No Stupid Questions

I have a controversial take and a very bold guess: CS principle will be more important than ever when you graduate college.

1. CS enrollment is way down especially in the U.S. because of AI scare.
2. Old programmers are mostly retired during the AI hype period

Both of these mean that the supply of programers will be way down when you graduate.

1. AI have been slopping out code that might break within couple years. We have seen many service degrade, but not much critical failure yet, these could come later.
2. Most open source project has began to ban pure LLM contributions. Even Rust disallow LLM-generated code with very minor exceptions. Likely company are going to do the same
3. People who go to a simple coding bootcamp will not be competitive when LLM is in the picture, nobody need a programmer to "make the button bigger" anymore.

All these said, the demand for "good programmer" likely will not go down. If you study hard, do side projects, and build connection during college, you will likely be at a huge advantage after 3 or 4 years.

Of course, there will also be risks, i.e. that LLMs actually wipe out all programming jobs, which it is unlikely, but also not impossible.

Linus Torvalds was just quoted in another article I read, "Al is the new compiler, not the new programmer"

Way too many comments for me to see if it's been said already, but have you looked into cybersecurity, networking, and identity management? They're all in the same realm and seem less prone to ai hype layoffs and such.

am a developer with a few big projects under my belt

I’ve got quite a bit of experience with Linux and I manage a home server, but that probably doesn’t differentiate me much

It 100% does if you target small companies. Think 5-30 man shows where 'IT department' is a luxurious dream. In that company you wear many hats and having IT/devops experience as a programmer is a big deal. You will instantly be one of the most experienced people in the small company when wearing the IT hat.

If it’s so hard for fresh CS graduates to get jobs, why would any other option be different?

As you are already in the workforce, stay in it. After having a job for the last year (?) and the option of what to do with the next four years of your life. You can either have 5 years of experience, or you can have 1 year of experience.

Notice how I didn't mention your degree? A degree is a minor point after you get your first job.

If you are interested in software development, and willing to put in the work to actually learn strong fundamentals, I think you're going to have a clear leg up on the competition after the AI bubble in all likelihood bursts eventually. Vibe coding is hurting the signal to noise ratio in general right now, but as far as I'm aware a "live portfolio" like a website of personal projects has always been as good if not better than a resume when it comes to selling your skills in software.

Just consider whether you'll be able to tolerate doing the work when you're not going to be the one in charge of deciding what you work on.

The AI wave is creating a huge amount of tech debt

There's going to be a huge surge of hiring humans to untangle and fix the spaghetti code in coming years.

Don't know where you live or what country, but if you look for a government job you might be able to use your degree there.

For the first time in over thirty years, the community college near me has had many members of the community advisory board (reps from various local businesses) that rep'd tech firms not even come to the advisory board meetings.

I take that to mean they're riding the AI bubble, hoping to phase out much of their human workforce. That said, someone has to maintain the local infrastructure, and while data centers don't employ many workers, they need some staff to watch over the systems. I also think networking still is a strong field, and obviously cyber security.

I have worked with several folks that were much better at their job because of self-hosting, so your experience there maybe isn't as worthless as you think.

My advice would be to talk to recruiters and department heads and ask what they see themselves needing.

We don't know for sure how bad it will be in 4 years

Granted it’s been 30-something years since I graduated with my CS degree, but my experience might be helpful. My first job out of college ended up being in tech support for a software company, and I used that to eventually move into software development. During my 2 years in tech support I learned what I could about the source code for the companies product, and built relationships with members of the engineering team. It got to the point where I could carry on conversations with some of the software developers to identify potential causes of bugs that customers were running into.

Because of the relationships I made with the software engineers they eventually recognized my skills and one of the managers eventually helped me transition from tech support into a software developer position.

The meta is job experience > skills > certifications > education

Typically, if you look for computer related job, they ask for comp sci or some equivalent degree + relevant experience + skills. If you're going for SWE or Game Dev, you're majorly fucked. I'm in IT but I started a couple years ago but I do occasionally look at job listings nowadays and I can tell it's competitive. I got multiple friends in comp sci and comp eng having tough times

It's honestly hard to say. It's very impressive what AI coding can do, especially in the past year, but all AI companies are not making a profit. They're effectively subsidized by investors. They're focused on growth. At some point they're gonna need to make a profit, they cannot continually operate at a loss and focus on growth. In fact, when Microsoft started charging properly it was such a massive deal that they called it the tokenpocalypse.

Honestly, I hate to say it, and I'm not trying to be a tech bro, but I think AI is here to say. What exactly it looks like long term, it's hard to say. I can say this though, knowing how to program will make you a better vibe coded (I feel dirty saying that seriously). So even if AI becomes the norm, you'll be better positioned if you know what you're doing.

When things turn though, it's impossible to say. It could be in the next year, could be like five years out. It could be that when you're done with your four year degree, they're still out here doing this "AI is gonna fix everything and we don't need junior devs" song and dance.

TL;DR: AI is not profitable now so will get more expensive meaning they'll have to use it less. Either way, knowing how to program without AI will make you better at programming with AI.

IT is a shitshow generally. But it pays kinda well and it still needs humans to do the actual work. The other fields are probably a bit less of a shitshow, but given that the whole planet is kinda a shitshow nowadays, might kick you out (or in the balls) even harder. So... just choose the wig and makeup that suit you better, clown up, and join us in one show or another.

My suggestion? If you're really clever, find a good trade shop that's willing to work with you through an apprenticeship and stay as far as you can from CS for the foreseeable future. Don't give up on learning how to code, but don't sink a ton of money into certifications or degrees; stay a hobbyist and enthusiast, don't make it a career. Some day those skills may be invaluable, but it's absolutely not worth the money today. You want to be rich in 40 years? Be the only one left who knows how to fix machine generated spaghetti code. You want to eat tomorrow, learn to swing a hammer, bend conduit, or some other kind of skilled labour.

Side note: Make sure whatever trade you're going into, you have someone who is going to guarantee you a spot to get your apprenticeship BEFORE you go to school. If you go straight into school, you will likely spend a lot of money on a trade you never get your journeyman ticket in.

ISP Network Engineer might be something.

It is my current feeling that the blend of physical work to install devices, with the mental work of planning, configuring, documenting, is kind of protecting the field.

Although maybe we are a bit special in my workplace because we don't have a separation between planners, NOC, and field team. It's all just the twelve of us, doing bits of everything. Maybe in the big ISPs things are circling the LLM drain as well.

Whatever you do, don't be evil.

Not nearly as bad as the now headline news presents.

Tech unemployment is still just about the lowest of any industry. Pay remains competitive (although nothing like the $200k entry level jobs of the 1990s). The labor demand is definitely growing, both domestically and globally.

Silicon Valley is shedding jobs. But if you go chase a job at EPIC up in Wisconsin or JP Morgan out in New York or take a job at Deloitte or SAP or Schlumberger, you'll find them. Look for positions in the airline or finance or real estate or energy industries, there's a superabundance of work and a perpetual shortage of labor.

Most of these big corporate outfits are glued to Microsoft products, though. Oracle also remains a popular database environment. Or they're using some proprietary nonsense - Dell Boomi for visual programming of interfaces or UIPath for botting or some other ill-conceived overpriced insanity.

But - at least where I'm sitting - AI hasn't replaced shit. My office is still trying to implement Agile and we're a Fortune 100 company. Most firms are way behind the curve. Don't let the hype cycle fool you.

If you are interested in the internals of computers just as much as programming them, take a good hard look at Computer Engineering as a major instead. You still get to code, but you also get to understand the hardware underneath it all. Since it is rooted in the physical parts of computing, I think it is less likely for AI to eat those jobs. (Plus, everything from your car to your TV to your coffee maker has an embedded microprocessor in it now. I think embedded software is a safe bet.)

But, no matter what major you pick, it is no longer the case that simply graduating with a degree (and a good GPA) is a guarantee of a good job. You need to go beyond your classes, and find additional things to work on. Internships are great if you can get them, but even if you can't, try to find an open source project (or even a hobby project) that you can spend time on. You want to have something more than your coursework on your resume for those first jobs. I would even value a resume with some good internships or side projects and a 3.6 GPA over someone with a 4.0 GPA who did nothing else (and left me with nothing else to talk about during the interview).

Finally, whatever you do, don't extend yourself to go into debt. Maybe there are a small handful of CS schools that are worth going into debt to attend -- but let's face it, if they want you and you're good enough, they will find a way to get you to afford it there, and you will get hired somewhere if you can make it to graduation. But, I know folks who went into 100+k worth of debt to go to a CS program at a small liberal arts college because they liked the campus. Don't be that person. Unless you are MIT or Caltech material, your local State University is probably good enough. If you do get through 4 years of school and can't find a job in your field and need to pivot, that will be so much easier to do if you have as little debt as possible.

I don't even get why CS degrees exist in the first place... It's not like the text books, computers, or programming languages are walled off or difficult to get. I really wish companies would stop putting so much weight on papers and start focusing more on actual competency.

Getting a job generally has little to do with your degree in most technical fields. The exception is on the research, academia, and science side.

So go to school take classes that are fun, if they happen to align with your career interests great if not just make sure you are building a portfolio of work related to your career goals.

Genuinely, not being snarky, get a union trade job instead. Carpentry, welding, whatever. Not as fun probably but the stability is there.

Tech is such a shit show today in general; there are for sure still good jobs out there but having worked in tech for a couple of decades I feel qualified to say that building a career in tech is needlessly risky. Layoffs come fast, promotions come slow, and stability is nowhere to be found. I have spent most of my career across multiple companies constantly afraid that I might not have a job tomorrow... and I am both good at my job and well liked.

One time I lost my job because all of a sudden investors pulled out and nearly the entire company got laid off. Got an email Thursday afternoon telling everyone not to come in Friday because they don't have a job anymore. There are countless stories out there like this.

Most people with a degree don't do a job directlly related to their degree, and most people I know who work in an IT or CS related field aren't university-educated. Go to uni because you want to learn and are interested in your field, not with the express goal of a career. If you wouldn't go to uni if you knew you'd end up doing something else as a career, then that degree probably isn't the choice for you, because it sounds like you're not interested in the education itself, just the job resulting from it.

I suspect AI will still take decades to catch up with the deep intelligence that you need for more complex programming. So good programmers will be far more valuable than code monkey.

If I were starting out I'd pick some combination, most likely biochemistry + AI programming / models. Like learning both biochemistry and how to program and train and research AI models that can e.g. fold proteins or synthesize some new medical molecule that could cure some illness. Medicine is still stuck in the dark ages.

Or robotics and manufacturing. All those jobs that went to China, China itself is planning to replace with robotics.

So instead of becoming a programmer, become someone that can develop and train and use AI models to solve problems in emerging fields.

Above all, focus on chances to become some kind of entrepreneur. If you're not a shareholder you're just a tool like an LLM to them. EDIT: Well no, not always, if you find a good team or small private company to join it can be really fun.

Well, the IT job market can change very quickly, so it is very difficult to predict what the job market will look like when you enter it in around 6 years (I assume that's how long it will also take in the US to get a Bachelor + Master?). It could be that in 6 years the AI bubble has popped and dumb managers will realize that AI can't replace every Software Developer.

I'd say go ahead and study CS, and if you can't find a job as a Software Developer, you can then look in neighboring IT fields, such as System Administrator, where you (for example) have to administrate Linux servers, and since you say you already have experience with this, it should give you an advantage in applications.

The CS job market is very location specific, so I don't have much advice in that regard.

I've got quite a bit of experience with Linux and I manage a home server, but that probably doesn't differentiate me much.

That said, I have been on my company's rotating interview panel for about a decade now, and while my company's line of work involves a lot of Linux development, I can say that most of our college hires do not possess very much Linux background at all. Sure, they might have used Linux machines for school projects, but rarely do any of them assert to be "experienced" with Linux.

By that, I mean deeper knowledge than just using Bash. If a candidate can tell me why they prefer csh over Bash, or any syntax difference between POSIX sh compared to Bash, that is definitely a distinguishing quality. It speaks of an operator who has enough usage under their belt that they're annoyed by the typical distro's defaults, and more importantly, assessed the available tools, and picked the right tool that works for them.

I cannot understate how valuable it is to us to find a candidate that understands their tooling, especially right out of college. Considering that we assume most new hires have to be brought up to speed over the first few months, a candidate that saves us that effort is at least one rank above their peers.

Deeper functional knowledge comes in other forms as well. It's one thing to know how a C program's main() function is invoked by an OS, but anything which shows a fuller understanding of, say, system architecture and how a timer interrupt leads to a context switch in an assembly ISR, to a returned service call to load an ELF, to a CPU privilege ring change, to crt0, to main(), that is another level entirely.

I've interviewed candidates that had side projects involving retro game disassembly. So maybe they couldn't give me the above level of detail for x86, they could describe the same for MIPS. And that's good enough, because most architectures do roughly the same thing, with a few different semantics and names.

Circling back to managing a server, if you had to deal with PAM, NAT and port forwarding, tunnels and VPNs, compiling from source, or abything like that which is non-trivial, do not sell yourself short. All that stuff is resume material, because if you can relay to an interviewer that you've dealt with real network or machine security tasks, it is distinguishing.

The best part is that you have all of college to learn the CS curriculum, but it's also time that you have to pursue any particular focus that excites you. I've written earlier about how embedded engineers don't really get caught in the hype cycle, so jobs don't suddenly appear then disappear a few years later. If you wanted to do that route, getting started with any microcontroller (eg Arduino, STM32) would help, with a goal to understand all the "magic" that the IDE and compiler are doing. Maybe instead you like das blinkenlights and find yourself drawn to hardware design. It wouldn't be too late to consider a switch to the Computer Engineer (CE) major, so you have a small taste of the EE life.

CS as a field is so large that there are many routes between "I want to work with computers" to a declared major and to a career thereafter. Fortunately, time is on your side; this would be a very different conversation if you were a 4th year college student.

If you're in the position to do so: try getting a job as a software developer for a year before going to college. If you're able to demonstrate you've already worked on your own projects, you will be taken more seriously than cs majors fresh out of college who've only seen code in home work assignments. Do this to get to see how software development works as a career and see if you fit in it.
You don't generally need a degree to be a programmer and in this field, experience is often more valuable than a degree. What college can offer is connections and the opportunity to find your actual calling.

I was in the tech industry for over a decade. Was. Idgaf any more, I left. I was having trouble reconciling morality issues before AI took over. It's not even worth interviewing nowadays.

I'm still doing personal things, like I'm currently planning a NAS Jellyfin server. If companies ever want people like me back, they're gonna have to fork over $$$$$$