72
My Parent doesn't want me doing CS, or CE, because they feel the job market will disappear come 7 years. (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/cs_career_questions@programming.dev
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

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

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 10 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

We are already 3 years into 'in 3 months AI will replace all programmers'.
The only reason why there is even such a big AI hype in CS in the first place is the nearly endless demand for software. It does not matter how horrible your software is, as long as it kind of does something, there is a demand for it. And all AI can do is satisfy this "demand" for small scale, broken and unmaintainable software. Everything that is a bit more sofisticated needs a human software developer.

Will this change in 7 years? Maybe, but not because of the current AIs since they have plateuaued. All we do is increase training massively or let the models run on stronger/more hardware for "better" results. Both of these ways increase costs massively but "result" improvements are marginal.

So unless there is a big new technological discovery, which can happen in any field at any time, AI will not replace software development jobs.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    This just isn't true anymore. AI coding capability at the top end has made a real qualitative leap in just the last 6 months or so and is actually very good at writing high quality code, if managed correctly.

    I was extremely sceptical about it until recently but the results are now becoming consistent enough that it can't be denied. Most of the devs I know (almost all AI sceptics to begin with) have come to the same conclusion.

    edit: Downvotes without comment? If people disagree with me by all means point out where I'm wrong.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent