Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

It's part of the problem with academia being behind industry.

I had a similar problem when doing my MBA; Lean Startup had just been released and the whole "startup scene" was getting going. But I couldn't use any of that in my MBA entrepreneurial course, because no-one had written a paper on Lean. I had to write business plans (which, obviously, no-one was doing out in the real world). I was being taught a useless skill because academia couldn't adapt quick enough.

For these CS grads who are being punished so harshly for using AI, the same: the first thing they will meet when they start their new developer job is a Claude prompt. Their CS course will not have prepared them for this, and they will suck at using an LLM to generate code.

There is an argument that universities should not be vocational, and should teach people how to be better humans, not better employees. I agree completely with this, but that also means universities need to stop advertising how getting a degree leads to more lucrative employment. Which is it?

Because if it is vocational, and if a CS degree is supposed to lead on to a career in software development, then they need to teach orchestration not C. We don't teach prospective developers how to write machine code on punched cards any more, for exactly the same reasons.

> For these CS grads who are being punished so harshly for using AI, the same: the first thing they will meet when they start their new developer job is a Claude prompt. Their CS course will not have prepared them for this, and they will suck at using an LLM to generate code.

You're assuming that this policy continues for higher level courses. It does not. Use of LLMs is discussed, and in some cases even encouraged, in higher level courses like Software Engineering I.

I would argue that if they use an LLM at the stage of a lower-level fundamentals course, they'll suck even more at using an LLM for more interesting tasks. They also won't have the skills necessary to address problems when the LLM invariably doesn't do exactly what is desired.

That's good to know. I'd assumed that this was one of those courses.

> I would argue that if they use an LLM at the stage of a lower-level fundamentals course, they'll suck even more at using an LLM for more interesting tasks. They also won't have the skills necessary to address problems when the LLM invariably doesn't do exactly what is desired.

That's how it works now, kinda, with all us seniors controlling the LLMs. But we're learning a whole new set of skills that are only tangentially related to the skills required to actually write code. I can easily see that in a couple of years students are taught those new skills directly.

> I can easily see that in a couple of years students are taught those new skills directly.

Definitely. We're already getting ready to prototype a course that does just that.

> There is an argument that universities should not be vocational, and should teach people how to be better humans, not better employees. I agree completely with this, but that also means universities need to stop advertising how getting a degree leads to more lucrative employment. Which is it?

I read a reply to a similar question in a different HN thread a while back that stuck with me. It went something like, "The point of university is to get an education. The point of student loans is to get a job."

haha yes, agreed.

One of my hopes is that AI screws up the whole career thing so badly that we go back to education being non-vocational (because there's no point, everything they teach will be obsolete before the students graduate).

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