CSCareerQuestions

2403 readers

4 users here now

A community to ask questions about the tech industry!

Rules/Guidelines

Follow the programming.dev site rules
Please only post questions here, not articles to avoid the discussion being about the article instead of the question

Related Communities

!programming@programming.dev - a general programming community
!no_stupid_questions@programming.dev - general question community
!ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev - for questions targeted towards experienced developers

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

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

[–] Avicenna@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It is hard to imagine CS becoming completely obselete. First of all, AI, even under the assumption that it will take hold everywhere in future, still is in its infancy. It might require a complete paradigm shift to become AGI.

A non-desirable situation is that many jobs in industry will transform into AI code supervision (it might be that this business vision completely fails and slowly disappears too since lowering your dev numbers will create bottle necks which AI can not solve unless it is AGI). If this business model sticks however, you should know checking code all the time without writing any could be quite a soul destroying process. This could turn into a situation where you only do your job to earn money and really code on the side for your personal projects (which was the case for many software devs before the AI but likely more so in this context).

If AI does not turn into AGI, I suspect it will still remain as a tool. Companies who fired junior devs in favour of AI hoping they can one day completely go dev free will likely suffer from experience gaps and try to refill their ranks. I suppose like with everything software jobs will suffer from enshitification too with CEOs favouring quantitative output metrics over qualitative ones. Overall I am not sure if it is a bleak future for just CS or for everything so my vote would be do what is your passion but be ready to be flexible with what you do with it.

If AI turns into AGI and tech oligarchs own it, even with ethical problems aside, it will be more than just CS that suffers from it.