this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
50 points (98.1% liked)

CSCareerQuestions

2403 readers
1 users here now

A community to ask questions about the tech industry!

Rules/Guidelines

Related Communities

Credits

Icon base by Skoll under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ericjmorey@programming.dev
odium@programming.dev
50
My Parent doesn't want me doing CS, or CE, because they feel the job market will disappear come 7 years. (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago by aunchers@lemmy.world to c/cs_career_questions@programming.dev
49 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Basically Title.
I love CS, I love designing systems, programming, some cyber and math.
The problem is, I am due to admit into CS this year (4 year program). My Parent's will be funding a majority of it (~2 years, + RESP). And one of my parents, thinks CS won't have many jobs come 7 years?
Why? Because AI will take them all (or is more likely to take them all). That AI is expanding at a rapid pace, and they will slowly but surely take the hardware designing jobs, the programming jobs, and pretty much all the jobs except the administration ones. I have a poor time putting into words what I would like to do in the future (cause I love lots of things related to CS) but I say thing a bit on the technical side, and this parent says that if I cant explain it to them than I don't understand it and that they understand (more to me) what will happen to the market due to their age

I am not saying they're wrong to any of this by the way, I'm just looking for advice on if they're right, and if not, why?

I don't think I'll ever give up doing CS because its something I love with all my heart.
But if I'm not able to convince them, they want me to take a gap and get a different degree (in a less likely to be taken job).
I might be rambling here, but I am genuinely soooo lost.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 22 points 3 days ago

I'm a technical lead for an AI-based startup and enthusiast about AI. I've been in software development for about 30 years. I'm responsible for making sure my teams use AI in their development process and enabling them and measuring the results. So from the perspective of your average lemming, I am biased towards AI and all of the terrible things it heralds, and probably literally Satan.

AI can create simple applications well. Of there is a tedious part of your job that takes time and focus away from your key job duties, AI can probably write a Python script to automate that for you.

The capabilities of AI are continuing to expand through breaking your ask up into multiple smaller tasks and executing them and verifying the output. However the ability of AI is growing at a smaller exponent than the cost. AI is not sustainable currently. At some point, the true cost of all the data center construction, hardware, electricity, etc will have to be passed on to customers and AI development projects will become vastly more expensive.

AI doesn't think and doesn't learn (though RAG pipelines can make it more effective) which means it can't learn through failure. The number of times it has led me in a circle because it doesn't know how to fix something and keeps trying different things until it has spent $10-20 in tokens just to reinvent the original problem is high.

The hardest parts of development aren't working the code. The hardest parts are translating requirements into code. Identifying and reasoning about edge cases. Planning and architecting. Identifying design tradeoffs and recommending / picking the right one. Coordinating with stakeholders.

AI can help with those tasks but it can't do those tasks. AI might slightly reduce the number of CSEs in the world a bit, but it will never, ever replace a significant number of us. It can't. The code it produces sucks without knowledgeable human guidance.

My teams are seeing a 10-12% self-reported productivity gain (or will take a few months before we have verifiable velocity management so take that with a grain of salt). We are aspiring to maybe 25% productivity gains on greenfield development. But to be honest that's the company line. I'm hopeful but skeptical we will see even that. I use AI every day and it is helpful in lots of ways, but you have to recognize when it's going off the rails or doing the wrong thing.

I'm actually in the middle of reviewing a draft acceptance criteria for a project I'm leading. It read all of the technical requirements and diagrams. It missed a bunch of stuff, got a bunch of stuff wrong, and most of what's left is not written for the right audience โ€” this should be a product owner document that doesn't require examining code or databases to determine success, but because much of what we have is technical documentation, that's what it wrote everywhere.

I know this is getting long, but I want you to understand CSE jobs aren't going anywhere for a bunch of reasons. It remains a great field. There is likely to be some pain in the industry over the next few years as CEOs learn we cannot be replaced so easily, but if you are just getting started, I have a feeling you might enter the market on the other side of that just as there is a big hiring boom as they realize they've fucked up.

Good luck!