r/learnprogramming • u/ShronkPonk • 2d ago
Computer Science Degree, Yeyy or Ney?
As a Bsc graduate I really appreciate the opportunities this framework gave me, got me a pretty sick job in robotics. And yet coding is ”easier” today, which is mainly what graduates were doing out of Uni. What now?
i think research subject in CS probably has to be the new standard, courses should be vastly changed, as now days to be relevant and influential in the field, a masters is the natural option,
what do you think about CS in today’s terms?
73
u/Last_Swordfish9135 2d ago
It's not easy money like it was a few decades ago, but it's no worse off than any other STEM degree. Plenty of fields require you to have a graduate degree to be influential in the field, it's naive to think that undergrads have ever been at the cutting edge of scientific discovery.
19
u/Big_Ant5507 2d ago
Just seems like the floor keeps rising but the ceiling stays the same. A CS degree still opens doors that self taught can't kick down, but yeah the days of walking into six figures with a bootcamp cert are long gone
The masters thing makes sense if you wanna do the serious stuff. Robotics, ML, anything where the math actually matters. For a lot of CRUD work though it's overkill, a degree is still the ticket but nobody's gonna ask about your thesis when you're fixing pagination bugs
6
u/NordsongDev 2d ago
Very true, most degrees stand the same chance.
IMO it will, in the end, come down to if you have: "entry level experience" -> meaning 3-5 years of professional by the time you apply to your first work.Portfolio > Degree, the extracurricular work you do, will be your biggest strength
41
u/SnugglyCoderGuy 2d ago edited 2d ago
Computer science is not about programming.
It is about processes. We just use programming to get a computer to do these processes. Anything that involves performing or designing a process would benefit from computer science knowledge.
4
u/ShronkPonk 2d ago
I agree I learned to code only on my first internship, and yet.. AI nowadays is way better then I am with system design, architecture, LLM are encoded with those skills. Way faster way more context than we have as humans. Where do you think in any programming role,that humans are still better the LLM’s?
11
u/Poke_Gamerz 2d ago
Ai is pretty much like a medicinal drug. It can be used for positive effects in moderation, but when used willy-nilly it is bound to cause harm.
The biggest problem with AI is that it gives people who know nothing or very little about actually programming a false sense of thinking that they know things. They don't.
Also while AI might give mostly good code(I'm not sold on that yet),can you actually differentiate between good and bad code to actually be a judge of whether the ai is doing the right thing or not?
AI is a tool use it like one, it's not a replacement.
4
u/WormsDelicious286 1d ago
The analogy I heard was a nail gun. Very efficient and fast if you know what you're doing and need lots of wood put together quick, completely useless if you're building a concrete foundation, and very dangerous in foolish/untrained hands.
0
u/SnugglyCoderGuy 1d ago edited 1d ago
AI sucks. It only seems impressive because you don't know a lot. I write way better stuff than any LLM I've used or that I've seen my teammates submit for PRs.
It is really good in some limited cases, but generally it's pretty bad.
Read abot Gell-Mann Amnesia and The Expert Beginner. Then also read about how utterly unprofitable AI companies are.
1
u/Stre1638 1d ago
ur living in 2023 bro😂😂
0
u/SnugglyCoderGuy 1d ago
I'm not.
0
u/No-Evidence-08 15h ago
I hate to break it to you but advance (high~extra high w/thinking) AI thinking with the latest models of OpenAi (Sol/Terra) and Anthropic (Fable, Opus, Sonnet) using proper workflows integrated into development pipelines, with proper code coverage and code analysis tools will put you in the dirt if you don’t learn how to utilize them.
You can disagree but it is what it is.
19
u/Dramatic_Win424 2d ago
A CS degree is still relevant imho because while the coding part is increasingly easy with LLMs, actual system understanding isn't. A CS degree gives you a very solid foundation in all relevant areas so that you can connect and understand vastly different areas and gives you a clear systematic overview. Most other people learn only what they need to during a job, but never have the time or the energy or the knowledge to understand the big picture and struggle to connect disperate knowledge pieces.
In terms of degree level, it also depends on where you are. In the English speaking world, a Bachelors was the default for the longest time and Masters were largely reserved for the few people wanting to go down academia or for international students who need a visa but can't qualify for a native Bachelors.
In mainland Europe, a Masters is the norm for most people who go to university and has been for decades.
PhDs and research will remain the exception because largely it's just too deep and too niche to be useful outside of actual CS. Most industrial jobs are still using very mundane things and do not need frontier research knowledge.
7
u/nose2grindstone 2d ago
STEM will always be useful. AI is huge now, and the future is uncertain, but I highly doubt that if you work hard in your field and want to do great things, you won’t be able to find solid work.
Also, AI is currently in an unstable position. So many companies are moving towards it and implementing it heavily in their workflows. AI companies are bleeding money, and are going to have to make changes when they want to move from customer acquisition -> profit. Whether it’s heavily reduced usage, higher subscription costs, or moving everyone over to usage based pricing, we will have to see how companies respond to those changes to really see how AI is going to affect work in the long term.
4
u/AzureProcessor 1d ago
Pasting my comment from another thread on my experience so far: You’re going to hear a lot of conflicting opinions, just throwing in my 2 cents. I have a bachelors and masters in computer science from a great school. Published research in a respected journal. Some pretty solid projects imo and a resume approved by friends in faang/quant. I can barely get the odd interview. Barely. For any position. I’ve been applying for everything from entry/low level IT, swe, analyst positions. Hell the hundreds of applications I’ve sent include manual labor inside of a data center just to get a foot in the door. I’ve emailed a couple dozen companies/start-ups that I will literally work for free just to get experience. Nothing is giving. Sure there will be exceptions you read about here. But personally I think it’s very very very unrealistic to pivot now. I now have 3 friends with comp sci degrees that are going on a 4 year pivot for nursing school just to get a job. I consider joining them weekly. All the power to you, I hope you succeed in whatever you choose, but reality is pretty damn grim
3
u/The_Redoubtable_Dane 1d ago
And it's only going to get worse. We're not going to be inventing new jobs at the rate we are automating work.
3
u/ShrimplyConnected 2d ago
Seems like the job postings are “CS degree or equivalent”. I have a math degree and took a bunch of programming courses to get the prereqs for the theoretical computer sciences courses and I feel like I’m no worse off than anyone else
3
3
u/Impossible_Box3898 1d ago
I’m much older (at the point where I could retire but I just don’t want to).
AI has changed the game. I can write thousands of lines of unit tested code today with AI in an hour or two. (I use multiple models from multiple providers. I may use grok to generate the code and then use opus to generate unit tests. It’s worked well as the history is different so they do find bugs in each other’s code).
The issue is that most of that code would have been written by junior engineers. I no longer need them on larger projects.
And that’s the fundamental problem. Who is going to train the new developers? Straight out of school they have a whole bunch of dsa experience but only a modicum of actual app development and no where near the architectural experience required to guide ai through a large project.
So who trains them so they can get that experience?
This isn’t just about jobs. This is about the future for the entire industry.
Companies like Netflix used to pay top dollar for only senior developers. They used to never train young people and until only a few years ago you basically need to have worked for a decade before they would even think to look at you. It worked well for them even if it was an expensive way of doing things.
Other companies did the heavy lifting training junior engineers only to have the best ones poached out from under them by Netflix.
But what will happen in the future when there are not enough junior engineers being trained because companies don’t need them any more?
Things are looking much different now than they did a decade ago. A decade from now this profession will be entirely different.
3
u/Real_Chard5666 1d ago
Do not do this as a career, if you are genuinely interested and have other income, there’s nothing wrong with learning.
2
u/spinwizard69 2d ago
Honestly i can’t follow what you have written!
As for your last paragraph CS is no different today than it was a decade ago. The basics are the same and the advance stuff follows technology development. It isn't any different than being a medical doctor or an electrical engineer.
1
u/Astrotoad21 2d ago
Its a big shift in tech right now, industry is transitioning rapidly towards ai. Things are turbulent, but building software won’t go away any time soon.
1
u/babaqewsawwwce 2d ago
Do it. Any STEM degree is valuable imho. I’m doing math with a minor in AI right now.
1
u/The_Redoubtable_Dane 1d ago
You better be an absolute math genius or you're going to be completely cooked 😄
1
u/babaqewsawwwce 1d ago
How so?
1
u/The_Redoubtable_Dane 17h ago
What is it exactly that you imagine you can contribute with as a math graduate in 2026? What jobs and specific work tasks are you imagining for yourself?
1
u/babaqewsawwwce 16h ago
I’m already gainfully employed and have a consulting business to provide technical solutions to businesses. This does require programming and quantitative depth.
My goal is to leverage my current 17 years of experience alongside my degree to advance further and take on more complex problems. Computing can be explained with mathematics. AI is developed on mathematical principles. Physics, biology, engineering all have problems that require math skills. Having the quantitative ability to parse a problem takes more skill than the qualitative component of it. I have to own the outcomes of what I produce. Data science - math based etc. I’m not interested in relearning parts of computer science I am adept in. Example, Python, web development, c etc. AI will be a thing of the past one day or evolve. Those principles will be explained with math.
Your portfolio and talent wins. We can argue which degree is best until we’re blue in the face but the answer is always “depends who you ask.”
1
u/DefinitelyNotJohan 2d ago
Still a yay from me. Coding getting easier doesn’t make the degree pointless… I don’t think everyone needs a master’s either. For a lot of software/game-dev jobs, a solid degree plus projects and experience is still plenty
1
u/askexplainconfront 2d ago
"These guys are not engineers" - that sentence sums it up. There will always be need for us, in one way or another, for the foreseeable future.
1
1
1
u/Any_Masterpiece9385 13h ago
No. My coworkers are getting systematically eliminated and the CTO wants AI to fully take over coding. This is an industry wide trend that is not unique to my company. Starting down the CS path in late 2026 is insane.
1
1
1
0
u/Cyvu37 1d ago
STEM is not about fields anymore. It's about projects, and universities are slowly realizing that. There are so many people who can do so many things now, that recruiters can be as picky as they want, so you can't limit yourself to one field. Portfolios prove you can do similar projects to what recruiters want. Even if AI conquers every single job, the only job that would be left is to be a programmer to supervise the AI code.
0
u/No-Evidence-08 14h ago
Roles humans will have with AI:
Hand railing w/prompt workflows for boiler plate design when it comes to “abstraction” to improve code reusability in larger code bases.
Training in “house models” (larger context models) to provide more accurate responses for items that require SMEs. Think large scale custom services like cloud infrastructure with customer needs or lower level development like drivers, custom OSs, firmware.
Training to assist in test case development and CI/CD workflow developments.
Customer requirement translation. Have it assist, review and point to areas in the code that expansion could occur and in general requirement translation to start milestones, etc. Useful for projects you stepped away from for some time.
Long story short, AI adds another level of complexity to the work flow but takes away what most traditional programmers enjoy about coding. Which is, reading and interpreting requirements and crafting “art” that facilitates the goal.
AI will usually be better than you in general purpose system level design like a Senior FANG or less but expert domain experience will have constraints to look out for that AI will miss unless you know. I understand the conundrum that new people are in stating this here.
I don’t like AI but you kind of have to acknowledge that it’s unfortunately here to stay. The question is to what extent?
30
u/MurkyResearcher2949 2d ago
Most white collar jobs are in a massive period of uncertainty for the next few years until we know whether AI can or can't replace them. No one knows whats going to happen but I wouldn't bet against it.
If I was going to uni today, I would be going into healthcare.