I agree this wouldn't be much, however could be enough to lure non-savvy users into paying.

This is a good thing. Turn all actionable hiring signals to noise and make it a pure lottery.

I don't know, the expiration of low interest rates seems to fully explain the slump in the software industry, without considering the advent of chatbot-assisted coding. The job market is just much smaller and new entrants will unfortunately have a tough time. We may be back to the days of de rigeur unpaid software internships, or college grads taking other, non-programming jobs.

But it seems like a bad sign for a technology when think pieces need to be written portraying skeptics as cro-magnons on the evolutionary scale of adoption, there's something very "emperor's new clothes" about it. The value of revolutionary tech typically speaks for itself and doesn't need extensive apologetics.

The value does need to be propped up for investors though.

How about this - if you're a student, focus on learning how computers work. You are not going to school to be a programmer. You are going to be a computer scientist. The latter begets the former. If your only thought as a cs student is "code output" you have already fucked up, and even if chatgpt can write it for you, it's not gonna understand it for you.

LLMs might replace the bootcamp boys and dilettantes but there will always be room for people who know shit. If that isn't you, make it you.

To maintain any kind of project, you need a set of inputs that a human can understand and manipulate to produce desired results, and a build chain that reproducibly produces output from the inputs.

The inputs were traditionally source code, but sure, we could in principle use prompts for an LLM as the primary inputs, which then produces source code that gets fed to the rest of the build chain.

But editing the source code produced by the LLM is a non-starter because then you're editing build artifacts.

Dear Teacher,everything is screwed, we are aiming low, and have no fucks left to give. While not a student of CS, I have had a number of rather strange conversations with current students, who have clearly and articulately, expressed there life plan as aiming just low of the middle, safe, low stress, jobby job, coming from clearly intelligent and capable people, who are not malcontents or missfits, or any kind of counter culture,, rebels, but are calmly (too calmly?) giving up without ANY fight, fighting for invisibility, grabbing for the biege pill

Jeez I wonder if nearly 70% of all tech jobs going to dubiously acquired h1b's has anything to do with it?

I VOTED FOR KAMALA AND YES I SEE THIS AS AN ISSUE

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