The LLM frenzy is only unmasking something that happened long ago. The dilution started 20+ years ago when people with no real interest in CS were attracted to the software profession by the high pay and low bar to entry. Posts on Hacker News by people who liked their profession and CS topics were often met by "I'm just in in for the paycheck" and IMO that's gradually increased over the years. I've often remarked on the irony of how few hackers, in the sense of having the old-school hacker ethos, there seemed to be on Hacker News.

The CS building at my local university used to have banners bragging about the average starting salary of their graduates. It was a very naked attempt to attract students based on the money they would be able to earn.

Absolutely this. I'm a second-year in Computer Engineering in college, and I quickly noticed that the average student here doesn't actually like programming at all.

I mean, none of these people actually have much of any personal projects, and the few that do mostly got the ideas out of a list of "great beginner projects to make your CV look good"... Not out of curiosity, passion or fun. Nobody tinkers, hacks, explores...

Of course that's an over generalization, there's still a few young hackers here and there, but we're a very small minority.

It's sad to see, I always thought that college would be the place where I would finally find passionate people who could talk about computer science for hours and hours, but so far I haven't even met one.

[flagged]