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.
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.
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.
I don’t see how this isn’t a massive net negative to you personally other than avoiding occasional odd conversation. You can have genuine conversations both personally and professionally with all sorts of people even if you don’t “dress like shit”. The expat versus immigrant thing is interesting but I assume most can see through that. Sorry to sound critical not really my intention but this is a very interesting approach. It makes the most sense if you’re already set in a great gig or already made your money, no?
Programming used to be attractive career exactly because you'd get a good job based on skills alone. There was no "you need to wear a suit to impress the client" bullshit: just show up, do a good day of honest work, go home with a fat paycheck. When you look at things from this perspective, signaling low-status also signals "I'm here because I can program", while signaling high-status also signals "I'm here to play office politics". So effectively, signaling low-status is a hidden signal that only other high-status people will recognize, while signaling high-status is a bluff that low-status people do.
It seems a little complicated but the idea itself is nothing new. When you go to a ghetto you'll see golden chains, expensive cars and other shiny shit. Go to a upper-middle-class neighborhood and you'll see things that look ordinary but are expensive on closer inspection.
Of course things have changed since then, but that's the gist.
Not to this extreme but most people around me don’t know what I do for money or explore in unallocated time
I’m fashionable and have a nice place but nothing says “software engineer that earns more than most doctors”
People that wake up next to me think I earn about 1/3rd to 1/5th of what I earn, I don’t correct them
But at the same time I do want just a little bit of the hypergamy. Unfortunately, broadcasting to that sentiment seems incompatible with staying low key and attracting more collaborative people, but it could be fun which is my goal. I’ve seen how doctors are treated in the attraction game, its strange and downright scary to see some people code switch around them to be seen as eligible mates, I could have that. I’ve been analyzing it and it has very little to do with perceived utility, and almost solely to do with perceived earning potential combined with the idea of other people wanting them.
When I’ve spent extended time in small towns I inherit that treatment. In small towns across the US, you have people aspiring to hook up with entry level military conscripts because “they make so much money”. When you earn an entire order of magnitude more than that, it’s almost impossible to blend in and people can tell, so you get the code switching hypergamy sentiment.
This is the closest parallel to what people are talking about in this thread, because I’m rarely networking. Recruiters reach out to me over email and linkedin and thats it. Do work, get paid, sign off.
I'm gay so I have easy access to sex and TBH I don't really have much sex, almost nothing at all, because sex with most people just isn't pleasant. I cannot derive pleasure from it if there's no connection, and "wow I love your car" isn't connection.
As a straight male that does well with dating and relationships I am quietly fascinated by this aspect of gay culture and relationships. It changes so many dynamics.
Thankful for the group of guys at our neighborhood bar where we play gays vs straights pool and rib about this stuff. Lol, just wanted to share that anecdote tbh
I enjoy the challenge and the sex. I think the speed limits in the hetero space to be with attractive women keep it interesting for nearly a lifetime. Things devalue when abundant, but it takes a lot for it to become abundant.
But even then, it's not disinteresting instantly, I'm around a lot of people with similar libidos and interest in sustained variety, who have achieved that, and brought similar people together. So I could really only say thank you for your personal account, it's a very individual journey not reflective of everyone else's experience with abundance.
I haven't really done much with material things, I live in and buy what's comfortable for me. But I know there is a large crowd that finds shiny material things attractive and its always an option when I want to optimize for that.
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.
True, but I'm talking about native English speakers. Those people likely have their own terminology in their own language to describe themselves.
Also an ex-patriate is typically in the professional class. So those "English" teachers who teach in Japan, etc., may think of themselves as ex-pats or try to frequent "ex-pat" hangouts but they aren't necessarily because of two things: one, they have not been working at their home office and then transferred and typically they do not hold prelesional degrees -though they may hold "certificates" or whatever. They are in effect temporary workers on a limited stay visa, often needing annual renewal by hopping to a third country to have it renewed themselves. For ex-pats all this or arranged by their employers.
Looking at online dictionaries there is no hint of temporariness [0], [1]. Wikipedia refers to it as "a person who resides outside their native country" and often referring to "a professional, skilled worker or artist from a wealthy country" [2], which matches exactly the way I see it used. Similar to other commenters here, I also mostly encounter it being used by skilled, first world professionals to separate themselves "from the plebs" of poorer immigrants.
PS I do not disagree that some use cases could include temporariness (wikipedia mentions academic discourse and something about some british civil workers a few decades ago) but this is by far neither the unique nor the most common way it is used nowadays, nor how historically it has often been used long before.
Perhaps less visible but also more numerous are the guys from China who are too poor to afford the bridewealth who go to poor SEAsian countries to find their brides but also can frequent the hourly hotels that cater specifically to Japanese to Chinese clientele. Euros and N. Americans stand out due to their physical differences.
This is nonsense. It’s referrals for jobs that get filled before the JD is even posted, or discussions about what companies/people _actually_ want when they’re tendering projects. It’s tickets for sold out events, access to golf tee times or bookings that just aren’t available if you have to ask.
Two examples from my life - a friend is a headhunter for tech companies. My last job was been him hitting me up before the job was advertised - I had met the hiring manager and booked an interview before they saw my CV or anyone else even applied to the job.
There’s a major sporting event in my city every year and the tickets sell out within minutes every year, the good ones gone to season ticket holders years in advance. A colleague is a season ticket holder and not interested in that particular game so the last few years I’ve gotten his ticket for less than face value for the cheap seats.
There's a formula I've bookmarked from someone to help you get better social capital. In order to increase your surface for social capital you need to expand your influence, therefore you need to increase your luck:
L (luck) = D (doing) x T (telling)
Basically, you need to be able to show you are able to do stuff (D) and with enough people seeing this by you sharing (T) through different channels, can open doors. I haven't been doing it as heavily but it has already given me incredible opportunities.
Best way to have social capital is an introduction into a space where money and power exist. Many spaces no matter what you do you will never be able to get in without an intro, and they have extremely few opportunities. Being college buddies with a member of an upper class is one of the only times they will ever socially mix. It is indeed like royalty in every way.
Being at Harvard gets you a lot relative to the population, being around the right clubs at Harvard gives you a lot relative to that. There is meritocracy within the range but nepotism can easily put people in the room. Work at a startup or two run by families of billionaires, and watch their career trajectory, and you will not have any doubt.
The sibling commenters are correct but I will add with the benefit of being an old guy that this ebbs and flows. GP said "I have never seen tech be less about engineering", and I agree.
But it can't get much less about engineering before rich people become poor in large numbers, and that will start the pendulum back the other way.
Rich people losing money that matters in large numbers is like a soft civil war, everything changes.
At work nobody knows what degree you've got. I mean some people insist to be called Dr. X if they have a Ph.D. (and in some cultures that's more common). You can have a B.Sc. in biology, or an M.Sc. in EE, or a law degree or no degree and nobody knows. As a manager in a large tech company I didn't even know that for the people I managed. I would usually find out people's background through random talk but it's not information I had access to. I was surprised to find one of the rising stars didn't finish his degree and wanted to take some time off to finish it.
Where it does matter is in the hiring process and especially for juniors and larger companies.
> I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
Sad but my experience as well.
As someone who started being more self-educated (I did learn a lot of theory myself) and only later finished my degree (started, dropped out to do some real work, came back much later) I do think a good CS program teaches a lot of important things. Most importantly the ability to learn and understand research in this area. Not all the specific things you're going to learn are going to be applicable all the time, some will some of the time, and not having that background at all is limiting. You can learn this without going through the academic system but it's much harder and most people don't and stay stuck in some sense.
Similar story where as soon as someone made a 100k+ offer to me I dropped out of school and never looked back (was making $12/hr at the time).
In retrospect it was not the best choice because college does give you a unique chance to get connections that let you into "the club" and will send you to the upper echelons of FAANG and early retirement.
I always thought I would just become a better and better engineer cutting my teeth at startups and then make the switch, but now it almost feels like you are a career startup engineer or a career big tech engineer, and making the switch is difficult. One is obviously insanely more lucrative, probably 3-5X with the way equity has exploded.
> Similar story where as soon as someone made a 100k+ offer to me I dropped out of school and never looked back (was making $12/hr at the time).
In the very early 90s, at 15 my part time computer repair job was paying a large share of the family rent, and by 17 I had graduated early and was working full time making 60k/yr. I had scholarships but I didn't take them because by 18 I had a customer base and a reputation. I went back to school in my 30s but it wasn't worth it. School is very help for many people and paths, but not all people and all paths.
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.
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.
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.
Every nation that was a heart of an empire still has lingering class issues. I've been told by Swedes a non-commoner last name can absolutely open some doors. Though nothing comes close to the UK, which is closer to Japan in this regard than the continental Europe.
Belgium has a class system. Read up on the death of Sanda Dia, very light punishments since all suspects had well connected parents. Lawyers, judges, doctors, surgeons, business executives, entrepreneurs, bankers, corporate directors, politicians, senior civil servants, police officials.
> 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.
The accent bit happens in the US too, to an extent. Depending on the accent you grew up with, you get different responses from people in professional or professional-adjacent settings if you forget to switch the knob back to the more homogenized vaguely Iowa-sounding GenAm accent. This covers a gamut of other accents - regional or not (NE, aave, southern, val, etc).
But it's not nearly as bad as RP in England from what I gather - for one, a pretty decent chunk of the population would normally grow up with a GenAm accent with no forcing, unlike in England where it's a pretty hyper local <5% of the native population.
I did what is referred to as a “fun MSc” (pretmaster) in The Netherlands. It’s a Master programme that doesn’t require much effort and doesn’t put you in too much debt but does allow you to put MSc behind your name. Some engineering firms (companies that do engineering as their core business) require all applicants to have an MSc. It is how I got my foot in the door.
I have an ME (pretty much MSc). I'm not sure anyone in the US really cares about the degree and I'd never put it beside my name except on a formal resume. I wouldn't say no effort; it took a couple of years.
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).
I guess it depends on what you want out of life too. I did not go to Uni, started my career early and had a very comfortable income my entire 20’s. No debt, travelled all over the world, relaxed freelance contracts. I had a lot of free time and low stress.
Later I joined one of my freelance clients as a co-founder (early 30s), more risky than the FAANG path but we’re on the right path to a comfortable pension.
I wouldn’t trade my life for that of some of my FAANG friends.
Yeah being good is great but... some of the best engineers I have ever met are working at small companies making 150k, while mediocre ones fell into Meta/Google/Tesla jobs during the pandemic hiring frenzy and are now looking at retirement.
If the goal is to be good that is fine, but there is little correlation with salary.
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.
> 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.
> No society can continue like this without breaking down
I wish you were right, but I think you are wrong. This article on poverty in ancient Rome suggests otherwise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_ancient_Rome
"Their society may have consisted of a handful of wealthy individuals that made up 0.6% of the population, an army that made up 0.4% of the population, and the poor masses that made up 99% of the populace."
I selected Rome because it's my understanding that this is one of the longest lived empires.
The facts for the Roman Empire are not clear, but it looks like massive inequality is the sad default mode for humanity. One might expect that as literacy and information sharing improved, it would be less tolerable by the populace for this inequality to persist. But it seems about as bad as ever. This may be due to the perception that rich people because they "earned" it, despite the fact that it seems patently obvious (to me at least!) that is not the case.
You occupy a very unusual place seeing such extremes of both sides.
I've only interacted with people with that level of wealth in a professional capacity. In my personal life, I know a lot of people who own multiple properties and businesses including some of my own family members but I don't think I know anyone with a private jet. The top of the range I know have big boats and big houses.
I feel like there is a social boundary between the old money and the new money.
The new money tends to be much wealthier and they don't like the old money folks. In theory, they could both talk with each other about exotic holiday spots, fine dining and boating/yachting but there is a different discomfort. And it's not about tech understanding because a lot of children of old money went into tech. I think the discomfort is that the new money folks see the old money folks as spoiled brats... But IMO, this is a result of the new money folks not seeing their own privilege; not granted by daddy, sure, but granted by the system itself.
My view is that nobody earned anything. They were chosen by luck of birth, chosen by a rich friend, chosen by a rich investor, or chosen by algorithm or a combination thereof. Usually based on highly superficial aspects. Their efforts have very little to do with it besides providing plausible narrative cover.
Re: movies and elite perspectives, I watched They Cloned Tyrone a while ago and it had a solid "hero movie from a lower socioeconomic class" vibe. I enjoyed the perspective shift and I think it might be a good example of your point.
It all used to be smoking and there are still places in the world where trains and busses have seats facing each other. Having sat in those seats in the past I can tell you that people can still perfectly well not talk to each other ;)
There are cultures (e.g. go to Israel) where random people still talk to each other.
I'm not sure I would call what you observed in Europe privilege. I think you were just an outsider/immigrant from a different culture. Different places have different cultures and it takes a long time (if ever) to acquire them. You'll be treated differently if you don't have the right social cues e.g.
In places like the US or Canada this tends to be a lesser effect because it's a big melting point.
I know plenty of really rich people (like billionaire or approaching) that aren't that different than most of us (also rich). You don't magically move to some other "circle" just by having money. It's true there are certain "classes"/cliques in different cultures but it's not as simple as has money vs. hasn't.
> 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.
In the USA at least, people in the normal cars aren't "sharing their experiences". They're playing garbage music from their iPhone speakers (technically not allowed - happens anyway), trying to subdue their giggling/crying/screaming children, loudly conversing amongst themselves, etc. It's a zoo.
Not trying to pick apart your post, I liked reading it in general.
> 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.
It's no great mystery. Social interaction is a skill that requires practice and effort to develop. Interacting with new people is risky and occasionally painful. Back in the day the punishment for not developing that skill and taking those risks was boredom, but nowadays you can just crawl into your cell phone to while away the hours.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
I'm german and I was at aldi yesterday, one guy was super nice and happy and wished another a good day, and the guy, including us were surprised how nice he was and he said "we need more nice people in this country". Mind blowing.
Taking the plane from croatia to germany is also funny, because there is a grey filter as soon as you enter the airspace
This tracks for me because I am a developer with a 4 year degree in a field completely unrelated to CS and I have never felt any of the stigma or othering from my coworkers on the measures you described.
If we're speaking realistically and not idealistically, then the primary point of a degree is as an investment in a job market. You go deep in debt with the aim of getting many times what you invest in return. But in the case of a bad job market, you're investing serious money (especially in modern times) for what may not ultimately pay off. And even if LLMs don't reach their viable potential, they're still likely going to significantly depress wages/employment for many forms of knowledge work, making a degree even less valuable.
I went to a top 10 university, but won't be encouraging my children to go to university at all, nor will I strongly discourage them. But I will make it clear that it is a choice with pros and cons, and in modern times I personally think that the cons outweigh the pros. Of course if they want to do some form of engineering then it will probably be necessary, but there's lots of wild careers like underwater welding that make big $$$, are fun/physical, highly skilled, and you get paid to learn instead of going 6 figures in debt before you even enter the job market. And it's something that will always be needed, everywhere, and isn't going anywhere.
And the reality of life is, like the article says - where you start is not where you end. Once you get your foot in the door pretty much anywhere, your formal title often quickly becomes much less relevant than the skills you have.
Only around 1% or less of graduates from top schools (the Ivy League, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc) end up with 6 figures of debt. In the Ivy League about 80% graduate with no debt. At top non-Ivy League schools average debt ranges from about $13k (MIT) to around $30k (CMU).
Even when you expand to include all schools instead of just top schools, 6 figure debt is rare. Average is about $27k for public universities, $34k for private non-profit universities, and $40k for private for-profit schools.
If someone has 6 figure debt from school they odds are overwhelming that it is from law school or medical school.
I wonder how many excellent students from non-rich families who could easily get into a top school for low cost or even free don't even bother applying because they have heard that myth of widespread 6 figure debt?
Those numbers are wrong. Here [1] are the latest data from the government. The average debt is $40k across all borrowers for Federal loans. Federal loans are about 90% of all loans, so you can easily bump that up to $45-$50k after also factoring in private loans. And most of that lending is done at predatory rates, even from the government, with the average well above 6% for undergraduate loans, and significantly higher for loans beyond that. So you're looking at $45k debt with compounding interest at 6%+ rates in the average case. And the average case is obviously not people going to higher end and more desirable institutions, where the degree is going to be much more valuable, but the debt is going to be much higher.
The reason debt is low at the most elite institutions is in part because the student body comes from disproportionately wealthy families and in part because most/all of these schools offer tuition free learning and other non-loan assistance for students from "low-income" families. At MIT "low-income" is defined as less than $200k. Any student who's viably able to be accepted to such institutions would be well aware of such things, but 99% aren't - so it's largely just as irrelevant as their debt figures.
Not if the baseline assumption is that the value of a degree continues to go down and you could've climbed the ranks of plumbing instead of getting a white collar degree.
As someone who got a Comp Sci degree from a good school and who worked at FAANG right out of school, it seems like this is all that matters to companies looking to hire me.
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.
All of my professional jobs have been contingent on background checks and validating (to some degree) the things I put in the record. If I say I have a degree, they call to verify. They called to verify work history, although not being able to reach previous employers wasn't a deal breaker. I don't think just claim you have a degree when you don't works.
If you have a degree from a 'good school', that gets you some credibility by itself, but mostly a 4 year degree says 'this person can commit to doing difficult things without an immediate payoff for around 4 years' which is a valuable thing for employers.
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.
Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention.
I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree.
And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out.
I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.
I respect you. To be honest, I still haven't found my footing. Most of what I earned was squandered paying off debts from being scammed, and my work is irregular. And as you said, the game is always changing, the rules keep shifting. I feel anxious, but reading the words of a senior like you makes me feel better.
I lived in a 3 pyeong (about 100 sq ft) space for three years (I wasn't homeless, so I had it better than you). Still, I'm grateful that now I have a small 8 pyeong (about 260 sq ft) space. Thank you for sharing your experiences and emotions.
I want to succeed through willpower, just like you. As you know, most of my coding is done better by AI. Unless it's large scale programming, the work that comes to people like us is usually small scale, handled at the level of specific frameworks.
Nevertheless, I still believe there is a place for me somewhere (though that might be self hypnosis).
> 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.
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.
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
>It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally.
From my understanding China operates this way. They supposedly have such an oversupply of software engineers that every company just build all the software they need internally. Now with AI they have supposedly been super aggressive in adopting it that its probably even more of the case that everyone is building most of what they need internally.
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.
Sounds like you are picturing WinForms in your mind (Was so awesome to create forms and ship really customized usable software quickly). Does business software really need to be super pretty?
No definitely doesn’t need to be pretty. My point is more that building and managing this stuff often requires a programmer. It’s not “cool” or cutting edge but it’s a job.
Isn't a philosophy also a popular pre-law degree? A lot of these sorts of articles neglect to account for the actual reality of how these degrees are used.
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.
> Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry.
In my (admittedly vibes-based) opinion, this is just a result of there being a huge supply of CS grads in this country due to it being popularized as a path to a stable, high-paying job. Those degrees are now more often than ever held by people who aren't necessarily passionate about, or good at, the field.
The signal-to-noise ratio in hiring, therefore, is worse than ever. AI exacerbates the problem, of course. But I don't think this is an existential crisis; I think the market will sort itself out, as those less-qualified entrants leave.
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.
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.
COBOL was mostly outsourced to India, and it's a terrible professional path for anyone in the EU or US, and has been since the Y2K bugs got fixed at the last minute.
(And probably a bad path in India, too, but I have no data one way or the other. It's just that all the excellent Indian devs I know use almost exactly the same tech stacks I do.)
Then why did it take Anthropic over a year just to fix the flickering issue in one of their main products when they have internal access to the latest and greatest models?
In the case of vibe-coded slop like OpenClaw it's not a question of some vague notion of "code quality", it's a case of the software shitting the bed and not working anymore, with no recourse of fixing it. (Neither humans nor LLMs have the context window to analyse and fix tens of millions of lines of code slop.)
> and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage
If OpenClaw wasn't broken it would just use a standard token API.
But see above - as software it is fundamentally broken and unfixable.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it.
What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI.
So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway.
Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.
thats interesting, the HMs where I work love hiring juniors (who pass the bar) because they are so AI-native
the more experienced engineers can help with setting guardrails and mentorship, but the juniors come unconstrained by priors on how to use ai in creative ways to solve all sorts of business problems.
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:
This is unfortunately true. There are tons of IEEE spamferences. Which is a shame because there are also good IEEE-sponsored (or co-sponsored) conferences (I find ISCA, Hot Chips + Hot Interconnects, and SC to all be interesting systems conferences, for example.)
However IEEE Spectrum is neither a journal nor a conference - it's the flagship magazine of the IEEE.
My impression of IEEE Spectrum (as well as CACM) is that they still feature good technical papers and content written by domain experts, but they also feature junk/filler "articles" and blog posts written by serial contributors who seem to optimize article quantity over quality. Often the title or topic is the only good part.
This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished.
Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy.
Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly.
> a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments
The decline in quality of STEM students/graduates is alarming, but the decline in intellectual quality of students is generalised.
Little did Dodson think he was being prophetic when he wrote satirically of Reeling, Writhing, and the arithmetical operations of Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
[0] _ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Isn't this just grading on a curve, which has been done probably as long as universities have existed? The key is the instructor making sure a high standard is met (which seems to be the crux of the issue).
Yes it has been in practice for a long time, but it's now being used to push clear fail cases into passing grades just to meet quotas. Prior it was used to adjust for particularly difficult assessments, and was closely monitored.
Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.
All exams should be verbal. The fact that verbal exams are so rare is because teachers/professors are overworked and (outside of AI) underpaid. Too many students, not enough time.
The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.
There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
> Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.
Universities consist of a wide range of people with different incentives, the lecturers typically (in my experience) have very pure motives. It's the management parts that put pressure to pass students, meet metrics, etc.
> The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.
Homework is essentially dead post-LLMs. The lecturer's responsibility is to provide guided learning, but also most importantly to assess each student's attempt to learn.
> There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
You'd be surprised how much 1:1 with students there are. One example I'm aware of is CS students getting 4 hours 1:1 for one module per semester - that's a hell of a lot.
What you're ultimately up against is cost per student. The overheads in Universities are enormous. It's usually 40:60:+, so £40k pay, £60k overhead plus research and investment (conference paper, travel, journals, new tools, etc).
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 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.
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
Employment of physicists has had its ups and downs. Academic physics research was impacted by funding, including a draw-down of defense related funding after the Soviet Union collapsed. Also, during my time as a student, mandatory retirement was outlawed, so there was suddenly a drastic reduction of retirements.
The number of people entering graduate study in physics never went down, so the academic career pipeline was flooded with talent. You had to be a research superstar to get a faculty job. I wasn't.
Meanwhile, physics had never really laid out a reliable path into industry. Getting an industry job involved a fair amount of luck. Many physics students became programmers. My first job after grad school was for a company owned by a relative of a fellow grad student, and my ancillary skills in programming and electronics have helped lubricate my resume as needed.
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?
If anything it seems wide deployment of LLMs would go against this. When nobody writes code by hand anymore, who will care about the ergonomics of programming languages? And even if a few do care, how would you get adoption? I expect everyone will just use whatever is already used most.
I agree, it seems like the current most popular languages and frameworks will become ossified, because they have the highest amount of training data. It's hard to see a future where Python and JavaScript aren't the most popular languages to use (assuming LLM-assisted development is the norm moving forward).
LLMs can be pretty conmpetent at languages that have zero training data, at least to the extent that those languages use features/ideas that are familiar. I wrote a toy language/compiler and AI can write code for it competently.
It seems that now more than ever, testing is important. But LLMs love to cheat the tests and make them superficially pass. If you're never reading the code, how do you know changes are reasonable?
I do review, if only whatever I do was the norm for everyone :)
Do you see lots of posts about new compilers and languages and language features on HN in the last year? Maybe I just missed them. I'd love to read more posts like that and fewer about agent frameworks.
It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money.
Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this.
I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation.
Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.
If a job is well-paying, there will always be many people going into it for the money. High paying and only people who love it do it are pretty much incompatible.
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.
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.
Getting a PhD is almost never worth the foregone wages if your goal is to be in private industry. For sure, people should get one if they are interested in research, or specific jobs that are only available to people with PhDs. But otherwise it isn't something to get into half-hearted.
This is only true when you compare the PhD field degree to something like finance where you can make real money at 23 years old. If the alternative is a bs for a path where most people end up going PhD, you will be working for like $20/hr most your life. You will probably be breaking even with what the PhD stipend would have been anyhow and you aren't getting any healthcare benefits.
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.
Philosophy is excellent training in the analytical skills needed for any knowledge-based job. Critically evaluating information, constructing arguments, thinking of counter-examples, etc.
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
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.
i went to a top cs school and loved it, it raised the ceiling of what i thought was even possible, coming from a country where cs was not seen as an interesting or desirable job at the time
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.
hmm i dont think any new grad is an expert and knows what they're doing (if im understanding you right)
but the skills we used to look for in new grads are shifting as coding agents make execution easy, a new grad with good business sense is really valuable
what do you mean? we're hiring new grads because we think they will make the company money. most of our hires are from top schools so they're already proven to be smart
right now most resumes are zero signal because any new grad can whip up an impressive sounding project using ai with zero paying users. but knowing what to build, having good product sense and taste, talking to customers, iterating and not giving up are much more desirable skills
youd be surprised how many new grads with capital and free time have zero business skills
There are two things you can get from a degree:
1. Knowledge and skills
2. A network and a reputation
While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.
I was making the difference between engineering and development too actually.
Building react and using react being an illustration of the difference between an engineer and a dev.
It is a spectrum however, that's true.
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!
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.
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.
USA never ceases to astonish me regardless of the presence of compulsory mathematics courses in computer science programs. I guess you didn't take logic :)
my son asked me just that today - should I even go to the uni. The idea is probably circulating somewhere. It is changing for sure but still important. Maybe he will learn new things. Or old things differently. It's not like education becomes suddenly redundant.
Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Can't really practice medical or legal skills from the comfort of your home on devices everyone has had for 10 years now. Also, unlike computers which must obey every whim of their master, lawyers and doctors deal with humans. Which makes raw skill less important.
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?
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.
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?
Nothing worse than a person who takes for granted all the hard work others put into society while smugly bragging about how they don't care about anyone but themselves.
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.
Call me biased, but the CS degree always seemed like the “general studies” of computing fields.
The interesting areas involve some sort of domain expertise- medical, physics, civil, electrical, chemical engineering, etc. or even pure math in the case of data science.
CS lacks all of those, including a strong math background.
Sure, for plain “boring” software development, CS is perfectly fine.
But in terms of one’s personal education and career trajectory, why not aim higher?
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.
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.
Just curious what part of the world you live in? Apologies if that seems like prying
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.
I don’t see how this isn’t a massive net negative to you personally other than avoiding occasional odd conversation. You can have genuine conversations both personally and professionally with all sorts of people even if you don’t “dress like shit”. The expat versus immigrant thing is interesting but I assume most can see through that. Sorry to sound critical not really my intention but this is a very interesting approach. It makes the most sense if you’re already set in a great gig or already made your money, no?
Programming used to be attractive career exactly because you'd get a good job based on skills alone. There was no "you need to wear a suit to impress the client" bullshit: just show up, do a good day of honest work, go home with a fat paycheck. When you look at things from this perspective, signaling low-status also signals "I'm here because I can program", while signaling high-status also signals "I'm here to play office politics". So effectively, signaling low-status is a hidden signal that only other high-status people will recognize, while signaling high-status is a bluff that low-status people do.
It seems a little complicated but the idea itself is nothing new. When you go to a ghetto you'll see golden chains, expensive cars and other shiny shit. Go to a upper-middle-class neighborhood and you'll see things that look ordinary but are expensive on closer inspection.
Of course things have changed since then, but that's the gist.
Not surprised to hear this from anal_reactor.
Not to this extreme but most people around me don’t know what I do for money or explore in unallocated time
I’m fashionable and have a nice place but nothing says “software engineer that earns more than most doctors”
People that wake up next to me think I earn about 1/3rd to 1/5th of what I earn, I don’t correct them
But at the same time I do want just a little bit of the hypergamy. Unfortunately, broadcasting to that sentiment seems incompatible with staying low key and attracting more collaborative people, but it could be fun which is my goal. I’ve seen how doctors are treated in the attraction game, its strange and downright scary to see some people code switch around them to be seen as eligible mates, I could have that. I’ve been analyzing it and it has very little to do with perceived utility, and almost solely to do with perceived earning potential combined with the idea of other people wanting them.
When I’ve spent extended time in small towns I inherit that treatment. In small towns across the US, you have people aspiring to hook up with entry level military conscripts because “they make so much money”. When you earn an entire order of magnitude more than that, it’s almost impossible to blend in and people can tell, so you get the code switching hypergamy sentiment.
This is the closest parallel to what people are talking about in this thread, because I’m rarely networking. Recruiters reach out to me over email and linkedin and thats it. Do work, get paid, sign off.
I'm gay so I have easy access to sex and TBH I don't really have much sex, almost nothing at all, because sex with most people just isn't pleasant. I cannot derive pleasure from it if there's no connection, and "wow I love your car" isn't connection.
As a straight male that does well with dating and relationships I am quietly fascinated by this aspect of gay culture and relationships. It changes so many dynamics.
Thankful for the group of guys at our neighborhood bar where we play gays vs straights pool and rib about this stuff. Lol, just wanted to share that anecdote tbh
I enjoy the challenge and the sex. I think the speed limits in the hetero space to be with attractive women keep it interesting for nearly a lifetime. Things devalue when abundant, but it takes a lot for it to become abundant.
But even then, it's not disinteresting instantly, I'm around a lot of people with similar libidos and interest in sustained variety, who have achieved that, and brought similar people together. So I could really only say thank you for your personal account, it's a very individual journey not reflective of everyone else's experience with abundance.
I haven't really done much with material things, I live in and buy what's comfortable for me. But I know there is a large crowd that finds shiny material things attractive and its always an option when I want to optimize for that.
emphasis on attractive, read as in-demand, difficult to stand out amongst
if you're thinking of banging ugly women just so you can bang - that's not how any of this works
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There's a reason it's called being "Anal Retentive"
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.
“Expat” is how white well-off immigrants expect to be addressed to differentiate themselves from other immigrants.
Ain't nobody calling seasonal minimum-wage workers "expats".
True, but I'm talking about native English speakers. Those people likely have their own terminology in their own language to describe themselves.
Also an ex-patriate is typically in the professional class. So those "English" teachers who teach in Japan, etc., may think of themselves as ex-pats or try to frequent "ex-pat" hangouts but they aren't necessarily because of two things: one, they have not been working at their home office and then transferred and typically they do not hold prelesional degrees -though they may hold "certificates" or whatever. They are in effect temporary workers on a limited stay visa, often needing annual renewal by hopping to a third country to have it renewed themselves. For ex-pats all this or arranged by their employers.
"expat" is rich, "immigrant" is poor. People use the word "expat" to signal they're rich, or at least they want to be.
Here, your theory goes out of the window.
Someone from the US who moves to France for good is not an expat.
Looking at online dictionaries there is no hint of temporariness [0], [1]. Wikipedia refers to it as "a person who resides outside their native country" and often referring to "a professional, skilled worker or artist from a wealthy country" [2], which matches exactly the way I see it used. Similar to other commenters here, I also mostly encounter it being used by skilled, first world professionals to separate themselves "from the plebs" of poorer immigrants.
PS I do not disagree that some use cases could include temporariness (wikipedia mentions academic discourse and something about some british civil workers a few decades ago) but this is by far neither the unique nor the most common way it is used nowadays, nor how historically it has often been used long before.
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/expat...
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expatriate
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate
Expat is an Anglo work migrant, they insist on the distinction as it's in their titular language.
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Perhaps less visible but also more numerous are the guys from China who are too poor to afford the bridewealth who go to poor SEAsian countries to find their brides but also can frequent the hourly hotels that cater specifically to Japanese to Chinese clientele. Euros and N. Americans stand out due to their physical differences.
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what's an example of something you made happen
encrypted backup of media files which should become public in very specific circumstances
you made a funny
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You know writing for brevity usually means you don't need to explain to your readers that you are writing for brevity...
This is nonsense. It’s referrals for jobs that get filled before the JD is even posted, or discussions about what companies/people _actually_ want when they’re tendering projects. It’s tickets for sold out events, access to golf tee times or bookings that just aren’t available if you have to ask.
Two examples from my life - a friend is a headhunter for tech companies. My last job was been him hitting me up before the job was advertised - I had met the hiring manager and booked an interview before they saw my CV or anyone else even applied to the job.
There’s a major sporting event in my city every year and the tickets sell out within minutes every year, the good ones gone to season ticket holders years in advance. A colleague is a season ticket holder and not interested in that particular game so the last few years I’ve gotten his ticket for less than face value for the cheap seats.
Fair enough, I’m not sure what the need is to be so vague about it then.
?
Take me on your helicopter, Jeffrey.
He was bragging about having a ti calculator in the 80s was seen as cool in that "interview" he filmed with Steve bannon
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There's a formula I've bookmarked from someone to help you get better social capital. In order to increase your surface for social capital you need to expand your influence, therefore you need to increase your luck:
L (luck) = D (doing) x T (telling)
Basically, you need to be able to show you are able to do stuff (D) and with enough people seeing this by you sharing (T) through different channels, can open doors. I haven't been doing it as heavily but it has already given me incredible opportunities.
Best way to have social capital is an introduction into a space where money and power exist. Many spaces no matter what you do you will never be able to get in without an intro, and they have extremely few opportunities. Being college buddies with a member of an upper class is one of the only times they will ever socially mix. It is indeed like royalty in every way.
Being at Harvard gets you a lot relative to the population, being around the right clubs at Harvard gives you a lot relative to that. There is meritocracy within the range but nepotism can easily put people in the room. Work at a startup or two run by families of billionaires, and watch their career trajectory, and you will not have any doubt.
But what do you do if you can't stand the faintest smell of nepotism?
The sibling commenters are correct but I will add with the benefit of being an old guy that this ebbs and flows. GP said "I have never seen tech be less about engineering", and I agree.
But it can't get much less about engineering before rich people become poor in large numbers, and that will start the pendulum back the other way.
Rich people losing money that matters in large numbers is like a soft civil war, everything changes.
Struggle harder than you otherwise would, sadly.
Then you're fucked :)
I got a job first and my degree later.
At work nobody knows what degree you've got. I mean some people insist to be called Dr. X if they have a Ph.D. (and in some cultures that's more common). You can have a B.Sc. in biology, or an M.Sc. in EE, or a law degree or no degree and nobody knows. As a manager in a large tech company I didn't even know that for the people I managed. I would usually find out people's background through random talk but it's not information I had access to. I was surprised to find one of the rising stars didn't finish his degree and wanted to take some time off to finish it.
Where it does matter is in the hiring process and especially for juniors and larger companies.
> I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
Sad but my experience as well.
As someone who started being more self-educated (I did learn a lot of theory myself) and only later finished my degree (started, dropped out to do some real work, came back much later) I do think a good CS program teaches a lot of important things. Most importantly the ability to learn and understand research in this area. Not all the specific things you're going to learn are going to be applicable all the time, some will some of the time, and not having that background at all is limiting. You can learn this without going through the academic system but it's much harder and most people don't and stay stuck in some sense.
Similar story where as soon as someone made a 100k+ offer to me I dropped out of school and never looked back (was making $12/hr at the time).
In retrospect it was not the best choice because college does give you a unique chance to get connections that let you into "the club" and will send you to the upper echelons of FAANG and early retirement.
I always thought I would just become a better and better engineer cutting my teeth at startups and then make the switch, but now it almost feels like you are a career startup engineer or a career big tech engineer, and making the switch is difficult. One is obviously insanely more lucrative, probably 3-5X with the way equity has exploded.
> Similar story where as soon as someone made a 100k+ offer to me I dropped out of school and never looked back (was making $12/hr at the time).
In the very early 90s, at 15 my part time computer repair job was paying a large share of the family rent, and by 17 I had graduated early and was working full time making 60k/yr. I had scholarships but I didn't take them because by 18 I had a customer base and a reputation. I went back to school in my 30s but it wasn't worth it. School is very help for many people and paths, but not all people and all paths.
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.
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.
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.
I go back to the UK every so often for work. Being in EU countries is really weird, because they don't have 'class systems' (like the brits).
Deference is given to your professional title, doctor, lawyer etc.
Every nation that was a heart of an empire still has lingering class issues. I've been told by Swedes a non-commoner last name can absolutely open some doors. Though nothing comes close to the UK, which is closer to Japan in this regard than the continental Europe.
> Every nation that was a heart of an empire still has lingering class issues
What nation on Earth doesn't have class issues?
Nations that didn't have their own feudal aristocracies.
Belgium has a class system. Read up on the death of Sanda Dia, very light punishments since all suspects had well connected parents. Lawyers, judges, doctors, surgeons, business executives, entrepreneurs, bankers, corporate directors, politicians, senior civil servants, police officials.
> 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.
The accent bit happens in the US too, to an extent. Depending on the accent you grew up with, you get different responses from people in professional or professional-adjacent settings if you forget to switch the knob back to the more homogenized vaguely Iowa-sounding GenAm accent. This covers a gamut of other accents - regional or not (NE, aave, southern, val, etc).
But it's not nearly as bad as RP in England from what I gather - for one, a pretty decent chunk of the population would normally grow up with a GenAm accent with no forcing, unlike in England where it's a pretty hyper local <5% of the native population.
I did what is referred to as a “fun MSc” (pretmaster) in The Netherlands. It’s a Master programme that doesn’t require much effort and doesn’t put you in too much debt but does allow you to put MSc behind your name. Some engineering firms (companies that do engineering as their core business) require all applicants to have an MSc. It is how I got my foot in the door.
I have an ME (pretty much MSc). I'm not sure anyone in the US really cares about the degree and I'd never put it beside my name except on a formal resume. I wouldn't say no effort; it took a couple of years.
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).
I guess it depends on what you want out of life too. I did not go to Uni, started my career early and had a very comfortable income my entire 20’s. No debt, travelled all over the world, relaxed freelance contracts. I had a lot of free time and low stress.
Later I joined one of my freelance clients as a co-founder (early 30s), more risky than the FAANG path but we’re on the right path to a comfortable pension.
I wouldn’t trade my life for that of some of my FAANG friends.
Opposite of my experience. I never cared about social networking. I focused only on being good.
Yeah being good is great but... some of the best engineers I have ever met are working at small companies making 150k, while mediocre ones fell into Meta/Google/Tesla jobs during the pandemic hiring frenzy and are now looking at retirement.
If the goal is to be good that is fine, but there is little correlation with salary.
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.
> 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.
> No society can continue like this without breaking down
I wish you were right, but I think you are wrong. This article on poverty in ancient Rome suggests otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_ancient_Rome "Their society may have consisted of a handful of wealthy individuals that made up 0.6% of the population, an army that made up 0.4% of the population, and the poor masses that made up 99% of the populace." I selected Rome because it's my understanding that this is one of the longest lived empires.
The facts for the Roman Empire are not clear, but it looks like massive inequality is the sad default mode for humanity. One might expect that as literacy and information sharing improved, it would be less tolerable by the populace for this inequality to persist. But it seems about as bad as ever. This may be due to the perception that rich people because they "earned" it, despite the fact that it seems patently obvious (to me at least!) that is not the case.
You occupy a very unusual place seeing such extremes of both sides.
I've only interacted with people with that level of wealth in a professional capacity. In my personal life, I know a lot of people who own multiple properties and businesses including some of my own family members but I don't think I know anyone with a private jet. The top of the range I know have big boats and big houses.
I feel like there is a social boundary between the old money and the new money.
The new money tends to be much wealthier and they don't like the old money folks. In theory, they could both talk with each other about exotic holiday spots, fine dining and boating/yachting but there is a different discomfort. And it's not about tech understanding because a lot of children of old money went into tech. I think the discomfort is that the new money folks see the old money folks as spoiled brats... But IMO, this is a result of the new money folks not seeing their own privilege; not granted by daddy, sure, but granted by the system itself.
My view is that nobody earned anything. They were chosen by luck of birth, chosen by a rich friend, chosen by a rich investor, or chosen by algorithm or a combination thereof. Usually based on highly superficial aspects. Their efforts have very little to do with it besides providing plausible narrative cover.
I think you should spend less time on computers, the internet and around tech people, it will blow your mind
Re: movies and elite perspectives, I watched They Cloned Tyrone a while ago and it had a solid "hero movie from a lower socioeconomic class" vibe. I enjoyed the perspective shift and I think it might be a good example of your point.
That movie was far better than it had any right to be.
It all used to be smoking and there are still places in the world where trains and busses have seats facing each other. Having sat in those seats in the past I can tell you that people can still perfectly well not talk to each other ;)
There are cultures (e.g. go to Israel) where random people still talk to each other.
I'm not sure I would call what you observed in Europe privilege. I think you were just an outsider/immigrant from a different culture. Different places have different cultures and it takes a long time (if ever) to acquire them. You'll be treated differently if you don't have the right social cues e.g.
In places like the US or Canada this tends to be a lesser effect because it's a big melting point.
I know plenty of really rich people (like billionaire or approaching) that aren't that different than most of us (also rich). You don't magically move to some other "circle" just by having money. It's true there are certain "classes"/cliques in different cultures but it's not as simple as has money vs. hasn't.
> 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.
In the USA at least, people in the normal cars aren't "sharing their experiences". They're playing garbage music from their iPhone speakers (technically not allowed - happens anyway), trying to subdue their giggling/crying/screaming children, loudly conversing amongst themselves, etc. It's a zoo.
Not trying to pick apart your post, I liked reading it in general.
100%* prefer almost anything to sodcasting, facetime calls, and tiktok/youtube/mobile games at max volume
*rounded up
> 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.
It's no great mystery. Social interaction is a skill that requires practice and effort to develop. Interacting with new people is risky and occasionally painful. Back in the day the punishment for not developing that skill and taking those risks was boredom, but nowadays you can just crawl into your cell phone to while away the hours.
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.
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.
> Then I joined the crypto sector and the people there seemed almost mentally deranged
so better than expected then
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.
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
Battenberg -> mountbatten
I think that is what op meant.
> 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
I'm german and I was at aldi yesterday, one guy was super nice and happy and wished another a good day, and the guy, including us were surprised how nice he was and he said "we need more nice people in this country". Mind blowing. Taking the plane from croatia to germany is also funny, because there is a grey filter as soon as you enter the airspace
My experience has been quite the opposite. I have done far better than my peers and have less debt. I wonder which country you're in?
This tracks for me because I am a developer with a 4 year degree in a field completely unrelated to CS and I have never felt any of the stigma or othering from my coworkers on the measures you described.
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.
If we're speaking realistically and not idealistically, then the primary point of a degree is as an investment in a job market. You go deep in debt with the aim of getting many times what you invest in return. But in the case of a bad job market, you're investing serious money (especially in modern times) for what may not ultimately pay off. And even if LLMs don't reach their viable potential, they're still likely going to significantly depress wages/employment for many forms of knowledge work, making a degree even less valuable.
I went to a top 10 university, but won't be encouraging my children to go to university at all, nor will I strongly discourage them. But I will make it clear that it is a choice with pros and cons, and in modern times I personally think that the cons outweigh the pros. Of course if they want to do some form of engineering then it will probably be necessary, but there's lots of wild careers like underwater welding that make big $$$, are fun/physical, highly skilled, and you get paid to learn instead of going 6 figures in debt before you even enter the job market. And it's something that will always be needed, everywhere, and isn't going anywhere.
And the reality of life is, like the article says - where you start is not where you end. Once you get your foot in the door pretty much anywhere, your formal title often quickly becomes much less relevant than the skills you have.
Only around 1% or less of graduates from top schools (the Ivy League, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc) end up with 6 figures of debt. In the Ivy League about 80% graduate with no debt. At top non-Ivy League schools average debt ranges from about $13k (MIT) to around $30k (CMU).
Even when you expand to include all schools instead of just top schools, 6 figure debt is rare. Average is about $27k for public universities, $34k for private non-profit universities, and $40k for private for-profit schools.
If someone has 6 figure debt from school they odds are overwhelming that it is from law school or medical school.
I wonder how many excellent students from non-rich families who could easily get into a top school for low cost or even free don't even bother applying because they have heard that myth of widespread 6 figure debt?
Those numbers are wrong. Here [1] are the latest data from the government. The average debt is $40k across all borrowers for Federal loans. Federal loans are about 90% of all loans, so you can easily bump that up to $45-$50k after also factoring in private loans. And most of that lending is done at predatory rates, even from the government, with the average well above 6% for undergraduate loans, and significantly higher for loans beyond that. So you're looking at $45k debt with compounding interest at 6%+ rates in the average case. And the average case is obviously not people going to higher end and more desirable institutions, where the degree is going to be much more valuable, but the debt is going to be much higher.
The reason debt is low at the most elite institutions is in part because the student body comes from disproportionately wealthy families and in part because most/all of these schools offer tuition free learning and other non-loan assistance for students from "low-income" families. At MIT "low-income" is defined as less than $200k. Any student who's viably able to be accepted to such institutions would be well aware of such things, but 99% aren't - so it's largely just as irrelevant as their debt figures.
[1] - https://studentaid.gov/sites/default/files/fsawg/datacenter/...
> 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.
Not if the baseline assumption is that the value of a degree continues to go down and you could've climbed the ranks of plumbing instead of getting a white collar degree.
As someone who got a Comp Sci degree from a good school and who worked at FAANG right out of school, it seems like this is all that matters to companies looking to hire me.
You still need to leet code and memorize the system design script lol
Hi, can you elaborate, I don't think I understand what you mean.
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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.
All of my professional jobs have been contingent on background checks and validating (to some degree) the things I put in the record. If I say I have a degree, they call to verify. They called to verify work history, although not being able to reach previous employers wasn't a deal breaker. I don't think just claim you have a degree when you don't works.
If you have a degree from a 'good school', that gets you some credibility by itself, but mostly a 4 year degree says 'this person can commit to doing difficult things without an immediate payoff for around 4 years' which is a valuable thing for employers.
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.
Becoming a professional software engineer without a Comp Sci (or overlapping engineering degree) was a bad idea for the reasons you mention.
I made it 15 years on mostly willpower earning millions of dollars, but never worked for a FAANG in any capacity, was unemployed (and even homeless) for different stints starting out, and to this day still get asked why I don't have a CS or engineering degree.
And a Haiku-powered Claude Code could now probably one-shot most of the stuff I have ever banged my head on as hard as I could to figure out.
I am just reflecting on the past though. What will make you "successful" then won't be what makes you that now.
I respect you. To be honest, I still haven't found my footing. Most of what I earned was squandered paying off debts from being scammed, and my work is irregular. And as you said, the game is always changing, the rules keep shifting. I feel anxious, but reading the words of a senior like you makes me feel better.
I lived in a 3 pyeong (about 100 sq ft) space for three years (I wasn't homeless, so I had it better than you). Still, I'm grateful that now I have a small 8 pyeong (about 260 sq ft) space. Thank you for sharing your experiences and emotions.
I want to succeed through willpower, just like you. As you know, most of my coding is done better by AI. Unless it's large scale programming, the work that comes to people like us is usually small scale, handled at the level of specific frameworks.
Nevertheless, I still believe there is a place for me somewhere (though that might be self hypnosis).
Thanks for the comment
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> 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?
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... (note: Latest Release: February 4, 2026, based on data from 2024)
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.
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.
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.
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
>It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally.
From my understanding China operates this way. They supposedly have such an oversupply of software engineers that every company just build all the software they need internally. Now with AI they have supposedly been super aggressive in adopting it that its probably even more of the case that everyone is building most of what they need internally.
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.
Sounds like you are picturing WinForms in your mind (Was so awesome to create forms and ship really customized usable software quickly). Does business software really need to be super pretty?
No definitely doesn’t need to be pretty. My point is more that building and managing this stuff often requires a programmer. It’s not “cool” or cutting edge but it’s a job.
That tends not to be written by software people so we can ignore it even though you are correct.
People who write software are software people lol. A lot of stuff is just old.
Accountants and marketers didn't build the legacy tools teams are stuck with.
Isn't a philosophy also a popular pre-law degree? A lot of these sorts of articles neglect to account for the actual reality of how these degrees are used.
I mean I have both arts and tech and it doesn't magically make you more interesting.
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.
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.
The article mentions this. Unsurprisingly, the CS grads are more likely to get jobs that require a degree.
Philosophy and history majors are for people who have no idea what they want to do. So a decent job in any field is as good as any other.
CS majors are working towards employment in a specific sector, and aren't likely to accept anything else very readily.
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.
> Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry.
In my (admittedly vibes-based) opinion, this is just a result of there being a huge supply of CS grads in this country due to it being popularized as a path to a stable, high-paying job. Those degrees are now more often than ever held by people who aren't necessarily passionate about, or good at, the field.
The signal-to-noise ratio in hiring, therefore, is worse than ever. AI exacerbates the problem, of course. But I don't think this is an existential crisis; I think the market will sort itself out, as those less-qualified entrants leave.
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.
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.
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.
COBOL was mostly outsourced to India, and it's a terrible professional path for anyone in the EU or US, and has been since the Y2K bugs got fixed at the last minute.
(And probably a bad path in India, too, but I have no data one way or the other. It's just that all the excellent Indian devs I know use almost exactly the same tech stacks I do.)
You know that’s not going to happen. Most of us are past the denial stage now, come join us…
Then why did it take Anthropic over a year just to fix the flickering issue in one of their main products when they have internal access to the latest and greatest models?
ThePrimeagen just talked about it on his podcast:
"I Think They Are Lying To You": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfYsSFY4l18
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.
Do you have any evidence that the code quality of OpenClaw is to blame for its decline in popularity?
I would say far more likely is that its creator was acqui-hired and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage.
The reality is that AI is both capable of producing sloppy code and capable of cleaning it up, if directed to do so, just like humans.
And, just like humans, code quality is very rarely the make or break factor between success and failure in business, much less popularity.
In the case of vibe-coded slop like OpenClaw it's not a question of some vague notion of "code quality", it's a case of the software shitting the bed and not working anymore, with no recourse of fixing it. (Neither humans nor LLMs have the context window to analyse and fix tens of millions of lines of code slop.)
> and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage
If OpenClaw wasn't broken it would just use a standard token API.
But see above - as software it is fundamentally broken and unfixable.
And since big-name companies will be dealing with this, nobody will get blamed for not seeing this train barreling down the tracks towards them.
I sure hope you're right
I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent
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.
> 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 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.
Can’t sustain six figure salaries because current prompts are wrong.
I heard prompt engineer is the six figure job of the future
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.
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.
Decades of experience here, and have not worked in over two years. Tell me again how I have nothing to worry about.
Experience does not really matter. What matters is a few shiny corp names and titles in your CV. No-one cares with merit these days
I had a frank conversation with a hiring manager about it.
What he said was even if we hire juniors, juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI.
So basically, today’s juniors are not worth investing in. Until society really sorts itself out with responsibile AI usage in a way that still develops independent professional skills, there is no point in hiring juniors. They will just be a more expensive version of whatever AI agent they use, which can be used directly by seniors anyway.
Companies today do not have to really worry about who replaces the seniors, that will be a problem for newer companies in 20 years or so. In time a solution will arrive naturally.
> juniors using AI are never going to rise to the level of our current seniors who built decades of experience without AI
this does not seem to be an argument for requiring junior employees to focus on using AI tools
thats interesting, the HMs where I work love hiring juniors (who pass the bar) because they are so AI-native
the more experienced engineers can help with setting guardrails and mentorship, but the juniors come unconstrained by priors on how to use ai in creative ways to solve all sorts of business problems.
That just sounds like a good way to end up with solutions like AI agents for parsing a text instead of a deterministic regex.
Juniors have no advantage over seniors in AI skills.
I love how the basic expectation of having a job and the life altering circumstance of not having one factors into this not even a little bit
Not sure what you mean, juniors are a poor ROI these days.
They mean that juniors have bills to pay, too.
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:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney
IEEE Spectrum is one of the many things that is always high on the HN front page, but is never worth reading.
That’s true but often the discussion in the comments are.
Open link. Get hit with corposlop imagery. Close article and go read HN comments.
IEEE has been putting their name on garbage journals and conferences since forever.
This is unfortunately true. There are tons of IEEE spamferences. Which is a shame because there are also good IEEE-sponsored (or co-sponsored) conferences (I find ISCA, Hot Chips + Hot Interconnects, and SC to all be interesting systems conferences, for example.)
However IEEE Spectrum is neither a journal nor a conference - it's the flagship magazine of the IEEE.
My impression of IEEE Spectrum (as well as CACM) is that they still feature good technical papers and content written by domain experts, but they also feature junk/filler "articles" and blog posts written by serial contributors who seem to optimize article quantity over quality. Often the title or topic is the only good part.
Good sleuthing, this really lowers the IEEE's quality in my eyes
This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished.
Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy.
Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly.
[1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...
> a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments
The decline in quality of STEM students/graduates is alarming, but the decline in intellectual quality of students is generalised.
Little did Dodson think he was being prophetic when he wrote satirically of Reeling, Writhing, and the arithmetical operations of Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
[0] _ Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
> many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments
Isn't this just grading on a curve, which has been done probably as long as universities have existed? The key is the instructor making sure a high standard is met (which seems to be the crux of the issue).
Yes it has been in practice for a long time, but it's now being used to push clear fail cases into passing grades just to meet quotas. Prior it was used to adjust for particularly difficult assessments, and was closely monitored.
Good good and good.
Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.
All exams should be verbal. The fact that verbal exams are so rare is because teachers/professors are overworked and (outside of AI) underpaid. Too many students, not enough time.
The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.
There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
> Less competition for me, and "educators" are being punished HARD for their abrogation of their actual responsibilities, which was to teach and give exams.
Universities consist of a wide range of people with different incentives, the lecturers typically (in my experience) have very pure motives. It's the management parts that put pressure to pass students, meet metrics, etc.
> The moment you pull up a powerpoint and start reading off of it, or start assigning homework, you've already failed to implement the traditional liberal arts education that the humanities seems to fawn over so much.
Homework is essentially dead post-LLMs. The lecturer's responsibility is to provide guided learning, but also most importantly to assess each student's attempt to learn.
> There's ACTUALLY no solution to blooms two sigma problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) except for teachers to fundamentally change their responsibilities. More time needs to be spent being intention to every individual student. If that means we need fewer students in universities, so be it. AI will kill the impenitence for higher education anyway.
You'd be surprised how much 1:1 with students there are. One example I'm aware of is CS students getting 4 hours 1:1 for one module per semester - that's a hell of a lot.
What you're ultimately up against is cost per student. The overheads in Universities are enormous. It's usually 40:60:+, so £40k pay, £60k overhead plus research and investment (conference paper, travel, journals, new tools, etc).
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.
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.
Tragedy of the commons. What stops a company taking on the strong junior engineers you just invested time and resources into?
Not a lot, so you should make sure you give them generous raises and other incentives to stay.
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
Why would anyona think Physics degree would be “dead”?
Employment of physicists has had its ups and downs. Academic physics research was impacted by funding, including a draw-down of defense related funding after the Soviet Union collapsed. Also, during my time as a student, mandatory retirement was outlawed, so there was suddenly a drastic reduction of retirements.
The number of people entering graduate study in physics never went down, so the academic career pipeline was flooded with talent. You had to be a research superstar to get a faculty job. I wasn't.
Meanwhile, physics had never really laid out a reliable path into industry. Getting an industry job involved a fair amount of luck. Many physics students became programmers. My first job after grad school was for a company owned by a relative of a fellow grad student, and my ancillary skills in programming and electronics have helped lubricate my resume as needed.
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?
> better compilers, more ergonomic languages
If anything it seems wide deployment of LLMs would go against this. When nobody writes code by hand anymore, who will care about the ergonomics of programming languages? And even if a few do care, how would you get adoption? I expect everyone will just use whatever is already used most.
I agree, it seems like the current most popular languages and frameworks will become ossified, because they have the highest amount of training data. It's hard to see a future where Python and JavaScript aren't the most popular languages to use (assuming LLM-assisted development is the norm moving forward).
LLMs can be pretty conmpetent at languages that have zero training data, at least to the extent that those languages use features/ideas that are familiar. I wrote a toy language/compiler and AI can write code for it competently.
Do you not review the code that LLMs output?
It seems that now more than ever, testing is important. But LLMs love to cheat the tests and make them superficially pass. If you're never reading the code, how do you know changes are reasonable?
I do review, if only whatever I do was the norm for everyone :)
Do you see lots of posts about new compilers and languages and language features on HN in the last year? Maybe I just missed them. I'd love to read more posts like that and fewer about agent frameworks.
Product does what it should and doesn't what it shouldn't?
It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money.
Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this.
I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation.
Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.
If a job is well-paying, there will always be many people going into it for the money. High paying and only people who love it do it are pretty much incompatible.
I would have loved to realize this back in high school, I would have gone into a lower paying field.
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.
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.
Getting a PhD is almost never worth the foregone wages if your goal is to be in private industry. For sure, people should get one if they are interested in research, or specific jobs that are only available to people with PhDs. But otherwise it isn't something to get into half-hearted.
This is only true when you compare the PhD field degree to something like finance where you can make real money at 23 years old. If the alternative is a bs for a path where most people end up going PhD, you will be working for like $20/hr most your life. You will probably be breaking even with what the PhD stipend would have been anyhow and you aren't getting any healthcare benefits.
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.
Philosophy is excellent training in the analytical skills needed for any knowledge-based job. Critically evaluating information, constructing arguments, thinking of counter-examples, etc.
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
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.
highly dependant on school ofc
i went to a top cs school and loved it, it raised the ceiling of what i thought was even possible, coming from a country where cs was not seen as an interesting or desirable job at the time
> who built a product with actual paying users
How could this possibly signal competence? I think it just signals capital and free time.
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.
hmm i dont think any new grad is an expert and knows what they're doing (if im understanding you right)
but the skills we used to look for in new grads are shifting as coding agents make execution easy, a new grad with good business sense is really valuable
All I ask is they are willing to learn to use git decently.
what do you mean? we're hiring new grads because we think they will make the company money. most of our hires are from top schools so they're already proven to be smart
right now most resumes are zero signal because any new grad can whip up an impressive sounding project using ai with zero paying users. but knowing what to build, having good product sense and taste, talking to customers, iterating and not giving up are much more desirable skills
youd be surprised how many new grads with capital and free time have zero business skills
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Related: Do You Really Want That Computer-Science Degree? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418782
There are two things you can get from a degree: 1. Knowledge and skills 2. A network and a reputation
While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.
Computer Science is still useful. It is software development that is made trivial now that software can write software.
Not many people are employed as computer scientists (they are mostly academics) compared to SWEs.
I was making the difference between engineering and development too actually. Building react and using react being an illustration of the difference between an engineer and a dev. It is a spectrum however, that's true.
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!
> 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.
Can confirm (everything down to calculus being called analysis), we also had a surprisingly difficult probability and statistics class.
I had a hard time with probability and stats, although it was way more mind expanding than calculus.
In what way are those undergraduate degrees any less narrowing of scope than a CS undergraduate degree?
> 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.
Isn't it normal to study mathematics in a computer science bachelor program in USA?
That country never ceases to astonish me lol.
FWIW, any accredited CS degree program in the US will have rigorous math and science requirements: https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
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.
Let's check:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www-cse-public/ugrad/curr...
That shows what one university out of thousands does? How does this answer the question in any meaningful way?
They run degree mill programs because their universities are for profit.
Most universities are not for profit at least the ones that are considered any good.
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
USA never ceases to astonish me regardless of the presence of compulsory mathematics courses in computer science programs. I guess you didn't take logic :)
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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
my son asked me just that today - should I even go to the uni. The idea is probably circulating somewhere. It is changing for sure but still important. Maybe he will learn new things. Or old things differently. It's not like education becomes suddenly redundant.
Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.
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?
To twist another saying: "Employers can be short-sighted for longer than I can delay my rent payment."
Why would their rent payment be affected in any way? They aren't a junior
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why aren't doctors or lawyers more like us?
Because they have professional bodies that act as gatekeepers.
Can't really practice medical or legal skills from the comfort of your home on devices everyone has had for 10 years now. Also, unlike computers which must obey every whim of their master, lawyers and doctors deal with humans. Which makes raw skill less important.
Because they like to monetize their worth.
That'd be 200 bucks for an answer.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
>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.
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?
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So you don't care about things that indirectly affect your net worth? Credit score? Your overall health? How many friends you have?
> 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…
Nothing worse than a person who takes for granted all the hard work others put into society while smugly bragging about how they don't care about anyone but themselves.
Have you been formally diagnosed as a sociopath yet?
Ideally you want society to continue to function after you retire unless you plan on jumping off a cliff at 62.
Sure. Why give a shit about anything really.
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!
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.
That worked so well for the finance system finding new Cobol programmers!
I am not convinced the finance system is struggling to find Cobol programmers. They certainly don't seem willing to pay them more on job listings.
When you read an article about a "skills shortage" it's usually more of a pay shortage and/or a terrible working conditions overage.
It is better to be overworked than underworked
Who said it was? It’s in fact more important than ever to know how to read and know how coding architecture works
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First step is denial
Call me biased, but the CS degree always seemed like the “general studies” of computing fields.
The interesting areas involve some sort of domain expertise- medical, physics, civil, electrical, chemical engineering, etc. or even pure math in the case of data science.
CS lacks all of those, including a strong math background.
Sure, for plain “boring” software development, CS is perfectly fine.
But in terms of one’s personal education and career trajectory, why not aim higher?
Algorithm analysis and numerical analysis are nothing BUT math.