If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning:
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
ehnto 8 hours ago [-]
To a much smaller extent due to where I live, I noticed this too. From merely the fact that I had a (local economy relative) high paying software job and that I could "make stuff happen" for people with capital or people in the "boys club", I was introduced to an entirely different layer of the city I had no idea about. I noticed how effortlessly the signals transfer and how it all feels very meritocratic, you don't even notice the layer and you just see the people.
Until someone who's not in that layer shows up, and suddenly the doors close, the conversation chills and the barriers to the layer become evident.
I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort.
I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming.
I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 2 hours ago [-]
If you are from / connected to Israel, you get a shortcut to this.
platz 7 hours ago [-]
what's an example of something you made happen
lifestyleguru 2 hours ago [-]
encrypted backup of media files which should become public in very specific circumstances
mettamage 2 hours ago [-]
Quite frankly when I read this, it’s either: women looking for a good time [1], drugs or hacking for hire.
Or maybe I am thinking too dark. But otherwise one wouldn’t need to be so vague about it.
[1] it could be sluts or prostitutes. I mean both terms neutrally, also I wrote it that way for brevity (reality is more nuanced). People decide what they want to do. I am against coercion though, obviously.
voidfunc 22 minutes ago [-]
You know writing for brevity usually means you don't need to explain to your readers that you are writing for brevity...
anal_reactor 7 hours ago [-]
Honestly I do the reverse of that. I dress like shit and when introducing myself I specifically use the word "immigrant" rather than "expat" because signalling high social position attracts people who want something from me but don't offer anything in return.
NathanielK 2 hours ago [-]
Not surprised to hear this from anal_reactor.
mc32 2 hours ago [-]
immigrants are people who tend to stay and don’t have plans to return to their home countries. Expats are temporary immigrants typically paid by their company to move and intend to move back to their home countries once the assignment is over.
He was bragging about having a ti calculator in the 80s was seen as cool in that "interview" he filmed with Steve bannon
zipy124 1 hours ago [-]
This is completely correct. It's the same reason why an MBA or PhD can be valuable if you want to go the management track. In Europe specifically - especially in the UK - the class based system is still alive and kicking and is based on subtle tells such as education, name, accent and more. It's less overt than in say India, but still very much present.
BoxOfRain 50 minutes ago [-]
I really do think the class system holds us back as a society in Britain, George Orwell had a lot to say on this subject in England your England and I fear the decline he describes in the 1940s only accelerated through the 20th century and into the 21st. That essay is a good read for anyone interested in the topic, although of course much has happened since it was written.
I resented being constantly 'corrected' on the local accent I was picking up from school as a child, but now I appreciate that an RP or close to RP accent turns down the difficulty slider in certain British interactions.
zipy124 46 minutes ago [-]
It really does. The classic example I think of is Michael Caine discussing when he wanted to do housing renovations, and before he even submitted designs, he had neighbours and councillors complaining it was going to be "vulgar," "nouveau," and "obscene" simply because of his class. He also talked about the concept of working class people furthering the divide, for example his female family members referring to women of the correct class as "proper ladies" and putting themselves down.
hiAndrewQuinn 4 hours ago [-]
For those looking for one practical way to do this in the US, I can share my story.
In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.
Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)
If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.
The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).
pipes 3 hours ago [-]
Hi, can you elaborate, I don't think I understand what you mean.
jongjong 5 hours ago [-]
Yes 100%. I was born upper middle class. I have a BIT from a global top 50 University. I understood this after working in cryptocurrency sector in Germany.
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.
taurath 1 hours ago [-]
> mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet
IME these mechanisms are a natural outflow of how those with money and power delegate power or invest money.
I have friends with a private plane. I also have friends who are scrambling to make rent, among many other friends always worried about their next paycheck. When you put the two together, you’ll find they can’t really engage in conversation about their lives without extreme embarassment - the plane people could solve most of the immediate problems facing the paycheck folks with barely a dent in their lifestyle.
So the plane people end up around people they can talk about vacation spots with, and the paycheck people hang around people who are empathetic and participate together in mutual aid to get thru. Rarely do the paycheck folks become plane people (they’re too generous or focus on maximizing other aspects of their lives than income). Rarely do the plane people actually help the paycheck people, except indirectly.
Inequality is embarrassing. Our society is embarrassing. That there is no safety net and basic needs being met being demanded by everyone from the poor to the richest of the rich can ONLY happen because they don’t interact. I see a huge backlash coming and it will not hit equally, or fairly. No society can continue like this without breaking down.
mawadev 3 hours ago [-]
I think you should spend less time on computers, the internet and around tech people, it will blow your mind
svara 2 hours ago [-]
While I can only peripherally relate to the specifics of your story, I think it beautifully illustrates how interesting and mind expanding it is to spend time in different cultural contexts, and that different cultures can very much co-exist in the same countries or even in the same people.
Everyone should do it more, it really helps put the uncompromising convictions of people around you into perspective and see them as what they often are: a lack of understanding for the breadth of human experience.
jongjong 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I suppose this is the stuff which you only start to understand after you've been somewhere more than a few years. It also makes you appreciate certain things about where you're from which you didn't even notice and used to take for granted. The European class system combined with a deep cynicism towards tech was a huge surprise to me... Especially for Germany which I thought would be an engineer's paradise.
Australia is extremely egalitarian. I think even more so than the US. In both Australia and the US, you can usually talk to the CEO of the startup directly; they actually like to talk to their staff directly. But in the US, the power differential is usually much bigger, I am more cautious about what I say.
In Germany, there seems to be a more rigid hierarchy and the founders tend to avoid talking to employees directly; they tend to communicate mostly through middle-managers, even in relatively small startups.
lifestyleguru 3 hours ago [-]
DACH societies are extremely class based, in fact most of European royal families come from there. They take it as a point of honor to be rude or at least gruff in daily interactions, it's not about you. Their cynicism is indeed a poison, no need for it as the real life will bring enough unexpected challenges.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
European royal families have pretty much nothing to do with the modern DACH region, and compared to the UK royal families in continental Europe have very little influence.
But the rest is pretty much true unfortunately, though I wouldn't call the behavior rude because it's not seen as rudeness by people who do it. It's more that being optimistic, feeling surprised by things, expressing strong emotions is all seen as naive and pointless. There is also a strong aversion to taking risks which is pretty frustrating. Even when you can show they are calculated risks.
However not the whole DACH region is the same either, the cultures are pretty different, the only thing in common is really only the language. I had better success in Germany than my own country of Switzerland
jongjong 1 hours ago [-]
Made me chuckle. I think I know what you mean about "expressing strong emotions" - This is how a lot of Europeans view Americans specifically.
I think the Australian version of naivety is more about meritocratic ideas and flat social hierarchies. Australians aren't usually loud or opinionated. European CEOs may not like it if an employee reaches out to them directly. In Australia, the startup CEO usually tries to be friends with the employees so it feels natural to reach out to the CEO directly and they often reach out to you. In Europe, I get the sense that CEOs believe that they're too important to talk to employees. This has been my experience at startups of similar sizes.
dgellow 1 hours ago [-]
> In Europe, I get the sense that CEOs believe that they're too important to talk to employees
In Switzerland and Germany that's pretty much true, yes. As a contractor I really prefer working with UK and US companies, the communication is as you describe, more friendly and natural, and they are generally more than happy to see someone who wants to take initiatives (in fact it is expected)
ghaff 24 minutes ago [-]
It also depends on the company.
I was picking up my buffet dinner at a company event in Europe and the CEO who I somewhat knew was alongside; this was a moderately large company--maybe 10K employees at that point. We went to sit down at a table and the $EUROPEAN_COUNTRY people there were basically "Nah, we'd prefer to speak our own language." So the CEO and I went down to sit at another more welcoming table. (And had a very pleasant discussion about his upcoming family vacation and forwarded him some info.)
Not sure of the point but there are definitely cultural differednces on many dimensions on what you can do and can't do.
lifestyleguru 2 hours ago [-]
> European royal families have pretty much nothing to do with the modern DACH region, and compared to the UK royal families in continental Europe have very little influence.
Literally the top female figure in the EU structures had married into German nobility. Even without the marriage it's hard to describe the carrier as self-made. Families controlling German automotive industry are interleaved with aristocrats. The trees are obstructing you the view of the forest.
stephbook 7 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't a bad job market convince people to get a degree?
You only miss a bad job market entry and low salaries, you need every meagre advantage you can get.
100% agree on a degree being a strong signal, by the way.
danans 6 hours ago [-]
> Shouldn't a bad job market convince people to get a degree?
Maybe, but the degree has to be paid for, with time and money.
KolibriFly 2 hours ago [-]
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s5300 1 hours ago [-]
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aaron695 7 hours ago [-]
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zarzavat 5 hours ago [-]
Most of the value of a CS degree is being able to say that you have a degree truthfully. If you don't have a degree then you just lie and say that you do, which is a moral papercut. Nobody really cares about your education though, they just want their world view to be maintained.
jdw64 2 hours ago [-]
Learning can be done without a degree, but building connections and securing funding is difficult without one.
A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree.
But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself.
Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder.
Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do.
I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.
0xpgm 23 minutes ago [-]
Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today?
Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art.
Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
le-mark 9 hours ago [-]
> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming.
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%.
Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment.
The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree.
The underemployment rate is defined as the share of graduates working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. A job is classified as a college job if 50 percent or more of the people working in that job indicate that at least a bachelor's degree is necessary; otherwise, the job is classified as a non-college job.
Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree.
Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest).
If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job.
Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate.
There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
Schlagbohrer 5 hours ago [-]
I'm glad you pointed this out because I think the difference is due to philosophy grads being ready and willing to enter the workforce as a welder or an au pair or a restaurant manager, whereas a CS grad is gonna hold out for a CS job.
Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.
keiferski 5 hours ago [-]
Philosophy major here that went from working in a bakery, to sales at a large apparel printing company, to writing and marketing at startups.
I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
Software tends to be complex enough that you need a lot of people and thus a tech company. It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally. Many non tech companies makes their own software but it is shipped to customers as part of the product
keiferski 27 minutes ago [-]
Eh it depends. I’ve worked at / with a lot of more traditional non-tech companies and you’d be amazed at how a lot of the software looks like Excel circa 1995.
I guess they could be using third party software but it seems like often they are just using an ancient thing they built themselves.
RealityVoid 7 hours ago [-]
There is an image crisis. Yes, it's not a badly paid profession. But the perception that it's a dead end will lead to a sharp drop off in the student numbers.
rockskon 9 hours ago [-]
Oh good lord not that statistic again.
Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take.
There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.
frollogaston 8 hours ago [-]
The article mentions this. Unsurprisingly, the CS grads are more likely to get jobs that require a degree.
rienbdj 2 hours ago [-]
Cut juniors for AI
Save money
Invest in market share
Increase market cap
Hire the last remaining seniors at higher rates but only where needed
Great time to be a shareholder or staff level engineer. For everyone else, the ladder has been pulled.
upbeat_general 9 hours ago [-]
I think that figure (haven’t verified it but assuming it’s true) isn’t complete. It hides who and where those people are - for example, I imagine art history skews towards higher ranked schools in the first place.
toyg 5 hours ago [-]
Such a correction was always going to happen. Coders always were the blue-collar workers of the 21st century, and capital ruthlessly optimises for profit. Where you once needed thousands of workers to run an assembly line, you now have dozens; where you once needed hundreds of programmers to run a big SaaS, you will now have a handful. It was always inevitable.
That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
VBprogrammer 4 hours ago [-]
> They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted.
As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause.
I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out two of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally.
I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
Larrikin 4 hours ago [-]
In your example you knew the issues with the original fix, had some ideas to the cause, even if they were wrong, and generally knew where to look.
In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.
rienbdj 2 hours ago [-]
Can’t sustain six figure salaries because current prompts are wrong.
JCTheDenthog 9 hours ago [-]
I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.
LastTrain 8 hours ago [-]
A few major failures will scare the risk mitigating bejesus out of some kinds of businesses, but maybe AI will be better than us at fixing those kinds of problems by then.
genxy 6 hours ago [-]
It is, but that isn't how it will be used. The problem isn't the tech, never was, it is how the greedy and stupid deploy it.
dyauspitr 6 hours ago [-]
You know that’s not going to happen. Most of us are past the denial stage now, come join us…
otabdeveloper4 2 minutes ago [-]
Remember OpenClaw?
You know why nobody talks about it anymore? Because the project has been vibe coded to death in the span of a few months.
Not only will it happen, it's literally happening right now in front of our eyes.
bluefirebrand 8 hours ago [-]
I sure hope you're right
I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
jayd16 8 hours ago [-]
Unemployment is based on the amount looking. I gotta say, how many philosophy students do you know actively looking for jobs? Now ask yourself why you think it's zero.
zerobees 8 hours ago [-]
My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive:
IEEE Spectrum is one of the many things that is always high on the HN front page, but is never worth reading.
tietjens 3 hours ago [-]
That’s true but often the discussion in the comments are.
stodor89 2 hours ago [-]
Open link. Get hit with corposlop imagery. Close article and go read HN comments.
senderista 7 hours ago [-]
IEEE has been putting their name on garbage journals and conferences since forever.
Schlagbohrer 5 hours ago [-]
Good sleuthing, this really lowers the IEEE's quality in my eyes
rippeltippel 8 hours ago [-]
I agree with the "what" but not with the "how".
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
rienbdj 2 hours ago [-]
Tragedy of the commons. What stops a company taking on the strong junior engineers you just invested time and resources into?
Transfinity 5 hours ago [-]
I think interest rates have a lot to do with that mindset. If you view a Jr engineer as a long term investment (in 18 months you get an SDE 2 who knows your business), that's much easier to justify when borrowing money is close to free.
Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
genxy 6 hours ago [-]
A difficult degree in philosophy or english lit also does the same thing. Humans are amazing generalists, and when we practice thinking deeply, that skill transfers and allows us to pickup new domains.
aatd86 2 hours ago [-]
Computer Science is still useful.
It is software development that is made trivial now that software can write software.
rienbdj 2 hours ago [-]
Not many people are employed as computer scientists (they are mostly academics) compared to SWEs.
KolibriFly 2 hours ago [-]
A degree was never supposed to make someone instantly productive on day one. It was supposed to be paired with junior roles, mentoring, code review
vanuatu 7 hours ago [-]
Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 3 hours ago [-]
Ironic. I did both a humanities and a CS degree. The CS degree was filled with either south asian internationals or people who just want to make money. The rest were antisocial dudes. Humanities however was filled with young social women. The experiences I got from the latter was a huge ego and confidence boost.
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
> who built a product with actual paying users
How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
keiferski 5 hours ago [-]
There is a weird assumption nowadays that “making money = you’re an expert and know what you’re doing.” The best X is the one that makes the most cash, full stop.
Very scary for the future, unfortunately.
s5300 1 hours ago [-]
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photochemsyn 9 hours ago [-]
If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
mkl95 3 hours ago [-]
> probability, calculus, linear algebra
All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.
wasabi991011 8 hours ago [-]
In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree?
lelanthran 3 hours ago [-]
> In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree?
They aren't, but your specialist knowledge draws from two disciplines.
If you undergrad is in CS, your specialist knowledge is in one discipline exclusively.
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
Isn't it normal to study mathematics in a computer science bachelor program in USA?
I don't think it was worded very well, but I think the parent comment was saying, "the bulk of CS can be covered in a masters program, so take an undergrad degree that has the same overlap in math/science, but a different focus". I'm not sure I agree, spreading the absorption of that knowledge over 4 years can be beneficial.
kubb 5 hours ago [-]
They run degree mill programs because their universities are for profit.
drstewart 2 hours ago [-]
I like how you don't know the answer but then just assume anyway lol
Guess the standards in your country for logic must be really low lol
n64controller 7 hours ago [-]
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alephnerd 8 hours ago [-]
People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
mamidon 9 hours ago [-]
This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?
Terr_ 9 hours ago [-]
To twist another saying: "Employers can be short-sighted for longer than I can delay my rent payment."
wasabi991011 8 hours ago [-]
Why would their rent payment be affected in any way? They aren't a junior
Terr_ 4 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it be uncharitable to assume that the commenter is totally selfish and short-sighted? :p
It may be a cliche, but it's all connected. In a general sense, programmers at different experience levels are at least partially substitutable goods. A crash in wages on one group will probably affect that other.
In a more specific sense, companies won't pay seniors for skills at mentoring and managing the juniors they won't have.
TheOtherHobbes 1 hours ago [-]
Longer term this kind of stupidity will destroy the economy from both ends.
Unless there's an unexpected jump in AI IQ, vibe-coded projects will start to unravel, but the companies won't have the resources to hire the human coders needed to fix the code.
Meanwhile a lot of people with real skills and ability will have been unemployed long enough to depress spending across the entire economy.
Those same people would have been prime drivers of spending, because they were one of the few demographics with significant disposable income and the ability to afford high rents and property prices.
You can see where this is going.
The people running the companies can't. Or if they can, they maybe believe they have an escape route.
That will turn out to be a fantasy too.
The problem isn't AI. it's an economy running on fantasy numbers that are unmoored from economic and physical reality.
frollogaston 8 hours ago [-]
You're framing it like they're making a mistake, so if they are, yeah that's not good for you either.
Idk though, really seems like the "AI layoffs" are just corps shedding headcount bloat accumulated in 2020-23.
Traubenfuchs 8 hours ago [-]
It would actually be good for us…
I never understood why software engineers were so excited about open source and teaching everyone to code.
Why aren‘t we more like doctors or lawyers?
TheOtherHobbes 1 hours ago [-]
Because engineers enjoy tinkering more than anything, and they love telling everyone how fun tinkering is, and there was a narrative that tinkering was empowering and everyone should know how to do it, with a side order of "And if you get really good you can build a business and become super-rich too."
But the reality is law is primarily about social capital, medicine has more of that than most people realise, and computer people love to pretend social capital is something other people do, and they don't need to.
bluefirebrand 8 hours ago [-]
Why aren't doctors or lawyers more like us?
tonyedgecombe 7 hours ago [-]
Because they have professional bodies that act as gatekeepers.
MAustriaGA 7 hours ago [-]
Because they like to monetize their worth.
lifestyleguru 3 hours ago [-]
That'd be 200 bucks for an answer.
LastTrain 8 hours ago [-]
Sure. Why give a shit about anything really.
antonvs 9 hours ago [-]
Where do you draw the line on that attitude? Do you not care about global warming because in your lifetime, you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live?
7 hours ago [-]
graphime 9 hours ago [-]
> Where do you draw the line on that attitude?
I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth.
> Do you not care about global warming because you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live in your lifetime?
Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
TheOtherHobbes 49 minutes ago [-]
Your assessment is incorrect.
Climate change will have huge effects on everyone's net worth. The process has already started.
Your failure to understand this will not change how it affects you.
tonyedgecombe 7 hours ago [-]
>Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
I suppose that makes a change from it's not happening or it is happening but it isn't man made or it is man made but we can't do anything about it.
joshmoody24 7 hours ago [-]
So you don't care about things that indirectly affect your net worth? Credit score? Your overall health? How many friends you have?
LastTrain 8 hours ago [-]
> I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth.
That is a really interesting admission upon which to evaluate your other comments here…
antonvs 8 hours ago [-]
Do you believe in ethics or morality?
If I decide you're having a negative impact on my net worth, can I come to your home and shoot you in the head?
It seems we need a remedial class in morality here, where we work up to you understanding the golden rule. But perhaps you're not capable of understanding that. Is euthanizing you then the only option?
MAustriaGA 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rockskon 8 hours ago [-]
Because eventually you'll get to the point where you've too much work to do and there's not enough people to delegate it to.
Hope you like being overworked!
strken 8 hours ago [-]
It's a self-solving problem, though. At that point, every remaining senior+ engineer will be paid a bajillion dollars (like they are now) and companies will start to invest in actual training.
rockskon 6 hours ago [-]
That worked so well for the finance system finding new Cobol programmers!
ameon 6 hours ago [-]
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strathmeyer 8 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 12:50:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
I am very curious how this changes for young technologists in an AI era, where maybe non-technical people in this layer no longer see a self made technologist as a value add to their cohort.
I purposely use technologist over software developer, since I feelnthe generalist self-made developer typically commands an intuitive breadth of skills not just programming.
I also didn't make out like Zuck, though I am happily working and making games on the side.
Or maybe I am thinking too dark. But otherwise one wouldn’t need to be so vague about it.
[1] it could be sluts or prostitutes. I mean both terms neutrally, also I wrote it that way for brevity (reality is more nuanced). People decide what they want to do. I am against coercion though, obviously.
I resented being constantly 'corrected' on the local accent I was picking up from school as a child, but now I appreciate that an RP or close to RP accent turns down the difficulty slider in certain British interactions.
In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.
Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)
If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.
The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).
After I left Australia and moved to Europe, I realized after some time that 'the matrix' had demoted me into a lower social class. I had to work harder for less money and had access to fewer opportunities.
Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged. I didn't understand it at first. They had a way, way, way more cynical view of the world than I did. In retrospect, it feels like they had been under attack by the system, in secret... And they saw any outsider as an enemy. I felt like I was disliked for not being cynical enough. Like my subtle optimism was a signal that I didn't belong. It made me a target.
Then I came back to Australia after having a really tough time and switched back to mainstream tech sector and it was like everyone I worked with was living in some fantasy world. Like 10x more naive than I ever was, all colleagues with master degrees and PhDs... Work was a lot easier too. More forgiving. Also, I was liked. People were almost too nice to me.
The difference is privilege. I can see it very clearly now. It's absolutely not based on culture or race.
Society is highly stratified and I believe there are mechanisms built into the system to prevent people from different classes to meet.
I feel like there is some kind of operating system which manufactures cultures to create separations... Traditions and taboos separate people to prevent them from sharing their experiences and to maintain blind spots which serve to hold the system together. I think I understand why rich people don't like to hang around regular people.
Have you ever wondered why people don't talk to strangers anymore? I went to a train museum recently and noticed that the carriages on old trains had seats facing each other; I sat on one side and thought to myself that it must have been awkward for people to stare at each other in the face, sitting so close to each other, with nothing and nobody standing in between them... for such long trips. Carriages were split between 'smoking' and 'non-smoking'... Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences. This is masked by superficial differences; superficial mental and physical differences are fine but experiential differences are not.
When I watch modern movies, they seem to show characters from an elite perspective. Even characters who are depicted as poor seem to share elite ideologies which makes the characters not believable.
Also, beyond values, there are some material distortions; I've seen too many detective series were the cop is living in a luxury penthouse.
IME these mechanisms are a natural outflow of how those with money and power delegate power or invest money.
I have friends with a private plane. I also have friends who are scrambling to make rent, among many other friends always worried about their next paycheck. When you put the two together, you’ll find they can’t really engage in conversation about their lives without extreme embarassment - the plane people could solve most of the immediate problems facing the paycheck folks with barely a dent in their lifestyle.
So the plane people end up around people they can talk about vacation spots with, and the paycheck people hang around people who are empathetic and participate together in mutual aid to get thru. Rarely do the paycheck folks become plane people (they’re too generous or focus on maximizing other aspects of their lives than income). Rarely do the plane people actually help the paycheck people, except indirectly.
Inequality is embarrassing. Our society is embarrassing. That there is no safety net and basic needs being met being demanded by everyone from the poor to the richest of the rich can ONLY happen because they don’t interact. I see a huge backlash coming and it will not hit equally, or fairly. No society can continue like this without breaking down.
Everyone should do it more, it really helps put the uncompromising convictions of people around you into perspective and see them as what they often are: a lack of understanding for the breadth of human experience.
Australia is extremely egalitarian. I think even more so than the US. In both Australia and the US, you can usually talk to the CEO of the startup directly; they actually like to talk to their staff directly. But in the US, the power differential is usually much bigger, I am more cautious about what I say.
In Germany, there seems to be a more rigid hierarchy and the founders tend to avoid talking to employees directly; they tend to communicate mostly through middle-managers, even in relatively small startups.
But the rest is pretty much true unfortunately, though I wouldn't call the behavior rude because it's not seen as rudeness by people who do it. It's more that being optimistic, feeling surprised by things, expressing strong emotions is all seen as naive and pointless. There is also a strong aversion to taking risks which is pretty frustrating. Even when you can show they are calculated risks.
However not the whole DACH region is the same either, the cultures are pretty different, the only thing in common is really only the language. I had better success in Germany than my own country of Switzerland
I think the Australian version of naivety is more about meritocratic ideas and flat social hierarchies. Australians aren't usually loud or opinionated. European CEOs may not like it if an employee reaches out to them directly. In Australia, the startup CEO usually tries to be friends with the employees so it feels natural to reach out to the CEO directly and they often reach out to you. In Europe, I get the sense that CEOs believe that they're too important to talk to employees. This has been my experience at startups of similar sizes.
In Switzerland and Germany that's pretty much true, yes. As a contractor I really prefer working with UK and US companies, the communication is as you describe, more friendly and natural, and they are generally more than happy to see someone who wants to take initiatives (in fact it is expected)
I was picking up my buffet dinner at a company event in Europe and the CEO who I somewhat knew was alongside; this was a moderately large company--maybe 10K employees at that point. We went to sit down at a table and the $EUROPEAN_COUNTRY people there were basically "Nah, we'd prefer to speak our own language." So the CEO and I went down to sit at another more welcoming table. (And had a very pleasant discussion about his upcoming family vacation and forwarded him some info.)
Not sure of the point but there are definitely cultural differednces on many dimensions on what you can do and can't do.
Literally the top female figure in the EU structures had married into German nobility. Even without the marriage it's hard to describe the carrier as self-made. Families controlling German automotive industry are interleaved with aristocrats. The trees are obstructing you the view of the forest.
You only miss a bad job market entry and low salaries, you need every meagre advantage you can get.
100% agree on a degree being a strong signal, by the way.
Maybe, but the degree has to be paid for, with time and money.
A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree.
But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself.
Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder.
Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do.
I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.
Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art.
Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
Yes, this has unemployment computer engineering at #2 with 7.8% and computer science at #5 at 7.0%.
Philosophy is at 5.1% unemployment.
The next column is also important to look at - the underemployment rate. Is the graduate in a profession that requires the degree.
Philosophy has a 47.1% underemployment rate. Half of the graduates with a philosophy degree aren't employed in a job that requires a college degree.Underemployment for computer engineering is at 15.8% (3rd lowest) and computer science is at 19.1% (9th lowest).
If you want a unemployment rate for computer science that matches philosophy the answer is easy - hold your nose and take the front desk receptionist job.
Also... sort by "median wage early career." Computer engineering and computer science are #1 and #2 at $90k and $87k. There's something important there too - most college graduates are not getting $100k/year jobs. That expectation of Big Tech wages out of college and turning one's nose up at a job that offers the median claiming that "it isn't competitive" may be contributing to the unemployment rate.
There isn't an existential crisis there. Most college graduates are finding jobs in the profession and computer science and engineering (from that data) are the highest paying college majors.
Source: all the B.A. Philosophy grads I know who entered basically any job they could get, often including the trades, and knew during their degree that that would be their path. But wow are they more interesting to talk with and more well rounded than a tech-head who turned up their nose at their humanities prereqs during university and as a result know nothing about the world outside of their narrow field.
I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.
I guess they could be using third party software but it seems like often they are just using an ancient thing they built themselves.
Left unstated is what jobs philosophy and art history majors take.
There's more computer scientists working in computer science than there are philosophy or art history majors working in philosophy or art history.
Save money
Invest in market share
Increase market cap
Hire the last remaining seniors at higher rates but only where needed
Great time to be a shareholder or staff level engineer. For everyone else, the ladder has been pulled.
That doesn't mean we're all dead or anything - factory workers still exist, developer jobs will still exist. They'll just be far fewer than they used to be.
I do tend to agree. Though at the current pace of change I don't know if we can take it for granted.
As a recent example, I was on a chat with the two most experienced technical people in our company and the original developer of a feature trying to work out why we were getting a null pointer exception in a very specific case. Of course we had a fix, just a guard against the null pointer, but I'm always uncomfortable with not knowing the underlying cause.
I kept digging while someone promoted the fix. Eventually ruling out two of our original theories as to why it happened. Until eventually someone just asked Cursor which spit out a theory which matched the symptoms perfectly and which we quickly reproduced locally.
I still think we'll need some kind of human who lives in that wide space between the 95% of the population who couldn't get Excel to sum a list of numbers and the machines but the industry will be unrecognisable.
In my experience the LLM when given the ticket would have done the original null pointer guard fix given the bug. Only under direction does it ever dig deeper and for me it'll often go down some wrong paths unless I tell it to go somewhere else. It's great when it gets it right the first time. But that is rarely the case and usually you just get good enough if you don't care to go further.
You know why nobody talks about it anymore? Because the project has been vibe coded to death in the span of a few months.
Not only will it happen, it's literally happening right now in front of our eyes.
I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
Very scary for the future, unfortunately.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.
They aren't, but your specialist knowledge draws from two disciplines.
If you undergrad is in CS, your specialist knowledge is in one discipline exclusively.
That country never ceases to astonish me lol.
I don't think it was worded very well, but I think the parent comment was saying, "the bulk of CS can be covered in a masters program, so take an undergrad degree that has the same overlap in math/science, but a different focus". I'm not sure I agree, spreading the absorption of that knowledge over 4 years can be beneficial.
Guess the standards in your country for logic must be really low lol
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
It may be a cliche, but it's all connected. In a general sense, programmers at different experience levels are at least partially substitutable goods. A crash in wages on one group will probably affect that other.
In a more specific sense, companies won't pay seniors for skills at mentoring and managing the juniors they won't have.
Unless there's an unexpected jump in AI IQ, vibe-coded projects will start to unravel, but the companies won't have the resources to hire the human coders needed to fix the code.
Meanwhile a lot of people with real skills and ability will have been unemployed long enough to depress spending across the entire economy.
Those same people would have been prime drivers of spending, because they were one of the few demographics with significant disposable income and the ability to afford high rents and property prices.
You can see where this is going.
The people running the companies can't. Or if they can, they maybe believe they have an escape route.
That will turn out to be a fantasy too.
The problem isn't AI. it's an economy running on fantasy numbers that are unmoored from economic and physical reality.
Idk though, really seems like the "AI layoffs" are just corps shedding headcount bloat accumulated in 2020-23.
I never understood why software engineers were so excited about open source and teaching everyone to code.
Why aren‘t we more like doctors or lawyers?
But the reality is law is primarily about social capital, medicine has more of that than most people realise, and computer people love to pretend social capital is something other people do, and they don't need to.
I draw the line at things that directly impact my net worth.
> Do you not care about global warming because you're probably not going to experience an unsurvivable wet bulb temperature where you happen to live in your lifetime?
Correct. I don’t care about global warming or climate change.
Climate change will have huge effects on everyone's net worth. The process has already started.
Your failure to understand this will not change how it affects you.
I suppose that makes a change from it's not happening or it is happening but it isn't man made or it is man made but we can't do anything about it.
That is a really interesting admission upon which to evaluate your other comments here…
If I decide you're having a negative impact on my net worth, can I come to your home and shoot you in the head?
It seems we need a remedial class in morality here, where we work up to you understanding the golden rule. But perhaps you're not capable of understanding that. Is euthanizing you then the only option?
Hope you like being overworked!