Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

How has the curriculum changed? What are the professors telling their students to explain why the course they enrolled in deserves the rigorous study? Are the students buying it - and is it matching reality at the end of the course? It’s hard to get a feel from the continuous pendulum swing of “it’s dead” to “it’s better than ever”. As much as I am scared with my own career, I am worried about my nephews’. What advice to give them, when all their life I have advocated for CS as a fulfilling career choice? P.S. I have pivoted to best time to be solopreneur. “But what about uni then?”

I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools.

Two points of anecdata from that experience:

• The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent.

• The professors do not know how to adapt their capstone / project-level courses. Core CS is obviously still the same, but for courses where the goal is to build a 'complex system', no one knows what qualifies as 'complex' anymore. The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era. The capabilities are also advancing so quickly that any answer they arrive at today could be stale in a month.

Interesting that the algorithmic finance firms are still recruiting. Perhaps they still need a pipeline of rigorous thinkers, or are unwilling to cede significant influence over P+L to llms.

currently in cs masters program at ivy: i think it's like thinking that pure math study evaporated when we made the calculator, or that we suddenly shouldn't have bothered with Riemann sums because of the FTC. ai to coding is much the same in the sense of moving to a layer of higher abstraction. i don't think cs curriculums have to change drastically to accommodate this; however, the onus on not getting it wrong increases since ai produces probabilistic output. finally, you can have a chat bot do all the work for you to your own detriment i suppose...

I've been doing programming and sys admin as a hobby for a long time and only recently started my bachelors in compsci, and I'm sad to have waited so long as almost everything has been infested with ai to some degree.

The curriculum in my university mostly didn't change. Most CS topics didn't change through ML research.

The main change was in testing/exams. There was a big effort towards regular testing assisted by online tools (to replace the system with one exam at the end in favor of multiple smaller tests). This effort is slowly being winded down as students blatantly submit ChatGPT/Claude outputs for many tasks. This is now being moved back to a single exam (oral/written), passing rates are down by 10-20% iirc.

Going into CS as a career will be interesting but the university studies/degree are still likely worth it (partly spoken from a perspective where uni fees are less than 500€ per semester). Having a CS degree also does not mean you become a programmer etc. but can be the springboard for many other careers afterwards.

Having a degree and going through the effort of learning the various fundamentals is valuable, regardless of everything being directly applicable. There is also the social aspects that can be very valuable for personal development.

Two points of anecdata from that experience:

• The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent.

• The professors do not know how to adapt their capstone / project-level courses. Core CS is obviously still the same, but for courses where the goal is to build a 'complex system', no one knows what qualifies as 'complex' anymore. The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era. The capabilities are also advancing so quickly that any answer they arrive at today could be stale in a month.

FWIW.

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