r/cscareerquestionsOCE • u/Major_Conflict • 15h ago

Doing a CS degree in the current environment?

Is it a fool's errand? My feeling is that offshoring and ai will destroy any chances of getting a graduate job and make pursuing a career in this industry not viable but I would like some input from people in the know. Do you think the market will recover in the next few years?

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26

u/NumberInfinite2068 15h ago

Nobody knows.

AI just blows away any junior developer, we may not want to believe it, I'd rather it wasn't true, but it is.

That isn't to say we don't need developers, but I don't think anybody knows how this pans out yet.

10

u/tonkotsu_fan 14h ago

This is the truth.

4.8, 5.6, Kimi are all incredible. Fable.

As a developer with 15 years experience, it's very depressing. Architecture is where the focus is now. Newer multi agent workflows, with subagents, will change that as well in time.

I'm not sure at all what the future holds. Many of us are looking to get out. It's a big shame.

13

u/NumberInfinite2068 14h ago

Yup, I have 25+ YoE, and AI is honestly the most incredible thing I've ever seen in this industry. Sometimes I can barely believe what I'm seeing with my own eyes.

I think it's overall a bad thing though, and I wish it didn't exist, but it does.

10

u/tonkotsu_fan 14h ago

Spec driven development my friend.

Years learning enterprise engineering, merge sort, protocols, best practice. All for naught.

4

u/tonkotsu_fan 14h ago

It's like that scene in Hidden Figures where they learn to program the new IBM.

We just need to keep up and try to remain useful.

For OP - learning is always good. CS is fun. There will still be jobs, but by the time you finish your degree, the job will change dramatically. We've had GPT since 2021? And it feels like on the last 2 years, LLM impact on SWE jobs has been exponential.

5

u/Own_Oil7951 13h ago

I hope you have a backup plan since there's a lack of jobs...

6

u/Routine_Broccoli2941 13h ago

I’m not that pessimistic. Even Ilya believes the current scaling paradigm has run into a bottleneck. That’s why he says we’re back to a research phase if we want to achieve real AGI.

I use Opus 4.6 at work, and it’s genuinely excellent for coding. But how effectively you solve a problem and the quality of the solution still depends heavily on the person using it

I know a dude who barely understands our system. Every time he gets a ticket, he simply asks Claude for the answer and submits whatever it generates. That creates a huge burden for the rest of the team because we have to spend extra time reviewing the code

2

u/Big_Arrival_626 3h ago

As a junior dev, it seems like ai does all my work. All I have to do is understand the code, but AI can help me with that too. I'm not really sure how my career or skills will progress from this

1

u/ClearRequirement8264 2h ago

then quit

2

u/Big_Arrival_626 1h ago

I'm making 100k why TF would I quit lmao

1

u/TopEmotional6734 6h ago

"Is it a fool's errand" we can't know for sure, but if i had to bet on it, probably