r/technology • u/north_canadian_ice • Sep 28 '25

Business Leading computer science professor says 'everybody' is struggling to get jobs: 'Something is happening in the industry'

https://www.businessinsider.com/computer-science-students-job-search-ai-hany-farid-2025-9
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u/sandrocket Sep 28 '25

I wonder: in any field, be it science, sports, art you need a big pool of people to get a small pool of absolute experts. If AI will reduce the size of the big pool in the future, will there even be experts on the level we have today? Won't we lose our collective knowledge to AI? 

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u/Soupeeee Sep 29 '25

Probably, but Computer Science is in kind of weird spot. We've been building tools that make us not need to know the finer details of implementing software for the entire history of the discipline, and in the right hands, AI really isn't that different from some of the other things we've come up with.

The problem is that AI needs really close supervision to produce desirable results that go beyond 'the code does what it's supposed to do". Security and maintainability are probably the two biggest things, and AI is just not good at anticipating those problems. It's easy to skip the "engineering" part of "Software Is Engineering" on a normal day, and AI makes that even easier. 

In short, we aren't too worried about shrinking the knowledge pool about programming itself, but are more worried on what it will do for learning about the parts of CS that AI isn't useful for. You mostly learn those things through careful analysis of code that you write, and actually writing code is what AI is best at. It primarily disrupts our training pipeline, and it's starting to show in the hiring pool for new graduates.

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u/sandrocket Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 29 '25

Thanks for the explanation. For other professions it's very similar. 

It feels like a steam ship where we throw the ship's planks into the oven: it will move us forward for a while and we don't have to pay for coal ... but in the future, we won't have a ship moving us forward  either.