Readit Newsdpflan commented on Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates newsweek.com/computer-sci... · Posted by u/zdgeier
I actually think prestige is a contributing factor for CS as well. People assume you must be smart to be a software engineer, and FAANG companies are prestigious to normal people because they have name recognition. Definitely not on the same level as a Doctor/Surgeon/Lawyer or whatever but certainly could be more than a typical 4-year degree will get you. And I suppose there's also the fact that those companies were viewed very differently 10-15 years ago and now there is a lot more cynicism about big tech in general.
Absolutely, and the _prestige_ of being a CS person that has a high salary. Society admires those with wealth.
dpflan commented on Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates newsweek.com/computer-sci... · Posted by u/zdgeier
The short of it is that the team just wants high throughput but doesn't care about improving the system health or process efficiency. I tend to consider multiple aspects of the work including those areas. But if you just want someone to turn out tickets, I tend to be slower unless the task is simple or repetitive. I have a disability and graying hair, so my options are limited. I'm going to fail my PIP later this month and I'll probably end up working at Walmart.
Hm, I see. Do you use a coding assistant? Do you see value in keeping up or your morale is diminishing? Can you change teams or positions or focus?
dpflan commented on Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates newsweek.com/computer-sci... · Posted by u/zdgeier
When most jobs just want you to be a ticket completer, the cheaters will do just fine if they can do it faster. The rest of use will be considered slow and discarded. It's happening to me.
Yes, they can be ticket punchers more easily, kind of trained to do that. But there are certainly levels of achievement that are not as possible with such a foundation that lacks grounding and true understanding.
Do you mind elaborating here on what is happening to you? It seems worthwhile information to add to the discussions ongoing for this post.
dpflan commented on Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates newsweek.com/computer-sci... · Posted by u/zdgeier
Salary isn't traditionally what motivates people to study medicine. It's prestige. The difficulty is part of the prestige, which is probably why they still do things like memorize long lists of cranial nerve names. I haven't heard that they have a problem with dropout rates.
A good CS education only gives you prestige with fellow nerds.
Yes, prestige, perception of self by others, but certainly salary and job guarantee are attractors to medicine. First hand anecdata from educators and doctors alike supports this.
dpflan commented on Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates newsweek.com/computer-sci... · Posted by u/zdgeier
Thank you for saying this because it feels like these people entering the industry in such numbers over the 2010s completely killed what made this job fun in the first place. I call them "ticket completers". Sure they can mechanically perform the minimum requirements of the job, but there is zero interest at all in what is actually being done; just following PM directions to the letter with no further thought. The whole spirit of innovation and curiosity and discovery has been lost, replaced by lifestyle seekers who look at you like an insane person when trying to talk about software in the abstract (ha!).
The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it.
> The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it.
Think about how AI can help students cheat nowadays. You could still cheat previously, but now a CS-degree seeker can have an AI do the entirety of school work for them (with exception of say pen-and-paper tests). Imagine how the quality of new graduates drops with regard to the understanding and abilities you highlight as crucial to being effective in software, and how those that do understand are even more valuable relatively, but perhaps harder to find in the noise.
dpflan commented on Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates newsweek.com/computer-sci... · Posted by u/zdgeier
CS professor with 15 years experience.
The massive boom in computer science enrollment over the last 20 years has been driven mostly by people chasing tech salaries, not by any real interest in computing itself. These students often show up completely unprepared for how difficult CS actually is, and universities have responded by dumbing down their programs to keep everyone happy and enrolled.
If this weeds out the people who are just there for the paychecks, it might actually be a relief to get back to teaching students who genuinely want to learn about computing.
Thanks for sharing. Is this similar to what was attracting students to medicine/doctor (guaranteed position with high salary)? But the med-school-to-full-time-physician pipeline is long and can weed out. CS is a difficult subject, certain ways of thinking are difficult but certainly can be learned, like recursive thinking.
Did colleges expand their computer science departments or even just create them to meet the demand for the degree? The pipeline to possible employment with a CS degree is quite short, doesn't require residency and board-certification so it's a quicker route to employment, but then you are competing with peers with stronger backgrounds and educations and seasoned professionals for the same positions.
dpflan commented on What's working for YC companies since the AI boom jamesin.substack.com/p/wh... · Posted by u/jseidel
I see a pattern with AI companies. They always try to solve a really hard and not very useful problem. It's the same as with self driving car companies ten years ago: If you believe self driving tech is ripe for commercialization, the reasonable thing to do is something capital intensive and a special case where the technology most likely to succeed. For instance, heavy trucks automatically following others in formations for long drives. Saves gas, money, and potentially personnel.
There is a clear business case and buying large trucks is already a capex play. Then slowly work your way through more complex logistic problems from there. But no! The idea to sell was clearly the general problem including small cars that drive children to school through a suburban ice storm with lots of cyclists. Because that's clearly where the money is?
It's the same with AI. The consumer case is clearly there, people are easily impressed by it, and it is a given that consumers would pay to use it in products such as Illustrator, Logic Pro, modelling software etc. Maybe yet another try in radiology image processing, the death trap of startups for many decades now, but where there is obvious potential. But no! We want to design general purpose software -- in general purpose high level languages intended for human consumption! -- not even generating IR directly or running the model itself interactively.
If the technology really was good enough to do this type of work, why not find a specialized area with a few players limited by capex? Perhaps design a new competitive CPU? That's something we already have both specifications and tests for, and should be something a computer could do better than human. If an LLM could do a decent job there, it would easily be a billion dollar business. But no, let's write Python code and web apps!
AI allows for exquisite demos, demos that tantalize the audience into thinking of the infinite potential of the technology, that stunning vision expands and expands until the universe of potential overwhelms the dreamer into a state of terminal fantasy. So it is always a solution looking for a problem. There are cases where the two meet more realistically and a valuable impactful company develops it.
Forgive me for asking, but im always curios about the definition of “agent”. What is an “agent” exactly? Is it a static prompt that is sent along with user input to an LLM service and then handles that resposne? And then it’s done? Is an agent a prompted LLM call? Or some entity that is changing its own prompt as it continues to exist?
- The pre-print paper: AI Agent Smart Contract Exploit Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05558
- An associated research institution: UC Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence - https://rdi.berkeley.edu/