[sam0x17]

I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers

AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how to operate with AI properly in an educational setting in such a way that learners actually still learn, the damage from years of unqualified people earning degrees and then entering academia is going to reverberate through the next 50 years as those folks go on to teach...

[boomskats]

What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none.

That time when you got to internalise through first hand experience what good & bad look like is when you built the skill/intuition that now differentiates competent LLM wielding devs from the vibers. The problem is that expectations of juniors are inevitably rising, and they don't have the experience or confidence (or motivation) to push back on the 'why don't you just AI' management narrative, so are by default turning to rolling the dice to meet those expectations. This is how we end up with a generation of devs that truly don't understand the technology they're deploying and imho this is the boringdystopia / skynet future that we all need to defend against.

I know it's probably been said a million times, but this kinda feels like global warming, in that it's a problem that we fundamentally will never be able to fix if we just continue to chase short term profit & infinite growth.

[sam0x17]

> What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none

I would say that baptism by fire _is_ where the quality of an academic education comes from, historically at least. They are the same picture.

[hn_acc1]

Agreed. I remember (a long time ago) being on an internship (workterm) and after doing some amount of work for the day, I spent some time playing around with C pointers, seeing what failed, what didn't, what the compiler complained about, etc.

[kakacik]

That's not something enthusiasts here and elsewhere want to hear, that's pretty obvious also in this discussion. People seems extremely polarized these days.

AI is either the next wheel or abysmal doom for future generations. I see both and neither at the same time.

In corporate environment where navigating processes, politics and other non-dev tasks takes significantly longer than actual coding, AI is just a bit better google search. And trust me, all these non-dev parts are still growing and growing fast. Its useful, but not elevating people beyond their true levels in any significant way (I guess we can agree ie nr of lines produced per day ain't a good idea, rather some Dilbert-esque comic for Friday afternoon).

[solatic]

Agree that AI is a force multiplier in small-cap and a better search at best in large-cap due to internal bureaucracy.

The bigger question (that remains to be seen and played out) is whether AI will be a forcing function towards small-cap. If smaller companies can build the same products as larger companies with fewer people then they can compete on price and win, hollowing out the revenue base of large-cap companies and leading to their downfall due to the dwindling workforce not having the culture to adapt. Of course reality is more complicated (moats, larger companies making too-good-to-be-true offers to acquire smaller competitors to prevent the emergence of genuine competition, boys-club who-you-know-not-what-you-know corruption via lawfare ...) so, yeah, remains to be seen.

[jjmarr]

> If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow

In my experience, target schools are the only universities now that can make their assignments too hard for AI.

When my university tried that, the assignments were too hard for students. So they gave up.

[sam0x17]

This comment would make sense 6 months ago. Now it is much, much, much more likely any given textually answerable problem will be way easier for a bleeding edge frontier AI than a human, especially if you take time into account

[jasonfarnon]

What university is assigning undergrads assignments too hard for AI?

[jjmarr]

Funnily enough, my Science Fiction class graded like that.

If you didn't have high information density in essays you were torn into. AI was a disadvantage due to verboseness.

Most people dropped the class and prof went on sabbatical.

[jasonfarnon]

Besides being tough, it's shaping students' writing in a specific direction. That dense style I think of as 19th century English philosophy prose, though I hear it may still be the ideal in parts of Europe.

[zeroCalories]

We're now reaching the point where people have gone their whole college education on AI, and I've noticed a huge rise in the number of engineers that struggle to write basic stuff by hand. I had someone tell me they forgot how to append to a list in their chosen language, and couldn't define a simple tree data structure with correct syntax. This has made me very cautious about maintaining my fluency in programming, and I'll usually turn off AI tools for a good chunk of the day just to make sure I don't get too rusty.

[andrekandre]

  > I'll usually turn off AI tools for a good chunk of the day just to make sure I don't get too rusty.

same, but its hard to do when $work has set a quota on ai usage and # of ai-related prs every month...

[9wzYQbTYsAIc]

That’s an insight that a project I’m working on has built upon: https://unratified.org/connection/ai/higher-order-effects/#1...

Education and training and entry level work build judgement.

[andai]

"Those who can't, do..."