Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaza | Hacker News Reader

I started university (in Australia) in 2004, not long after the dot com crash. CS enrolment rates were low, kids were getting scared off due to perceived lack of jobs. As a result, there was a shortage of grad talent (companies were already ramping up hiring again by 2004). I got a grad job just fine, in 2008, and I've never been short of work since.

So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.

View on HN

> 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads*

alterative view: the AI hype is real, AI takes over, and no one has any jobs anyway

also a thought: in 5 years the boomers will be retiring in droves as will the first series of GenX and the market, in most fields, should be opening up anyway

what makes you so confident that AI is just a hype?

Experience. You learn to ignore what people _believe_ it does and what they _say_ does and look at what it _actually_ does.

It's fun to play with, but LLMs can't reason and are fundamentally unreliable. They cannot be made reliable.

The actual market uses for large quantities of human-like text is, like, autocomplete and spam.

I use copilot as fancy autocomplete and like it, but ~all claims that it will replace SWEs are by people selling AI or people who fundamentally do not understand what SWEs actually do.

It'll probably replace some offshoring, ironically lol

This time is different. A fact right now is that software engineers now can orchestrate LLMs and agents to write software. The role of software engineers who do this is quality control, compliance, software architecture and some out of the box thinking for when LLMs do not cut it. What makes you think advances in AI wont take care of these tasks that LLMs do not do well currently? My point is once these tasks are taken care off a CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees. What people need to learn is how to think of customers needs in abstract ways and communicate this to AI and judge the output in a similar way someone judges a painting.

> CS graduate won't be doing tasks that they learnt to do in their degrees

how is that different from the previous decade(s)? How often do you invert a redblack tree in your daily programming/engineering job?

A CS degree is a degree for thinking computationally, using mathematics as a basis. It's got some science too (aka, use evidence and falsifiability to work out truths and not rely on pure intuition). It's got some critical thinking attached, if your university is any good at making undergraduate courses.

A CS degree is not a boot camp, nor is it meant to make you ready for a job. While i did learn how to use git at uni, it was never required nor asked - it was purely my own curiosity, which a CS degree is meant to foster.

The original comment advised people to enroll in CS to capture the potential shortage of CS grads in the workforce. You’re saying no people shouldn’t be doing CS to make themselves ready for a job. The comment you replied to also takes a similar stance, ie no CS doesn’t make people ready for a job.

You might think you’re disagreeing with the parent comment but in fact you’re disagreeing with the top level comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com