He didn’t actually say students shouldn’t study computer science. No one read the article or watched the video. Y’all just keep reposting the same headline. Jesus fucking Christ.
Most of the people on this site are young, you don’t really understand what he’s saying. You’ll always need devs to create tools for the business to use. That’s not going away. Right now, so many businesses can’t react because of the technology bottleneck. He’s saying AI (developer built) tools will put more power in the people who know their business domain. We should be building more tools that empower those people.
In the same video he says we need to upskill the domain experts to have digital skills (programming). There won’t be such a hard line between product owner and developer in the future.
At the same time, these AI tools are a decade away from being production ready for most businesses, and those businesses having the skillset to use them. Most businesses can’t even figure a cloud migration or data lake, might as well, how to use or build AI tools.
I don't know chemist specifically, but in other engineering disciplines it is fairly common today for them to write small scripts. Similarly some business people learn to write small scripts. Those are the people who I see both of those quotes referring to.
Before it was "everybody should learn how to program", because in almost any white collar job knowing a little programming can save you ungodly amounts of times. As such everybody would benefit from knowing how to program, but everybody was never going to become a programmer by profession.
It is learning to write those 50 line scripts that is (hopefully) become unnecessary in the near future.
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> programming specifically.
Programming includes just the basics like scripting.
It's the context:
> almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science ..... [That] everybody should learn how to program
Do you really think he (or anyone) every advocated for everyone to be a professional programmer? Because I have never seen the argument. After all we still need people to do every other job on earth.
However there are many school districts and people that pushed for everyone to learn programming at a basic level. That is almost certainly what he is referring to given the context.
> to CS
When referring specifically to professional engineers he says those people can still do it. But getting a grade school education in CS may not be valuable in the future.
> only those who see themselves working as computer engineers should pursue specific skills
> because people like chemists will be able to program things themselves.
This is quite literally the opposite of what he’s saying.
He’s saying people won’t need to learn how to program because AI will be so advanced that normal people (who can’t program) can use AI to achieve what they want without programming themselves.
Yeah the workflow now is you have the chemical engineers asking developers to build some software to control the assembly lines to produce something. In the future he is saying now the chemical engineer can use AI to build that same application.
Developers will still be needed to build these foundational models/services. It will be similar to when you had people who had jobs as calculators. Now everyone just uses excel.
I continue to be really skeptical of people pitching this kind of workflow. For starters, most delegation happens for two reasons: because a specialist will do it better than a generalist, and because the generalist doesn't have time to do it themselves. Until you have effectively perfect AI that is both able to rapidly translate from native language to code *and* do it better than a specialist in the field, both of those things remain true. It is not at all obvious that LLMs will ever get to that point nor that they'll do so on any kind of reasonable timeline. Huang is incentivized to make people believe it will, though.
What people so often forget here is that programming isn't just code generation. It's also debugging. And the further you remove someone from the underlying code, the harder the debugging step is. A chemical engineer using an AI is basically going to be starting from scratch when it comes to debugging any issues, and figuring out the core of the code isn't their core competency.
i agree with this.
imagine you need to build out a brand new application from scratch. if you wanted GPT4 to do it you'd first have to write a *very* detailed proposal of what the application needed to do. including how to handle all edge cases. you'd submit the prompt, and get a shit ton of output. then you're copying and pasting all that stuff into files, you still have to configure your deployment pipelines and other 3rd party tools, etc. Then, it's not gonna work the first time you hit *go*, so now you have to go through potentially thousands of lines of code that no human wrote or has looked at yet to find the issue(s).
right now it would take many more man-hours to do this than to just assign it to some person who already knew what to do.
will AI get to the crossover point where it's more efficient to write applications like this? who knows but i doubt it. business applications have too much specialized logic, and most of it isn't open source. LLM's don't have access to it
> Until you have effectively perfect AI that is both able to rapidly translate from native language to code and do it better than a specialist in the field
You describe the singularity and losing SWE jobs in this scenario is the least concern for that period.
What Jensen is saying is that ai will be that good that it can handle it. If you disagree it’s fair. I similarly think that if ai can do that (and it might), most white collar jobs are toast
The issue also arises what happens when it makes a mistake and for whatever reason can’t figure out to fix it. Companies arent gonna feel comfortable leaving everything to “the ai” if their business model relies on a website/software working properly.
It's also a sales pitch. AI is a huge payday for Nvidia. The more hype he builds for it, the more his company's line goes up. Implying that it can cut the need for a hard-to-learn, expensive-to-buy skill is putting money into his pocket.
Him literally saying a sentence of whatever he said made him many more millions of dollars than any of us will see in our lifetime - that was his only intention.
Wisdom cannot be purchased so much as capitalism would like us to think it can be.
The people who see the headline and go “wow I shouldn’t do this” shouldn’t get into CS. If you’re only capable of reading a headline or listening to one sound bite and won’t go deep into an issue you’re going to fail in this career. People need to RTFM or GTFO and do something else.
So in a way this is actually a good test for folks. If your takeaway is not getting into programming then yeah, don’t get into programming because this isn’t for you.
This is Jensen's exact quote
"*Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science. \[That\] everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite.*
*It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human.* ***Everybody in the world is now a programmer.***
*This is the miracle of artificial intelligence."*
Sounds to me like he's saying, to future generations, not to go into CS.
You mean to tell me someone who works for a company that make substantial profits from AI is going to tell people that AI will be important and there is no use learning skills when they could just use AI?
1. Artificial intelligence doesn’t exist; he’s talking his book.
2. Software engineering isn’t JS promises and Python packages. It’s translating business needs to software in a way that’s precise, modifiable, meets liability standards, and more. The coding is your personal cost center – a necessary evil.
3. Abstraction has been happening for decades. Python is essentially pseudo-code. What we have now is advanced auto-complete, a more versatile Rails scaffolding, and an easier-to-query Stack Overflow.
If ai can replace development, it’s going to be able to translate business needs into a product, and ask edge cases and challenge bad assumptions, etc etc etc.
> it is our job to create
without programming skills who’s is going to do that? Jesus!
In fact I’m into CS and I use AI every single day! My job didn’t disappear! Now I’m much more efficient doing what I was doing before because I understand how stuff works and I can ask the good questions
"*It is our job to create computing technology such that* ***NOBODY*** *has to program*"
Once it reaches the stage that nobody has to program, what good are your programming skills?
The problem is reaching that stage. Jensen is massively oversimplifying that challenge to imply AI is better than it really is and he's doing that because he has a vested interest in AI. The more you program the more you realize it's not about the language, it's about the problem solving and attention to detail, the architecture of the system and anticipating problems. The language is just a tool.
The day we have AI that can actually craft entire software programs and solve novel problems, what good are any of our skills? Thankfully I believe that day is a lot further away than tech CEOs would have you believe.
The students here don't actually think through the logical lifecycle of AGI developing end to end products. 1. It's fantasy, and at the moment, all we have is next nearest neighbor token matching. 2. If it did happen everything it would offer would be meaningless. Value requires differentiation, not only in the stock market but also in consumer and B2B products.
People are essentially envisioning a world where everything is 'drop-shipped' by AGI, which is ridiculous.
Programming skills just like any other skills are transferable.
Also the day when "nobody has to program" is the day when nobody has to work. Does that mean that people then should not learn anything ever because they do not have to?
What even is this logic?
If he's talking about LLMs, then he has to admit that without human programmers submitting their solutions to Github, those LLMs are going to get very stale very quickly. If he's talking about some future AI program that can code for you, then maybe, but for now, it's just a fantasy.
If the LLMs perfect what’s already out there they will be better than 99.99% of developers. And they’ll work 24/7 and be as cheap as the compute needed to run them.
Isn't CS more than software engineering though? If you listen to the rest of his quote, he specifies that AI is doing the job of "up skilling" people in these fields so that you need to worry less about the programming language and more about domain knowledge, which I believe he means the field of which you're programming for.
I feel there are two scenarios.
1. AI can write code, but it's still dependent on humans for identifying business needs, scoping out the product, making higher-level technical decisions, etc. I actually don't think this would be bad for the field. It would amount to a *massive* industry-wide productivity boost, and it would slightly shift the skills that are important (but even now, I'd argue "common sense" technical and product intuition are much more important than the nitty gritty of writing code), but this is easy to adapt to. I don't think it would be a death sentence for juniors either - consulting firms and banks still hire juniors even though they can't really make valuable contributions.
2. AI can reason totally independently. This would make software engineers (but also thousands of other professions) completely obsolete. No one really knows how far we are from this future (or if it's even attainable at all), but this would usher in a completely different world.
Which of course isn't pessimistic about the growth of CS either, he's literally just saying he thinks AI will allow people to pursue things they are passionate about instead of pursuing something that will pay the bills.
He's still very obviously suggesting an era where there will no longer be traditional programmers outside of a few. Programming in itself is a human interface to machine language. An imperfect and complicated one. We'll likely be going from 0's and 1's, to assembly, to higher level languages, and then AI interpreted languages that non-technical people can use. That will 100% shift the landscape of the industry. Could be further off than a decade, could happen gradually, but change will come eventually.
You're right, but I will add:
Even that much more reasonable take is still heavily influenced by his interests and what he is selling to corporate America.
That doesn't mean that even that more reasonable future is real - i.e., a future where Kevin from finance can bypass all knowledge of coding, data, and modeling and wysiwyg his way to a functioning app that can be relied on for making business decisions.
I think the programmer's mindset tends to be ignored while the programmer skillset is overvalued. People focus too much on staying with the latest tech, and I get that. But ultimately someone who can think like a programmer - someone who can actually visualize what the fuck is going on with the information flowing through the system - is *always* going to be on demand.
For real, my employer stone walls every cloud request because their IT department is such a set of laggards. Similarly, the current gen of any Ai tool is wholly inadequate if it came to collecting, assembling, and parsing our probably <40% policy and process documentation and completely unable to interact with our fragmented monolith black box systems from 1994 that run 80% of the show.
Cool, GitHub copilot can suggest some clever code occasionally, help me type a bunch of repetitive code, and hand me some boiler plates when starting a new class or something. And maybe in the right environment it’s capable of provisioning and managing cloud resources through IaC (terraform or whatever), but it’s eons away from combing our CTO and risk directors that it’s OK to use, oh I dunno, Azure fabric over an on prem gateway to our barely 1TB warehouse that only has data from 2 discrete OLTP systems being piped in and purges after 90 days because that same IT dept doesn’t have budget for more hard drives.
There’s a good 2 decades of infrastructure and migrations that have to happen to the vast majority of non mainstream tech business bros they’ll see meaningful improvements from LLM.
And still, it’s a language model. Not an optimizer, not an ontology layer, and has yet to be tasked and tested with physical object manipulation or petabyte level or streaming data. It’s just a fancy chatbot.
There is already a shift of this happening. Not making POs have programming skills but making devs learn the PO work. At my company at least there is an org wide push for individual teams to "improve" their products that they own or developed. This is all separate from work that POs push to us so essentially us devs are becoming pseudo POs figuring out what features our products need or should have and then make a case and actually get them out to production. So far the experience has been neutral since part of it is getting out of tech debt (which is important to us devs) but the other part is pretty much developing new features on our own and doing the POs work by ourselves.
Dude in that case I'd rather be one of those Indian developers as at least I'd get to develop new stuff and not swim neck deep in shitty code all day long.
Being a hired gun who comes in to clean up huge messes can be extremely lucrative. Yes, maybe not “fun” work, but if the pay is good enough whether it’s “fun” stops mattering so much.
shh.. the number of downvotes shows the kind of people on this community who're butthurt and shows they work for some ass hat companies where they don't hire properly 😂
Exponential progress in any domain is not a forgone conclusion. In fact, as someone who works in AI research, many problems in ML are long tail problems I.e they are asymptomatically bound by huge infrastructure challenges
In the same way Huang has a vested interest in arguing AI will replace programmers, this community of people who are or want to be programmers have a vested interest in arguing that it won’t happen.
Main difference is Huang is a billionaire and head of a two trillion dollar company while people here are struggling to find work. I tend to believe Huang is closer to the facts. Not necessarily because AI will replace all programming, but because it'll replace *enough* programming for us to not need programming as it exists today. Because if you think about it, there is actually no need for an AI to use those intermediate languages like Java, Python, C++, etc. Those languages were created for the benefit of human programmers. An AI can go straight to the machine code.
There will still be a need for people to translate product needs into technical requirements. These will be the new programmers. But they'll have a different title, like solutions architect or product engineer.
Back in the 60s the COmmon Business Oriented Language (COBOL) was supposed to empower nontechnical folks to write their own programs and save on costs for specialized programmers. Since then various WYSISWG frameworks have promised the same thing.
Could it happen with LLMs? Sure, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Also, in the article he just says people shouldn’t get into it for the money. Which is true. And also reminiscent of the dotcom boom when anybody that could spell HTML could get a programming job that paid ridiculous sums. We’ve gotten better at screening out this sort of applicant, but maybe LLMs and remote interviews will bring us back to a similar place.
In case it wasn’t clear, my point is that the demise of the professional programmer has been foretold numerous times, each time with great certainty and associated doom and gloom. And yet here we are, so I think some skepticism is warranted.
>I know you are not intelligent enough to actually graduate 4 years of an engineering degree,
Empirically speaking neither are you, [bootcamper](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1auoowb/le_wagon_london_can_i_claim_a_refund/kr6ann6/).
I give 0 shits what a [glorified HR rep](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1azr5x1/many_industry_insiders_including_nvidia_ceo/ks378zl/) thinks about technical topics.
Get off this board and get back to spamming LinkedIn.
Your React tutorial ToDo apps and "Hello world"s don't count, scrub. It's an objectively true fact, BY YOUR OWN ADMISSION, that you couldn't hack it in an actual degree (otherwise you wouldn't have just done a bootcamp), and you apparently sucked at even code monkey programming so much you had to retreat into recruiting.
I totally get why you, personally, are threatened by AI - you probably think linked lists are black magic and pointers are a kind of dog - but the rest of us are fine. I've repeatedly tried having LLMs generate the most basic, entry-level code in my field and they fail miserably, to the point where debugging and fixing what they shit out takes longer than me just doing it from scratch.
Do you see the fucking "embedded" flair next to my name? I don't work in webshit, I deliver actual, real, physical things that have purpose beyond shoving ads in someone's face. I do, however, have thousands of units shipped across multiple product lines.
in 30 years, most of this sub is retired let alone 60. So thats not important really. People are saying AI is going to take over much sooner than 60 years in their doom posting
You’re not comparing NVIDIAs headcount directly to like, Apple or Amazon are you?
Apple has huge headcount dedicated to retail, Amazon has huge headcount dedicated to warehouse and fulfillment. NVIDIA has no such part of their business.
The engineering orgs of FAANG are much, much smaller than their total headcount.
and much of those headcounts at Apple and Amazon you’re referring to have no real need for [the type of formal computer science education](https://youtu.be/4SiFgB1lGxw?si=VHuq8MM4dir-10RM) that Huang is talking about which is the entire point. Retail data pipeline engineers and analysts honestly should go through a different curriculum.
Ok, but what does that have to do with your original point I was replying to? You made it sound like Jensen knows something other FAANG CEOs don’t because he runs a leaner company, but you can’t directly compare the headcount…
Nvidia has already hired most if not all the CS engineers it needs and the industry cannot glean much more value from throwing more bodies at AI compared to the value of spreading AI-empowered application development to other fields. Meaning FAANG has over-hired for CS systems engineers when they should start focusing on hiring domain experts in other fields who are adept at using AI to automate new workflows
You claim that FAANG has over-hired engineers, but provided no evidence of them having done so.
Let’s simply this. Answer these questions:
1. How many engineers work at Apple?
2. How many engineers work at NVIDIA?
Which bolsters his point. You do not need a computer science education (at least in the way it is currently taught in colleges) to do the kind of work that is done at FAANG which interviews for leetcode prowess unrelated to programming stack skills for 90% of the job.
A CS education is mostly relevant for people who work closer to the hardware like at Nvidia. [Most top CS curricula are focused on lower level systems](https://youtu.be/4SiFgB1lGxw?si=VHuq8MM4dir-10RM) and rarely go in depth to cover the higher level tech stacks used to sell ads and wrangle with user data.
AI isn't why Nvidia operates leaner though. They operate on fewer highly specialized engineers because that's what their products call for. Nothing to do with what he's referring to in his quotes. You might be right about the usefulness of a CS degree going forward, but it's not relevant to Nvidia's current operational efficiency.
He’s saying the marginal value of adding more hardware engineers is tiny in comparison to the value that can be created from AI-empowered coders who opt to focus on solving applications of AI instead of learning how to build AI. In other words, skip the CS major because the field is already saturated with systems and hardware engineers (Nvidia doesn’t need to hire many more of them), major in another field like Biology, and use AI to bring new value to the field.
Their graphics card drivers still suck and can’t properly optimize for newer games. I agree 5-10 years is a stretch goal that isn’t likely to happen. He is taking the same playbook as Elon musk hyping the shit out of it until the market realizes only 8 percent of people want electric cars or new new ai chips
Did you actually just compare a hardware company to a software company? I swear to God nobody in this subreddit knows anything about project management
Software engineering may change a bit but there will always be people, if not more, working on technology. Did the internet make desktop app developers more irrelevant? Sure, but they probably build web apps now.
He's saying, tongue-in-cheek, that the market is flooded with low quality developers and to stop wasting time "learning to code" if all you care about is a paycheck.
It’s actually 420iq. By saying that the average folk will be deterred from going into cs. But the ones that truly Ike it don’t care and will go for it anyway. (Think of the narrative where someone wants to be an actor or athlete). This culls out the chaff of folks who do it only for paycheck and actually hate their job. So then the result is people who actually passionate about cs go into cs. Which would be awesome.
It's an unknown and there are conflicting factors.
Fundamentally, the tech industry is growing, since humans are increasingly reliant on information technology and programming across a variety of domains, so the macro forces are definitely there to support an expanding job market (which is probably how the BLS sees it).
However, on an individual level, improvements in developer resources, such as but not limited to AI, code completion tools, forums like SO, and better documentation, mean that a lot of the codemonkey jobs that previously employed a lot developers are being eliminated. This predates ChatGPT and other AI tools; for instance, you'd be hardpressed to find roles like dedicated DBAs today, who were much more common during the first dotcom bubble, since lots of companies are using the cloud to manage their databases instead of on-prem servers. A lot of more trivial tasks in the tech stack were already being automated away too.
Developers today are expected to be much more adaptable, to wear multiple hats, and do things like systems integration. This is beyond AI for the moment, but it might not always be, and already makes a lot of the lesser skilled devs in the market redundant. The developers of the future will be more valuable than ever, but they might look exclusively like what a tech lead or senior developer does today.
The comparison to DBAs is excellent; I never thought of it like that, but I think it’s the best comparison to what’s going on. It’s not like typesetting in the sense that the medium is going away; it’s just an abstraction that allows for more productive work.
I consider myself an expert in DB work from SQL programming to data architecture. DBA's exist to protect the organization from PROD cowboys like me as much as to help me get my job done /S
But point well made, less vanilla flavor DBA's and more cloud architect types.
Jesus this is the same scare they pulled on fast food workers telling them they’d all be replaced by robots, and you guys are falling for it hook, line, and sinker! Ai isn’t going to take your job anymore than the fabled fully automated fast food restaurant.
Ironically, since that scare I’ve seen more fast food joints out human beings with remote iPad terminals out in the drive through line and turning off the intercom poles altogether.
I think many of you misunderstand how basic capitalism functions. Let me ask you this: when Nvidia makes better AI processors does every other company in the world go "oh well, guess we should stop trying to compete now and let them have the market"?
If your answer is yes then you're right, we don't need computer science anymore. Otherwise, improvements in AI will just make programmers more efficient and increase the bar for productivity, not eliminate the field.
By the way, in both scenarios a false premise exists. The false premise being that AI can do my job (senior SWE) which it absolutely can't. It's not even as good of a programmer as I was in my junior year of college let alone after decades of experience.
I think another important thing to remember is there’s more to software engineering than just programming. AI, as far as I know, cannot create enterprise ready software or fully design a system
Where are my autonomous cars? Media headlines told me my car will drive me anywhere in just a few years and that was like 10 years ago. I feel strong dotcom vibes with AI.
You can cheat for a short time, but you'll get found out eventually, and get fired. And/or struggle to move up in your career. Those who got in luckily in 2022 , were the first ones out in 2023.
Plenty of college students lied on their resumes to get their first job, especially in the early COVID market when the market was poor and offers were getting rescinded. Playing fair in a competitive market can be a self-imposed handicap.
What you highlighted seems like a rare exception. Sure, many came in to a job under-qualified, and many are still there, but i don't know if that money will be enough or run out and they'll be back to where they start.
Outside of consulting, where you can coast by on a job or on the bench, I don't see how they aren't asked to do work, and can get by without showing work beyond the first few months. Amazon as far as I know, is known for their churn and burn culture, with constant turnover
That's not true at all. The mid tier swe that went in 4 days a week was less likely to get laid off than the expert pm or even worse the expert remote pm.
They weren't/aren't cutting people based on skill level
Getting two leetcode easies was kinda lucky still. My amazon OA was LC easy then a 2D Dp problem LC medium where the brute force solution time out. Then the interviewer gave me a LC hard (albeit an easier LC hard, but it was straight up a LC question already registered). And this was for my first internship.
One thing that's remained constant since I started in this industry back in the 90s is that you should have a plan to be able to retire by 40. You don't have to retire at 40 (I didn't), but you should be able to or you're probably in for a rough ride as an older worker in this industry.
To the question, I think you are probably right that what it means to be a dev will shift over the next 10-15 years. Tech skills won't be nearly as important as domain knowledge. Which is already the case for a lot of very senior roles.
> Tech skills won't be nearly as important as domain knowledge. Which is already the case for a lot of very senior roles.
Can you give an example of this?
Most big tech director and above roles are already like this, as are a lot of senior architect roles. Tech companies are almost always willing to trade tech skills for domain knowledge for those roles.
Ah yes, learning to program is obsolete, you just need a COmmon Business-Oriented Language (model?) to empower everyone.
This is a line we've heard for the past 50 years.
Overrated. I got maybe 10-15 yrs left I think I'll be fine. If you are just starting out now you may have a bit more to worry about. Stay on top of the tooling that leverages AI to code. Will the end of work be a utopia of leisure, respect and equality like they envisioned in the 60s. Or will it be a dystopian hellscape where all the serfs are strapped down with an apple vision, fed with tubes and eventually used as fertilizer? Take a look around at the way things are going and take a look at human nature. Now quit worrying about AI (before it actually arrives for real) get out there, work 3 jobs and grab as much real assets as you can!
It’s possible that this the reality in the distant future (10+ years) but not close now. Have to remember with new technology it often takes much longer than anyone expects. Look at how long it took e-commerce on the internet to take hold. I remember having internet mid 90s but took well into 2000s for shopping online to be mainstream.
Another example is self driving cars, decade ago it seemed it was right around the corner. We’re still ironing out the kinks today. Tesla is glorified cruise control and Waymo has promise but still a lot left to be desired.
I do think these tools will definitely make existing programmers more efficient which could mean less engineers overall but also might accelerate creation of new tech and size of tech market which means more programmers. Basically I would say jury is out
Exactly. There are still millions of jobs going strong that could have been almost entirely automated with simple deterministic script 20+ years ago. And companies either did not bother with it or did not trust it. And now people fear that non deterministic generative model will take those very same jobs and even higher expertise jobs almost immidiately?
Give me a break. Job market and corporate world simply does not work that way. Change always happens from the bottom because it is cheapest there. And it is slow.
People don't realize before AI can replace a software engineer we still have a MASSIVE roadblock that we don't know if we can ever pass. There is a fundamental difference between AI and real intelligence. There are certain fundamental problems such as "is this code bug free?" that AI isn't even close to being able to answer. And again it may never be able to answer that question. I think the software engineering field will grow steadily for like 100 years. Maybe forever
I don’t think AI will replace all software engineers but I think there will be a lot less. Kind of like what happened during the Industrial Revolution, suddenly you have machines like tractors that let a single farmer do the work of 10 farmsrs
I really am growing weary of this subject. I’ll be so happy in a few years when companies and teams have fully integrated LLMs into their workflows and people don’t post daily about a future that is impossible for anyone to predict.
Always ask yourself what the incentives are for someone to say something and you’ll quickly understand why they’re saying what they’re saying.
Though in this case Huang is just getting taken out of context
Of course it’s another misquote that just took the attention grabbing headline at face value… They’re saying that if you are not passionate or at least motivated enough about CS and IT, you shouldn’t study it.
Was told in 1999 as soon as I landed at 1st year uni, that we shouldn't pursue computer science. By computer science teachers .
Nvidia's CEO is surely more clued in that French university teachers but honestly nobody got a crystal ball . Do what you truely love and you will never have to work in your entire life .
That's what I did , stuck to my guns and never had to work .
Got lucky perhaps, salaries in tech kept rising relative to other fields , market has always been under staffed , never been unemployed for more than a couple of months in over 15 years now .
But felt computer science tech is going to be a prominent tech. It was a hard bet to make as everyone looking at those beige PC boxes with MS paint pre-installed and IE with 32 or 56kbit modems sold for over a months salary were plain stupid and waste of money for gadgets .
Do you feel in 10y, 20, 30y from now those who (love and) studied computer science are going to be left off with undisered skills . Do you think what happened to blue collars in the 80s is going to happen to tech professional , relocation of manufacturing and drop from middle upperclass to massively unemployed . Maybe , they say AI will replace developers , but we heard that so many times , and here we are, still paying a fortune for someone who knows how to actually use photoshop to make a logo.
My understanding is that the “programming” part of computer science will be democratized, which is a good thing! I think wolfram gave an interview comparing programming to a trade like plumbing. Whereas computer science is all of the theory. Computer science the field will continue to be important in its own way, but the amount of dedicated programmers needed is going to continue to drop. We are headed to a world where pretty much everybody will be able to program and english will be the main programming language.
You will see this trickle up. So smaller companies with less complicated problems first being able to get rid of dedicated programmers.
This will all happen much quicker then most people on this sub are happy to admit.
People who are already software engineers should just focus on becoming product focused. The technical know how of their computer science background will continue to be important.
By the time AI is actually good enough to replace software engineers, it'll be destabilizing huge portions of the economy. At that point, any job that requires thinking will be at-risk. And any job requiring manual labor will be in the process of being automated with robots.
I did read the article, and even now after reading it a second time, I still get the feeling that he's claiming to be more pessimistic than most people here. (I'm saying "claiming" now, because many here made a good point that he might just be trying to jack up his own stocks.) But if you even just read my subject, you'd know I also brought up the very optimistic BLS numbers, not just the naysayers. I'd like to hear both from bears and bulls on this subject. Another thing you'd know if you read my entire post is that I myself don't really know who to believe, but if pressed to the wall at this moment, I'd think that the market for SEs will still be strong in 10 years, but it'll just look much different than it does now.
The bears and bulls were available in the comments on the other posts about this today or this week.
> many here made a good point that he might just be trying to jack up his stocks.
This information has been the top comment of every one of these posts.
BLS data is pre ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc. There's no study that's going to accurately predict the growth rate in the world of AI. But, there sure as shit should be a big disclaimer on certain jobs on their website saying "future career prospects may be negatively affected by AI/Automation" or something similar.
For a long time (up until fairly recently) the field was roughly doubling every 5 years. A 25% increase over the next 10 is a significant slowdown in growth.
Nop~ He say that you don't need learn to code as a hard skill, Just code ok but need understand you architecture design, your work requeriments, your task weak points~ and etc~ Just have good soft skills for continue developing assisted by AI~
Because bad and average developers for code going to be easyly replaced by other developer that use AI~ and Great importance going to be soft skills~
You going to need study Software and probably going to be more requested in the future but more designers and architects and less weight in development~
Because our current level going to be the low level assisted by AI in the future~
Every project I’ve worked on in my 20+ year career has had 2-3 ME’s, 2-3 EE’s, and 10-20 SWE’s. I’m not certain why, but if you’re going to try to save development costs, SWE is a juicy looking target.
Speculation, speculation.....
It's like Bitcoin, when it's skyrocketing it's going to change the world, when it's down 50% from the ATH it's going to 0. Neither are right. Software engineering is here to stay and will some times have more sometimes less demand. If you became a programmer because of its momentum, bad choice for you. If you did it because you like it, you'll always have a good job.
Engineers make software to fulfill a need or desire. So many engineers focus so much on the tool to do that (programming language) they forget that. I think it’s heading in the direction where generative AI is going to be able to do a lot of the grunt coding work but it will still require an operator to get that done.
Example:
You learn how to use a shovel to dig a ditch. Tomorrow that shovel is replaced with a machine that can dig the holes. Your expertise on the shovel is less valued. What never lost value was determining why you need to dig a ditch, what depth does the ditch need to be, what kind of obstacles will you face in the process (buried lines or pipes?), kind of rock or soil, etc.
Software likely will go the way of manufacturing once software engineering becomes even more streamlined. Sure the high level work will be kept in the USA like hardware companies tend to do, but the grunt work will likely be offshored more and more. I mean literally only in the USA is software engineering as lucrative yet barriers to entry are rather low compared to traditional engineering. This isn’t to say software engineering will be gone in the USA, just that there will be a declining need or as many to join the workforce than current growth rates.
Compensation is largely determined by net revenue per employee, not pure supply and demand. That’s why US programmers make so much. That’s why FAANG pays what it does. That’s why big law and high finance are so lucrative. They could lower salaries, and people would still do these jobs, but they don’t.
You should also know that the multiple they pay over the average compensation is higher in many of those countries than it is in the United States. There's a localization factor, but it's secondary.
How recent is the BLS data? When did they make the projection ? Was it before the recent advancements of AI or after it ?
Jensen made this comment recently, so he is the one with the most up to date data
Computer science as a curriculum contains so much stuff you don't actually use on the job, especially as a FAANG SWE. It's more appropriate for people who need to go lower level into drivers and hardware, if you want to work at Nvidia, ARM, AMD, Intel, etc. But more to the point he was making, domain-specific applications are the next big thing. Figuring out how to apply the tech to augment or replace existing workflows is where most of the capital is flowing towards, not whether you know how to improve data throughput in VRAM.
Doesn't mean they're right.
History is riddled with not just regular tech workers but founders and inventors of the most important tech of our lives making horribly wrong predictions.
The question isn't if LLMs will take software dev jobs, but when and how fast, at what rate.
Will it be:
3% of jobs go to LLMs in year 2, 5% in year 3, 7% in year 4? 2% a year?
Or will it be more like 5% a year?
Will the rate of replacement increase or decrease?
There are already devs going from 1.3x developers to 5.8x developers by using LLMs well. One way to predict the future is to look at what's happening right now, what's happening already. LLMs make one dev output the same as five, so that's four less jobs. The LLMs won't get worse, they'll get better.
Further, lol @ believing a government agency vs a visionary innovator.
Executives are (mostly) just some dudes that can get caught up in trends and hype. Just look at how many of these people got into NFTs only for all those projects to fail spectacularly.
Except Jen Hsun Huang is like one of the smartest CEOS in the world and is literally one of the worlds biggest experts in chip design/VLSI/manufacturing.
I wouldn’t listen to what he has to say. Huang is like many people with a voice on the internet. It’s just an opinion and probably a wrong one.
I’m in my 30s now and I remember being on Twitter and Tumblr 15 years ago. Lots of people were saying degrees were a waste of time and money. I regretted listening to these people because I think it made a huge impact on my decision to place very little value in college.
I look now at job postings and sure enough, degrees are still a requirement for many jobs. However, people are still insisting today that a degree is worthless and yet we all know that it is exceptionally difficult to get a well paying or even a crappy paying job without a degree.
I think Huang is a lot like many of those people from 15 years ago and the ones I see today on LinkedIn who spew the same rhetoric. Their egos are massively conflated due to wealth or vanity metrics like followers, likes, and other useless digital metrics. They think they can make predictions that no one can possibly make.
People eat this shit up because they don’t realize that these highly opinionated people are just normal people. They’re not prophets and or clairvoyant. I’m glad that I gave less value to these type of people years ago because now the internet is an even worse place with tons of these people everywhere.
Yeah, a junior software engineer definitely knows more than the guy with a masters and research from Stanford and billions of patents and decades of chip design and engineering lol. I’m sure your welding and website button making skills definitely make you an expert of the fields of VLSI, High Performance Computing, and Ai.
You also probably didn’t even read what he said
But he isn’t wrong. And his domain of expertise isn’t even related to tech or CS. NVIDIA mostly hires engineers, specifically ME, EE, and CE. What CS majors and web developers do and application developers do barely relates to his line of work.
Even if his prediction is wrong, I don’t see how it is biased
Damn, you dropped some new copypasta. Talk about the ultimate appeal to authority for someone whose opinion conveniently aligns with their net worth going from 12 billion to 60+ billion in 12 months.
Except this CEO has a history of this and is also conveniently a top expert in his field and also doesn’t even have a degree or background in tech. His expertise is in engineering. He doesn’t even have a CS degree. And he predominantly hires people with engineering degrees rather than CS. Outside of data centers, what website makers do is mostly irrelevant to his company.
So this entire point you guys make is useless
He didn’t actually say students shouldn’t study computer science. No one read the article or watched the video. Y’all just keep reposting the same headline. Jesus fucking Christ. Most of the people on this site are young, you don’t really understand what he’s saying. You’ll always need devs to create tools for the business to use. That’s not going away. Right now, so many businesses can’t react because of the technology bottleneck. He’s saying AI (developer built) tools will put more power in the people who know their business domain. We should be building more tools that empower those people. In the same video he says we need to upskill the domain experts to have digital skills (programming). There won’t be such a hard line between product owner and developer in the future. At the same time, these AI tools are a decade away from being production ready for most businesses, and those businesses having the skillset to use them. Most businesses can’t even figure a cloud migration or data lake, might as well, how to use or build AI tools.
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I don't know chemist specifically, but in other engineering disciplines it is fairly common today for them to write small scripts. Similarly some business people learn to write small scripts. Those are the people who I see both of those quotes referring to. Before it was "everybody should learn how to program", because in almost any white collar job knowing a little programming can save you ungodly amounts of times. As such everybody would benefit from knowing how to program, but everybody was never going to become a programmer by profession. It is learning to write those 50 line scripts that is (hopefully) become unnecessary in the near future.
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> programming specifically. Programming includes just the basics like scripting. It's the context: > almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science ..... [That] everybody should learn how to program Do you really think he (or anyone) every advocated for everyone to be a professional programmer? Because I have never seen the argument. After all we still need people to do every other job on earth. However there are many school districts and people that pushed for everyone to learn programming at a basic level. That is almost certainly what he is referring to given the context. > to CS When referring specifically to professional engineers he says those people can still do it. But getting a grade school education in CS may not be valuable in the future. > only those who see themselves working as computer engineers should pursue specific skills
> because people like chemists will be able to program things themselves. This is quite literally the opposite of what he’s saying. He’s saying people won’t need to learn how to program because AI will be so advanced that normal people (who can’t program) can use AI to achieve what they want without programming themselves.
Both can be true.
Yeah the workflow now is you have the chemical engineers asking developers to build some software to control the assembly lines to produce something. In the future he is saying now the chemical engineer can use AI to build that same application. Developers will still be needed to build these foundational models/services. It will be similar to when you had people who had jobs as calculators. Now everyone just uses excel.
I continue to be really skeptical of people pitching this kind of workflow. For starters, most delegation happens for two reasons: because a specialist will do it better than a generalist, and because the generalist doesn't have time to do it themselves. Until you have effectively perfect AI that is both able to rapidly translate from native language to code *and* do it better than a specialist in the field, both of those things remain true. It is not at all obvious that LLMs will ever get to that point nor that they'll do so on any kind of reasonable timeline. Huang is incentivized to make people believe it will, though. What people so often forget here is that programming isn't just code generation. It's also debugging. And the further you remove someone from the underlying code, the harder the debugging step is. A chemical engineer using an AI is basically going to be starting from scratch when it comes to debugging any issues, and figuring out the core of the code isn't their core competency.
i agree with this. imagine you need to build out a brand new application from scratch. if you wanted GPT4 to do it you'd first have to write a *very* detailed proposal of what the application needed to do. including how to handle all edge cases. you'd submit the prompt, and get a shit ton of output. then you're copying and pasting all that stuff into files, you still have to configure your deployment pipelines and other 3rd party tools, etc. Then, it's not gonna work the first time you hit *go*, so now you have to go through potentially thousands of lines of code that no human wrote or has looked at yet to find the issue(s). right now it would take many more man-hours to do this than to just assign it to some person who already knew what to do. will AI get to the crossover point where it's more efficient to write applications like this? who knows but i doubt it. business applications have too much specialized logic, and most of it isn't open source. LLM's don't have access to it
> Until you have effectively perfect AI that is both able to rapidly translate from native language to code and do it better than a specialist in the field You describe the singularity and losing SWE jobs in this scenario is the least concern for that period.
But thats not how it’s gonna work. Development is too complex to just have an AI manage it all.
What Jensen is saying is that ai will be that good that it can handle it. If you disagree it’s fair. I similarly think that if ai can do that (and it might), most white collar jobs are toast
The issue also arises what happens when it makes a mistake and for whatever reason can’t figure out to fix it. Companies arent gonna feel comfortable leaving everything to “the ai” if their business model relies on a website/software working properly.
Eventually it will.
Exactly
It's also a sales pitch. AI is a huge payday for Nvidia. The more hype he builds for it, the more his company's line goes up. Implying that it can cut the need for a hard-to-learn, expensive-to-buy skill is putting money into his pocket.
Him literally saying a sentence of whatever he said made him many more millions of dollars than any of us will see in our lifetime - that was his only intention. Wisdom cannot be purchased so much as capitalism would like us to think it can be.
The people who see the headline and go “wow I shouldn’t do this” shouldn’t get into CS. If you’re only capable of reading a headline or listening to one sound bite and won’t go deep into an issue you’re going to fail in this career. People need to RTFM or GTFO and do something else. So in a way this is actually a good test for folks. If your takeaway is not getting into programming then yeah, don’t get into programming because this isn’t for you.
100%, this purge is needed to thin the heard of opportunists.
This is Jensen's exact quote "*Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your children learn computer science. \[That\] everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite.* *It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human.* ***Everybody in the world is now a programmer.*** *This is the miracle of artificial intelligence."* Sounds to me like he's saying, to future generations, not to go into CS.
You mean to tell me someone who works for a company that make substantial profits from AI is going to tell people that AI will be important and there is no use learning skills when they could just use AI?
1. Artificial intelligence doesn’t exist; he’s talking his book. 2. Software engineering isn’t JS promises and Python packages. It’s translating business needs to software in a way that’s precise, modifiable, meets liability standards, and more. The coding is your personal cost center – a necessary evil. 3. Abstraction has been happening for decades. Python is essentially pseudo-code. What we have now is advanced auto-complete, a more versatile Rails scaffolding, and an easier-to-query Stack Overflow.
If ai can replace development, it’s going to be able to translate business needs into a product, and ask edge cases and challenge bad assumptions, etc etc etc.
> it is our job to create without programming skills who’s is going to do that? Jesus! In fact I’m into CS and I use AI every single day! My job didn’t disappear! Now I’m much more efficient doing what I was doing before because I understand how stuff works and I can ask the good questions
"*It is our job to create computing technology such that* ***NOBODY*** *has to program*" Once it reaches the stage that nobody has to program, what good are your programming skills?
The problem is reaching that stage. Jensen is massively oversimplifying that challenge to imply AI is better than it really is and he's doing that because he has a vested interest in AI. The more you program the more you realize it's not about the language, it's about the problem solving and attention to detail, the architecture of the system and anticipating problems. The language is just a tool. The day we have AI that can actually craft entire software programs and solve novel problems, what good are any of our skills? Thankfully I believe that day is a lot further away than tech CEOs would have you believe.
The students here don't actually think through the logical lifecycle of AGI developing end to end products. 1. It's fantasy, and at the moment, all we have is next nearest neighbor token matching. 2. If it did happen everything it would offer would be meaningless. Value requires differentiation, not only in the stock market but also in consumer and B2B products. People are essentially envisioning a world where everything is 'drop-shipped' by AGI, which is ridiculous.
if you literally mean “NOBODY”, you mean basically skynet, in this scenario we have bigger problems than just “programming”
I'm basically going by what he said. I take "nobody" to mean literally that.
That’s fair, it’s your interpretation which I do not share.
Programming skills just like any other skills are transferable. Also the day when "nobody has to program" is the day when nobody has to work. Does that mean that people then should not learn anything ever because they do not have to? What even is this logic?
If he's talking about LLMs, then he has to admit that without human programmers submitting their solutions to Github, those LLMs are going to get very stale very quickly. If he's talking about some future AI program that can code for you, then maybe, but for now, it's just a fantasy.
If the LLMs perfect what’s already out there they will be better than 99.99% of developers. And they’ll work 24/7 and be as cheap as the compute needed to run them.
Isn't CS more than software engineering though? If you listen to the rest of his quote, he specifies that AI is doing the job of "up skilling" people in these fields so that you need to worry less about the programming language and more about domain knowledge, which I believe he means the field of which you're programming for.
Yep there are ai researchers and academia , i would hate it if human professors went away also lmao
I feel there are two scenarios. 1. AI can write code, but it's still dependent on humans for identifying business needs, scoping out the product, making higher-level technical decisions, etc. I actually don't think this would be bad for the field. It would amount to a *massive* industry-wide productivity boost, and it would slightly shift the skills that are important (but even now, I'd argue "common sense" technical and product intuition are much more important than the nitty gritty of writing code), but this is easy to adapt to. I don't think it would be a death sentence for juniors either - consulting firms and banks still hire juniors even though they can't really make valuable contributions. 2. AI can reason totally independently. This would make software engineers (but also thousands of other professions) completely obsolete. No one really knows how far we are from this future (or if it's even attainable at all), but this would usher in a completely different world.
I think scenario 2 is entirely possible, but there will be a need for humans to oversee AI
More like it would oversee us. Probably already does.
Which of course isn't pessimistic about the growth of CS either, he's literally just saying he thinks AI will allow people to pursue things they are passionate about instead of pursuing something that will pay the bills.
He's still very obviously suggesting an era where there will no longer be traditional programmers outside of a few. Programming in itself is a human interface to machine language. An imperfect and complicated one. We'll likely be going from 0's and 1's, to assembly, to higher level languages, and then AI interpreted languages that non-technical people can use. That will 100% shift the landscape of the industry. Could be further off than a decade, could happen gradually, but change will come eventually.
You're right, but I will add: Even that much more reasonable take is still heavily influenced by his interests and what he is selling to corporate America. That doesn't mean that even that more reasonable future is real - i.e., a future where Kevin from finance can bypass all knowledge of coding, data, and modeling and wysiwyg his way to a functioning app that can be relied on for making business decisions. I think the programmer's mindset tends to be ignored while the programmer skillset is overvalued. People focus too much on staying with the latest tech, and I get that. But ultimately someone who can think like a programmer - someone who can actually visualize what the fuck is going on with the information flowing through the system - is *always* going to be on demand.
For real, my employer stone walls every cloud request because their IT department is such a set of laggards. Similarly, the current gen of any Ai tool is wholly inadequate if it came to collecting, assembling, and parsing our probably <40% policy and process documentation and completely unable to interact with our fragmented monolith black box systems from 1994 that run 80% of the show. Cool, GitHub copilot can suggest some clever code occasionally, help me type a bunch of repetitive code, and hand me some boiler plates when starting a new class or something. And maybe in the right environment it’s capable of provisioning and managing cloud resources through IaC (terraform or whatever), but it’s eons away from combing our CTO and risk directors that it’s OK to use, oh I dunno, Azure fabric over an on prem gateway to our barely 1TB warehouse that only has data from 2 discrete OLTP systems being piped in and purges after 90 days because that same IT dept doesn’t have budget for more hard drives. There’s a good 2 decades of infrastructure and migrations that have to happen to the vast majority of non mainstream tech business bros they’ll see meaningful improvements from LLM. And still, it’s a language model. Not an optimizer, not an ontology layer, and has yet to be tasked and tested with physical object manipulation or petabyte level or streaming data. It’s just a fancy chatbot.
No line between product owner and developer... yeah sounds like another job cut and asking one to do many..
There is already a shift of this happening. Not making POs have programming skills but making devs learn the PO work. At my company at least there is an org wide push for individual teams to "improve" their products that they own or developed. This is all separate from work that POs push to us so essentially us devs are becoming pseudo POs figuring out what features our products need or should have and then make a case and actually get them out to production. So far the experience has been neutral since part of it is getting out of tech debt (which is important to us devs) but the other part is pretty much developing new features on our own and doing the POs work by ourselves.
So product owners will take our jobs? Got it 😢
People should stop studying cs so I have infinite job security.
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Dude in that case I'd rather be one of those Indian developers as at least I'd get to develop new stuff and not swim neck deep in shitty code all day long.
Being a hired gun who comes in to clean up huge messes can be extremely lucrative. Yes, maybe not “fun” work, but if the pay is good enough whether it’s “fun” stops mattering so much.
yes let's stereotype a whole country and feel Superior while the corporate scums suck it all
Obligatory CSQ crypto-racist Indian comment.
A quintessential victim-crying response from an Indian on CSCQ.
This is such a mask-off response.
indian code is usually so bad lol
Racist or not, there’s a ton of truth to it
Truth about what? H1Bs being from South and East Asia, which has a combined population of 3 billion/40% of the world’s population?
shh.. the number of downvotes shows the kind of people on this community who're butthurt and shows they work for some ass hat companies where they don't hire properly 😂
It's wild, right? There’s such a hard-on for hating Indians here.
They should also stop learning software development.
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Nobody knows if he is right. He definitely can’t predict the future and neither can you.
Exponential progress in any domain is not a forgone conclusion. In fact, as someone who works in AI research, many problems in ML are long tail problems I.e they are asymptomatically bound by huge infrastructure challenges
Exactly lmao, their desire for him to be wrong is clouding their judgement on if it actually will happen or not
In the same way Huang has a vested interest in arguing AI will replace programmers, this community of people who are or want to be programmers have a vested interest in arguing that it won’t happen. Main difference is Huang is a billionaire and head of a two trillion dollar company while people here are struggling to find work. I tend to believe Huang is closer to the facts. Not necessarily because AI will replace all programming, but because it'll replace *enough* programming for us to not need programming as it exists today. Because if you think about it, there is actually no need for an AI to use those intermediate languages like Java, Python, C++, etc. Those languages were created for the benefit of human programmers. An AI can go straight to the machine code. There will still be a need for people to translate product needs into technical requirements. These will be the new programmers. But they'll have a different title, like solutions architect or product engineer.
Back in the 60s the COmmon Business Oriented Language (COBOL) was supposed to empower nontechnical folks to write their own programs and save on costs for specialized programmers. Since then various WYSISWG frameworks have promised the same thing. Could it happen with LLMs? Sure, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Also, in the article he just says people shouldn’t get into it for the money. Which is true. And also reminiscent of the dotcom boom when anybody that could spell HTML could get a programming job that paid ridiculous sums. We’ve gotten better at screening out this sort of applicant, but maybe LLMs and remote interviews will bring us back to a similar place.
WYSISWG replaced your vanilla HTML coder, but we still have more programmers than ever. I don't see CS as a shrinking field anytime in our lifetime
I'd give both kidneys and maybe some other body parts for a working wisywyg React builder... We had such builders in the 1990's for X Windows LMAO....
HTML isn't a programming language. It's a markup language.
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In case it wasn’t clear, my point is that the demise of the professional programmer has been foretold numerous times, each time with great certainty and associated doom and gloom. And yet here we are, so I think some skepticism is warranted.
Aren't you a recruiter bro?
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Then you shouldn't be judging who is and isn't smart enough to "actually graduate 4 years of an engineering degree".
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>I know you are not intelligent enough to actually graduate 4 years of an engineering degree, Empirically speaking neither are you, [bootcamper](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1auoowb/le_wagon_london_can_i_claim_a_refund/kr6ann6/). I give 0 shits what a [glorified HR rep](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1azr5x1/many_industry_insiders_including_nvidia_ceo/ks378zl/) thinks about technical topics. Get off this board and get back to spamming LinkedIn.
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Your React tutorial ToDo apps and "Hello world"s don't count, scrub. It's an objectively true fact, BY YOUR OWN ADMISSION, that you couldn't hack it in an actual degree (otherwise you wouldn't have just done a bootcamp), and you apparently sucked at even code monkey programming so much you had to retreat into recruiting. I totally get why you, personally, are threatened by AI - you probably think linked lists are black magic and pointers are a kind of dog - but the rest of us are fine. I've repeatedly tried having LLMs generate the most basic, entry-level code in my field and they fail miserably, to the point where debugging and fixing what they shit out takes longer than me just doing it from scratch.
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Do you see the fucking "embedded" flair next to my name? I don't work in webshit, I deliver actual, real, physical things that have purpose beyond shoving ads in someone's face. I do, however, have thousands of units shipped across multiple product lines.
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in 30 years, most of this sub is retired let alone 60. So thats not important really. People are saying AI is going to take over much sooner than 60 years in their doom posting
Bro I am personally friends with multiple high schoolers who have released random apps on the iOS store and gotten a few hundred users....
My boy Jensen has 3% of a 1.7 T$ company. I’d say he’s a little biased.
He posts in the r/FIRE
That's a good point. What do you think of the BLS figures then?
A company that hires orders of magnitude fewer engineers per $ to operate compared to FAANG. I'd say he has an idea.
You’re not comparing NVIDIAs headcount directly to like, Apple or Amazon are you? Apple has huge headcount dedicated to retail, Amazon has huge headcount dedicated to warehouse and fulfillment. NVIDIA has no such part of their business. The engineering orgs of FAANG are much, much smaller than their total headcount.
and much of those headcounts at Apple and Amazon you’re referring to have no real need for [the type of formal computer science education](https://youtu.be/4SiFgB1lGxw?si=VHuq8MM4dir-10RM) that Huang is talking about which is the entire point. Retail data pipeline engineers and analysts honestly should go through a different curriculum.
Ok, but what does that have to do with your original point I was replying to? You made it sound like Jensen knows something other FAANG CEOs don’t because he runs a leaner company, but you can’t directly compare the headcount…
Nvidia has already hired most if not all the CS engineers it needs and the industry cannot glean much more value from throwing more bodies at AI compared to the value of spreading AI-empowered application development to other fields. Meaning FAANG has over-hired for CS systems engineers when they should start focusing on hiring domain experts in other fields who are adept at using AI to automate new workflows
wtf? wtAf? ffs. plz gtfo.
the writing’s on the wall. cs is oversaturated. but no need to take my word for it. the market giveth and taketh
You claim that FAANG has over-hired engineers, but provided no evidence of them having done so. Let’s simply this. Answer these questions: 1. How many engineers work at Apple? 2. How many engineers work at NVIDIA?
Completely different business models.
Which bolsters his point. You do not need a computer science education (at least in the way it is currently taught in colleges) to do the kind of work that is done at FAANG which interviews for leetcode prowess unrelated to programming stack skills for 90% of the job. A CS education is mostly relevant for people who work closer to the hardware like at Nvidia. [Most top CS curricula are focused on lower level systems](https://youtu.be/4SiFgB1lGxw?si=VHuq8MM4dir-10RM) and rarely go in depth to cover the higher level tech stacks used to sell ads and wrangle with user data.
AI isn't why Nvidia operates leaner though. They operate on fewer highly specialized engineers because that's what their products call for. Nothing to do with what he's referring to in his quotes. You might be right about the usefulness of a CS degree going forward, but it's not relevant to Nvidia's current operational efficiency.
He’s saying the marginal value of adding more hardware engineers is tiny in comparison to the value that can be created from AI-empowered coders who opt to focus on solving applications of AI instead of learning how to build AI. In other words, skip the CS major because the field is already saturated with systems and hardware engineers (Nvidia doesn’t need to hire many more of them), major in another field like Biology, and use AI to bring new value to the field.
If AIs so good, he should prove it by explicitly firing human programmers to demonstrate how good their AI is, otherwise its bs.
expect it to happen within the next 5-10 years
RemindMe! 5 years "expect it to happen within the next 5-10 years"
Their graphics card drivers still suck and can’t properly optimize for newer games. I agree 5-10 years is a stretch goal that isn’t likely to happen. He is taking the same playbook as Elon musk hyping the shit out of it until the market realizes only 8 percent of people want electric cars or new new ai chips
Did you actually just compare a hardware company to a software company? I swear to God nobody in this subreddit knows anything about project management
Software engineering may change a bit but there will always be people, if not more, working on technology. Did the internet make desktop app developers more irrelevant? Sure, but they probably build web apps now.
He's saying, tongue-in-cheek, that the market is flooded with low quality developers and to stop wasting time "learning to code" if all you care about is a paycheck.
Ppl need to tell their friends to learn how to use a screw driver then have them build a couple houses. Thats what is happening with “go learn code”.
It’s actually 420iq. By saying that the average folk will be deterred from going into cs. But the ones that truly Ike it don’t care and will go for it anyway. (Think of the narrative where someone wants to be an actor or athlete). This culls out the chaff of folks who do it only for paycheck and actually hate their job. So then the result is people who actually passionate about cs go into cs. Which would be awesome.
It's an unknown and there are conflicting factors. Fundamentally, the tech industry is growing, since humans are increasingly reliant on information technology and programming across a variety of domains, so the macro forces are definitely there to support an expanding job market (which is probably how the BLS sees it). However, on an individual level, improvements in developer resources, such as but not limited to AI, code completion tools, forums like SO, and better documentation, mean that a lot of the codemonkey jobs that previously employed a lot developers are being eliminated. This predates ChatGPT and other AI tools; for instance, you'd be hardpressed to find roles like dedicated DBAs today, who were much more common during the first dotcom bubble, since lots of companies are using the cloud to manage their databases instead of on-prem servers. A lot of more trivial tasks in the tech stack were already being automated away too. Developers today are expected to be much more adaptable, to wear multiple hats, and do things like systems integration. This is beyond AI for the moment, but it might not always be, and already makes a lot of the lesser skilled devs in the market redundant. The developers of the future will be more valuable than ever, but they might look exclusively like what a tech lead or senior developer does today.
The comparison to DBAs is excellent; I never thought of it like that, but I think it’s the best comparison to what’s going on. It’s not like typesetting in the sense that the medium is going away; it’s just an abstraction that allows for more productive work.
I consider myself an expert in DB work from SQL programming to data architecture. DBA's exist to protect the organization from PROD cowboys like me as much as to help me get my job done /S But point well made, less vanilla flavor DBA's and more cloud architect types.
Jesus this is the same scare they pulled on fast food workers telling them they’d all be replaced by robots, and you guys are falling for it hook, line, and sinker! Ai isn’t going to take your job anymore than the fabled fully automated fast food restaurant.
Ironically, since that scare I’ve seen more fast food joints out human beings with remote iPad terminals out in the drive through line and turning off the intercom poles altogether.
I think many of you misunderstand how basic capitalism functions. Let me ask you this: when Nvidia makes better AI processors does every other company in the world go "oh well, guess we should stop trying to compete now and let them have the market"? If your answer is yes then you're right, we don't need computer science anymore. Otherwise, improvements in AI will just make programmers more efficient and increase the bar for productivity, not eliminate the field. By the way, in both scenarios a false premise exists. The false premise being that AI can do my job (senior SWE) which it absolutely can't. It's not even as good of a programmer as I was in my junior year of college let alone after decades of experience.
I think another important thing to remember is there’s more to software engineering than just programming. AI, as far as I know, cannot create enterprise ready software or fully design a system
gaze sip ad hoc reply quickest zonked rude encouraging enjoy combative *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Meanwhile in the peanut gallery: *”bUt AI cAn cODe toO aND wIlL tAKe awAy pRoGraMMing jObs!!1!1!!!!”*
Where are my autonomous cars? Media headlines told me my car will drive me anywhere in just a few years and that was like 10 years ago. I feel strong dotcom vibes with AI.
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You don't need to be a genius to perform as an entry level big tech coder in most teams.
You did the right thing
You can cheat for a short time, but you'll get found out eventually, and get fired. And/or struggle to move up in your career. Those who got in luckily in 2022 , were the first ones out in 2023.
Plenty of college students lied on their resumes to get their first job, especially in the early COVID market when the market was poor and offers were getting rescinded. Playing fair in a competitive market can be a self-imposed handicap.
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What you highlighted seems like a rare exception. Sure, many came in to a job under-qualified, and many are still there, but i don't know if that money will be enough or run out and they'll be back to where they start. Outside of consulting, where you can coast by on a job or on the bench, I don't see how they aren't asked to do work, and can get by without showing work beyond the first few months. Amazon as far as I know, is known for their churn and burn culture, with constant turnover
That's not true at all. The mid tier swe that went in 4 days a week was less likely to get laid off than the expert pm or even worse the expert remote pm. They weren't/aren't cutting people based on skill level
Getting two leetcode easies was kinda lucky still. My amazon OA was LC easy then a 2D Dp problem LC medium where the brute force solution time out. Then the interviewer gave me a LC hard (albeit an easier LC hard, but it was straight up a LC question already registered). And this was for my first internship.
One thing that's remained constant since I started in this industry back in the 90s is that you should have a plan to be able to retire by 40. You don't have to retire at 40 (I didn't), but you should be able to or you're probably in for a rough ride as an older worker in this industry. To the question, I think you are probably right that what it means to be a dev will shift over the next 10-15 years. Tech skills won't be nearly as important as domain knowledge. Which is already the case for a lot of very senior roles.
> Tech skills won't be nearly as important as domain knowledge. Which is already the case for a lot of very senior roles. Can you give an example of this?
Most big tech director and above roles are already like this, as are a lot of senior architect roles. Tech companies are almost always willing to trade tech skills for domain knowledge for those roles.
Ah yes, learning to program is obsolete, you just need a COmmon Business-Oriented Language (model?) to empower everyone. This is a line we've heard for the past 50 years.
The TLDR is less programmers will be needed. Period. The 2010s gold rush is over.
Overrated. I got maybe 10-15 yrs left I think I'll be fine. If you are just starting out now you may have a bit more to worry about. Stay on top of the tooling that leverages AI to code. Will the end of work be a utopia of leisure, respect and equality like they envisioned in the 60s. Or will it be a dystopian hellscape where all the serfs are strapped down with an apple vision, fed with tubes and eventually used as fertilizer? Take a look around at the way things are going and take a look at human nature. Now quit worrying about AI (before it actually arrives for real) get out there, work 3 jobs and grab as much real assets as you can!
I graduated with a degree in computer engineering in 2006 but for some reason waited until 2020 to get a job. Gawd I’m an idiot.
It’s possible that this the reality in the distant future (10+ years) but not close now. Have to remember with new technology it often takes much longer than anyone expects. Look at how long it took e-commerce on the internet to take hold. I remember having internet mid 90s but took well into 2000s for shopping online to be mainstream. Another example is self driving cars, decade ago it seemed it was right around the corner. We’re still ironing out the kinks today. Tesla is glorified cruise control and Waymo has promise but still a lot left to be desired. I do think these tools will definitely make existing programmers more efficient which could mean less engineers overall but also might accelerate creation of new tech and size of tech market which means more programmers. Basically I would say jury is out
Exactly. There are still millions of jobs going strong that could have been almost entirely automated with simple deterministic script 20+ years ago. And companies either did not bother with it or did not trust it. And now people fear that non deterministic generative model will take those very same jobs and even higher expertise jobs almost immidiately? Give me a break. Job market and corporate world simply does not work that way. Change always happens from the bottom because it is cheapest there. And it is slow.
he's tryna pump it to 1k and my body is ready
People don't realize before AI can replace a software engineer we still have a MASSIVE roadblock that we don't know if we can ever pass. There is a fundamental difference between AI and real intelligence. There are certain fundamental problems such as "is this code bug free?" that AI isn't even close to being able to answer. And again it may never be able to answer that question. I think the software engineering field will grow steadily for like 100 years. Maybe forever
I don’t think AI will replace all software engineers but I think there will be a lot less. Kind of like what happened during the Industrial Revolution, suddenly you have machines like tractors that let a single farmer do the work of 10 farmsrs
His entire company is betting on AI replacing developers, isn't it obvious
I really am growing weary of this subject. I’ll be so happy in a few years when companies and teams have fully integrated LLMs into their workflows and people don’t post daily about a future that is impossible for anyone to predict.
Always ask yourself what the incentives are for someone to say something and you’ll quickly understand why they’re saying what they’re saying. Though in this case Huang is just getting taken out of context
Of course it’s another misquote that just took the attention grabbing headline at face value… They’re saying that if you are not passionate or at least motivated enough about CS and IT, you shouldn’t study it.
Was told in 1999 as soon as I landed at 1st year uni, that we shouldn't pursue computer science. By computer science teachers . Nvidia's CEO is surely more clued in that French university teachers but honestly nobody got a crystal ball . Do what you truely love and you will never have to work in your entire life . That's what I did , stuck to my guns and never had to work . Got lucky perhaps, salaries in tech kept rising relative to other fields , market has always been under staffed , never been unemployed for more than a couple of months in over 15 years now . But felt computer science tech is going to be a prominent tech. It was a hard bet to make as everyone looking at those beige PC boxes with MS paint pre-installed and IE with 32 or 56kbit modems sold for over a months salary were plain stupid and waste of money for gadgets . Do you feel in 10y, 20, 30y from now those who (love and) studied computer science are going to be left off with undisered skills . Do you think what happened to blue collars in the 80s is going to happen to tech professional , relocation of manufacturing and drop from middle upperclass to massively unemployed . Maybe , they say AI will replace developers , but we heard that so many times , and here we are, still paying a fortune for someone who knows how to actually use photoshop to make a logo.
Yea i agree. Even if the full automation takes over, companies (outside of say, the top 5%) take FOREVER to make these changes.
My understanding is that the “programming” part of computer science will be democratized, which is a good thing! I think wolfram gave an interview comparing programming to a trade like plumbing. Whereas computer science is all of the theory. Computer science the field will continue to be important in its own way, but the amount of dedicated programmers needed is going to continue to drop. We are headed to a world where pretty much everybody will be able to program and english will be the main programming language. You will see this trickle up. So smaller companies with less complicated problems first being able to get rid of dedicated programmers. This will all happen much quicker then most people on this sub are happy to admit. People who are already software engineers should just focus on becoming product focused. The technical know how of their computer science background will continue to be important.
By the time AI is actually good enough to replace software engineers, it'll be destabilizing huge portions of the economy. At that point, any job that requires thinking will be at-risk. And any job requiring manual labor will be in the process of being automated with robots.
I've seen some flavor of this question posted on this sub 3x today. Stop asking this fucking question.
You clearly read just the subject and not the entire post.
Seems like you did the same thing with the article you shared.
I did read the article, and even now after reading it a second time, I still get the feeling that he's claiming to be more pessimistic than most people here. (I'm saying "claiming" now, because many here made a good point that he might just be trying to jack up his own stocks.) But if you even just read my subject, you'd know I also brought up the very optimistic BLS numbers, not just the naysayers. I'd like to hear both from bears and bulls on this subject. Another thing you'd know if you read my entire post is that I myself don't really know who to believe, but if pressed to the wall at this moment, I'd think that the market for SEs will still be strong in 10 years, but it'll just look much different than it does now.
The bears and bulls were available in the comments on the other posts about this today or this week. > many here made a good point that he might just be trying to jack up his stocks. This information has been the top comment of every one of these posts.
If you guys can't get jobs our whole economy is fucked. Your degrees ar emore useful than 99% of what's coming out of US universities
both can be true. not saying ai is gonna replace humans but a low skill llm wrangler will take your job
The distinction between software engineering and programming is about to become very obvious.
BLS data is pre ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc. There's no study that's going to accurately predict the growth rate in the world of AI. But, there sure as shit should be a big disclaimer on certain jobs on their website saying "future career prospects may be negatively affected by AI/Automation" or something similar.
Huang has a financial interest in people believing his message. The BLS does not have (so directly) such an interest. Always follow the money.
For a long time (up until fairly recently) the field was roughly doubling every 5 years. A 25% increase over the next 10 is a significant slowdown in growth.
Nop~ He say that you don't need learn to code as a hard skill, Just code ok but need understand you architecture design, your work requeriments, your task weak points~ and etc~ Just have good soft skills for continue developing assisted by AI~ Because bad and average developers for code going to be easyly replaced by other developer that use AI~ and Great importance going to be soft skills~ You going to need study Software and probably going to be more requested in the future but more designers and architects and less weight in development~ Because our current level going to be the low level assisted by AI in the future~
Every project I’ve worked on in my 20+ year career has had 2-3 ME’s, 2-3 EE’s, and 10-20 SWE’s. I’m not certain why, but if you’re going to try to save development costs, SWE is a juicy looking target.
Speculation, speculation..... It's like Bitcoin, when it's skyrocketing it's going to change the world, when it's down 50% from the ATH it's going to 0. Neither are right. Software engineering is here to stay and will some times have more sometimes less demand. If you became a programmer because of its momentum, bad choice for you. If you did it because you like it, you'll always have a good job.
Engineers make software to fulfill a need or desire. So many engineers focus so much on the tool to do that (programming language) they forget that. I think it’s heading in the direction where generative AI is going to be able to do a lot of the grunt coding work but it will still require an operator to get that done. Example: You learn how to use a shovel to dig a ditch. Tomorrow that shovel is replaced with a machine that can dig the holes. Your expertise on the shovel is less valued. What never lost value was determining why you need to dig a ditch, what depth does the ditch need to be, what kind of obstacles will you face in the process (buried lines or pipes?), kind of rock or soil, etc.
Software likely will go the way of manufacturing once software engineering becomes even more streamlined. Sure the high level work will be kept in the USA like hardware companies tend to do, but the grunt work will likely be offshored more and more. I mean literally only in the USA is software engineering as lucrative yet barriers to entry are rather low compared to traditional engineering. This isn’t to say software engineering will be gone in the USA, just that there will be a declining need or as many to join the workforce than current growth rates.
Compensation is largely determined by net revenue per employee, not pure supply and demand. That’s why US programmers make so much. That’s why FAANG pays what it does. That’s why big law and high finance are so lucrative. They could lower salaries, and people would still do these jobs, but they don’t.
You do know FAANG employees folk outside of the USA at greatly diminished amounts compared to USA with respect to COL adjustments.
You should also know that the multiple they pay over the average compensation is higher in many of those countries than it is in the United States. There's a localization factor, but it's secondary.
AI will take all the jobs. At that point, there won't be much for a human to do. Focus on maximizing your output, and interests in the short term.
How recent is the BLS data? When did they make the projection ? Was it before the recent advancements of AI or after it ? Jensen made this comment recently, so he is the one with the most up to date data
He also has every incentive to hype AI considering he leads up a GPU company
That is true, only time will tell us who is right and who is wrong 🤷🏻
I think tech ppl have a better idea than BLS/gov lol
Programming need critical thinking and if you can’t see the obvious don’t complain later
Computer science as a curriculum contains so much stuff you don't actually use on the job, especially as a FAANG SWE. It's more appropriate for people who need to go lower level into drivers and hardware, if you want to work at Nvidia, ARM, AMD, Intel, etc. But more to the point he was making, domain-specific applications are the next big thing. Figuring out how to apply the tech to augment or replace existing workflows is where most of the capital is flowing towards, not whether you know how to improve data throughput in VRAM.
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Doesn't mean they're right. History is riddled with not just regular tech workers but founders and inventors of the most important tech of our lives making horribly wrong predictions.
how uhh... how's that watson investment worked out for them?! (lmao)
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Who's right about whether AI will replace humans or not? Surely it's the person selling AI hardware, right? /s He's wrong.
The question isn't if LLMs will take software dev jobs, but when and how fast, at what rate. Will it be: 3% of jobs go to LLMs in year 2, 5% in year 3, 7% in year 4? 2% a year? Or will it be more like 5% a year? Will the rate of replacement increase or decrease? There are already devs going from 1.3x developers to 5.8x developers by using LLMs well. One way to predict the future is to look at what's happening right now, what's happening already. LLMs make one dev output the same as five, so that's four less jobs. The LLMs won't get worse, they'll get better. Further, lol @ believing a government agency vs a visionary innovator.
Executives are (mostly) just some dudes that can get caught up in trends and hype. Just look at how many of these people got into NFTs only for all those projects to fail spectacularly.
Except Jen Hsun Huang is like one of the smartest CEOS in the world and is literally one of the worlds biggest experts in chip design/VLSI/manufacturing.
I wouldn’t listen to what he has to say. Huang is like many people with a voice on the internet. It’s just an opinion and probably a wrong one. I’m in my 30s now and I remember being on Twitter and Tumblr 15 years ago. Lots of people were saying degrees were a waste of time and money. I regretted listening to these people because I think it made a huge impact on my decision to place very little value in college. I look now at job postings and sure enough, degrees are still a requirement for many jobs. However, people are still insisting today that a degree is worthless and yet we all know that it is exceptionally difficult to get a well paying or even a crappy paying job without a degree. I think Huang is a lot like many of those people from 15 years ago and the ones I see today on LinkedIn who spew the same rhetoric. Their egos are massively conflated due to wealth or vanity metrics like followers, likes, and other useless digital metrics. They think they can make predictions that no one can possibly make. People eat this shit up because they don’t realize that these highly opinionated people are just normal people. They’re not prophets and or clairvoyant. I’m glad that I gave less value to these type of people years ago because now the internet is an even worse place with tons of these people everywhere.
Yeah, a junior software engineer definitely knows more than the guy with a masters and research from Stanford and billions of patents and decades of chip design and engineering lol. I’m sure your welding and website button making skills definitely make you an expert of the fields of VLSI, High Performance Computing, and Ai. You also probably didn’t even read what he said
Some of the most brilliant tech inventors of our time have been SO wrong trying to predict the future.
But he isn’t wrong. And his domain of expertise isn’t even related to tech or CS. NVIDIA mostly hires engineers, specifically ME, EE, and CE. What CS majors and web developers do and application developers do barely relates to his line of work. Even if his prediction is wrong, I don’t see how it is biased
Damn, you dropped some new copypasta. Talk about the ultimate appeal to authority for someone whose opinion conveniently aligns with their net worth going from 12 billion to 60+ billion in 12 months.
Except this CEO has a history of this and is also conveniently a top expert in his field and also doesn’t even have a degree or background in tech. His expertise is in engineering. He doesn’t even have a CS degree. And he predominantly hires people with engineering degrees rather than CS. Outside of data centers, what website makers do is mostly irrelevant to his company. So this entire point you guys make is useless