I actually worked in the 90s and 2000s and software was not a popular career because it didn't pay much. Programmers were nerds who did it for the tech, not the money. Ir you say they earned twice as much you have no idea, I had room mates until I was mid thirties.

No its going to regular hourly workers who are seeing the largest pay rises in this market.

Whey he’s advocating for is that people don’t want to get in tens of thousands of debt without expecting to get a job because they need money to survive and pay off said debt

There is a middle ground between both.

If teaching fundamentals, then force students to utilize these fundamentals to build into applied or industry usecases.

For example - leveraging the K8s thread - force students in their OS class to understand HOW to apply data structures to manage scalability problems AND forcing students to understand Linux kernel internals like cgroups.

Most universities don't offer course to connect these fundamentals together - not even my Ivy League alma mater based on my own survey of curricula.

Everyone is incentivized to understand the bare minimum, overindex on Leetcode, and skim over harder fundamental courses. On top of that, ime at my alma mater, most CS faculty was essentially applied math nerds who could see beauty in a well formatted inductive proof but would glaze out when pushed on implementing Paxos using best practices around kernel or system performance. And vice versa for the system nerds.

In a world where AI/ML can increasingly automate away boiler plate work and even conduct limited reasoning, understanding how fundamentals and (shudder) first principles are connected into become a product or solution is what matters.

And thus, this becomes a critical thinking problem, which just cannot be learnt without experimentation and getting into the weeds.

Can you tell that to the entire world?

Well being a good engineer doesn’t mean “Jack shit” if you’re homeless and hungry because no one will hire you to exchange money for labor to support your addictions to food and shelter.

If I have to explain everything in detail and check behind your work as a junior dev snd wait for you to get up to speed, I might as well just use ChatGPT.

If I do need a perdón, why would I hire a junior engineer when I can just recruit an underpaid mid level developer more whose already proven himself and gotten up to speed especially if I can hire someone cheaply living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is willing to work for less than I made over a decade ago?

> The problem is developers are now DevOps, QA, PMs, Customer Support, and everything else.

As long as the hour expectations are reasonable I actually like this. This teaches you so many more skills than being pigeon-holed into software engineering. Granted, I like the idea of one day founding a business so I may need to be able to do all of these rolls some day.

CS programs teach fundamentals, though not necessarily the most popular tools in the industry. Those skills help regardless of whatever specific tools you end up using. I don’t think it’s a waste of time.

I have never met a single human being in person who did not believe that a crucial part of acquiring practical skills in software (not "trades") for young people is to go to university. Maybe people shouldn't theoretically expect this, but there is theory, and then there is reality. We need to make them match, in whichever direction.

I can guarantee you that the only people who went to college to be “better citizens of the world” were those who were privileged enough to have parents who could afford to subsidize their living.

This is exactly what I wanted to say, but phrased more nicely than I think I would've managed. So, thanks.

College is a massive time and monetary commitment. The reason the vast majority of people go through it is because employment opportunities are gated away behind a degree. Without one, finding the job you want can be extremely difficult, and at times even impossible.

It always bothered me how colleges hold someone's future career hostage like this, forcing them to go through them, and then they pretend it's not the case and that college is simply intellectual enrichment.

The gating that colleges do also makes it much more difficult to change careers than it should be. The whole system does the task it's given extremely poorly, and pretends that it's not even responsible for the task. Great, fine. Let's work on alternative ways to handle job credentialing then.

It's not a "certain segment" that changed their mind. It's the reality of what's happening to our country (countries). We can no longer, at large, afford the luxury of spending so much money ONLY to "learn to think". We also need practical education more than before. That's the undeniable nature of what has happened to the economy, especially in software.

You mean the job they can’t get because companies rather hire someone with experience for a little more money?

This isn't viable. This isn't a normal vocational job - it's too abstract/overwhelming for everybody to learn all of it on the job to the needed degree. We need to stop tricking kids into this path. Either CS needs to teach practical skills (I understand things evolve fast, but you're exaggerating, and regardless, an education in the current thing is absolutely invaluable, and also prepares you for learning the next thing on your own), or we need to make it much more clear that another education path is better. Also, boot camps are worthless for this.

Yep, it is different.

If AI is really wrecking the job market structurally due to new efficiencies, one would hope those effects will be permanent (i.e we won't need juniors anymore because AI will fill those spaces permanently, with or without human intervention; and thats not going to change because AI is only going to get better, blabla, yada, yada).

If it is not, it would be a matter of eventually reaching AI winter status and/or just finding a new thing to hype and the tech job market will open its gates again.

Of course there is some nuance to it, both things can happen at the same time with different intensities.