> It's been a huge learning curve.

I have been doing this professionally for over twenty years, and I still learn something every day. Over the past couple years, with AI augmentation, I learn even more, move faster and go deeper into the systems that I work on.

A CS degree was never going to provide you with all of the tools that you need for a successful career. It provided you with the basics to get your foot in the door.

AI is not replacing you or an education. AI is raising the bar of what you can comprehend and retain. From someone who is technically minded (and self-taught), all I have ever wanted is to keep learning.

> AI is not replacing you or an education. AI is raising the bar of what you can comprehend and retain. From someone who is technically minded (and self-taught), all I have ever wanted is to keep learning.

AI is, in my opinion, absolutely murdering the junior dev market. It's now much more efficient to pay for a senior or staff engineer and set them up with a subscription to claude or codex. I think things are going to remain fine for senior+ engineers, but I genuinely don't know what advice I'd give to graduating devs at this time.

> A CS degree was never going to provide you with all of the tools that you need for a successful career. It provided you with the basics to get your foot in the door.

Yes and no.

I concur that it was never about the tools, although I've seen plenty of people advocating it had a more "practical" approach, using the same tools as companies use, and in the same way.

On the other hand it's not only about the basics.

In there you can go at depth in aspects that you will have to fight to use, like proper engineering practices, and might only be vital on the later stages of your career. And I feel that those learnings, plus the possibility of acquiring a breadth of knowledge that is hardly possible otherwise, is what gives CS graduates a leg up to other practitioners of the art of software development.

YMMV and a leg up can be easily overtaken, yes.

I wonder how you'd do without your AI augmentation if you find yourself not being able to use it for whatever reason. I wonder what you retained when the AI is not working... or with a very expensive augmentation that wants more cut from your pay...

> A CS degree was never going to provide you with all of the tools that you need for a successful career. It provided you with the basics to get your foot in the door.

+1

Aside from teaching me the _basics_ of programming and discrete mathematics, it did not help my career. I, in-fact (due to poor GPA), did not even have a SWE role out of school and had to find my own way here into a successful career. (I struggled even with LeetCode easys coming out of college) I attribute it to creating opportunities for luck (networking) and an appetite for life-long learning (which came well after college).

Basically true for all degrees. I studied non-cs engineering before getting into coding and feel it often. At times have felt “should have stuck more with mech e where jobs are more stable and the tech moves slower” but know it’s kind of a fallacy.

>I have been doing this professionally for over twenty years, and I still learn something every day. Over the past couple years, with AI augmentation, I learn even more, move faster and go deeper into the systems that I work on.

Too bad a big percentage wont get to do that professionally anymore due to AI.

>AI is not replacing you or an education. AI is raising the bar of what you can comprehend and retain.

No, it also makes the job market hell and cuts down on positions, on top of an already squeezed pre-AI environment.

And that's if one is still OK with the fact that coding work (something many of us enjoyed in itself) turned into "project manager for AIs".

AI has been a godsend to my learning especially in regards with CS and Mathematics. It does not get tired of explaining me not only the 'what' but also 'why' and 'how'. Plus lots of learning rabbit holes.

I was never a good student (not academically inclined at all) and I have learnt more with AI in past 6 months than the engineering degree taught me.

Retain? You're full of it. You can't possibly make that argument. There's absolutely no data to support it.

> AI is not replacing you or an education

I do learn every day thanks to AI, I agree with that part. But I'm increasingly convinced that AI is likely to replace either me or some of my teammates in the near future.

In the last year, half of my team has been laid off (or left) already and won't be replaced, and we don't see any drop in productivity and the tools are getting better by the day. We need experts to drive all this, but not as many people as before.

Other than keeping up to date with how to best use AI/harnesses what else would be most important to stay on top of for retaining a software engineering job these days? Also AI seems generic to me. Could I bother you for a more detailed breakdown on the most important topics/skills you would consider necessary for a software engineer to be knowledgeable of?

> AI is not replacing you or an education.

AI is the tractor in The Grapes of Wrath, and you’re the one driving it.

> all I have ever wanted is to keep learning

Good for you! Many people just want to be able to pay their bills.

Your post is entirely too dismissive of the chaos this new technology is introducing.

I don't think they're complaining about the learning curve.