re: Software Engineers are Freaking Out

Learn to weld!

More casualties of Multivac.

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Computer science professor at a major state university just finished the worst faculty meeting in 32 years of academia

Department head dropped the placement statistics like a bomb at 2:47 PM on a Wednesday

2023: 89% placement rate within 6 months of graduation
2024: 67% placement rate
2025: 34% placement rate
2026 projections: 12% placement rate

312 CS majors graduating this spring. Industry contacts saying maybe 40 will find work.

The dean wants to know why enrollment is still climbing while job prospects crater

Faculty sitting there like deer in headlights because what the frick do you tell 19-year-olds taking out $40k per year in loans

Half the curriculum is already obsolete. Teaching data structures while companies replace entire engineering teams with Claude and Cursor.

One professor suggested pivoting to "AI collaboration skills" and got laughed out of the room

Another said we should warn students. Department head said that would "damage program reputation and university revenue"

So they keep taking tuition money from kids who will graduate into a wasteland

Career services still posts those bullshite salary averages from 2022 when new grads were getting $140k offers

Now the same companies are hiring 2 senior engineers with AI tools instead of 12 junior developers

Every CS professor knows their students are walking into a meat grinder

But the university needs those enrollment numbers to hit budget targets

They're literally selling degrees that lead to DoorDash driving

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I'm not a developer, but I work with a few elite ones. They are not concerned. Yet.

Even the best automated dev tools have high error rates and spit out some really bad code, but they do it incredibly quickly. The folks I know are now using automation to produce a lot of code quickly, then spending time cleaning up it's errors on the back end. Even with the errors, they are producing more code faster than ever before, with less labor. They are also training the models as they go.

The group hit hardest will be new grads who aren't super AI-fluent.

Hard to know how this will shake out. Maybe the models eventually get so good that hardly any devs are needed. Or maybe, as Sam Altman implied a while back, if we can generate code X% faster, then we will create demand for at least that much more code through new products and innovations. Which will supposedly create new dev jobs.

I see a lot of disruption for most industries. But I suspect that devs will do better than most once they recalibrate. They might just all end up being AI devs & trainers.

To add to this thread, I just asked chat gpt to time me while I ran a mile, then about 10 seconds later I told it I was done and asked how long it took. It told me that it took me 7 minutes and 45 seconds, when I called it out for giving me the wrong time it admitted to just making up a number

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AI is coming for a lot of white collar jobs.

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AI will come for most every job. The robot will be able to do the trades better than you can. It is not as far away as people think.

They try to encourage us to use the AI at work. I'm like, hell no! I know its coming but I'm not going to speed it up and help train my replacement.

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