Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs (latimes.com) 125
Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already "elite" or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs" with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. "I think that's crazy." While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers. Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates -- those considered "cracked engineers" who already have thick resumes building products and doing research -- are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.
"There's definitely a very dreary mood on campus," said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. "People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it's very hard for them to actually secure jobs." The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees. [...] Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study. [...]
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need "two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents," which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidovic, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. "We don't need the junior developers anymore," said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. "The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there." [...] Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing. As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
"There's definitely a very dreary mood on campus," said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. "People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it's very hard for them to actually secure jobs." The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees. [...] Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study. [...]
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need "two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents," which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidovic, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. "We don't need the junior developers anymore," said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. "The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there." [...] Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing. As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
What could go wrong? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re: What could go wrong? (Score:3)
What else is not? Wasn't it all BS always?
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What else is not? Wasn't it all BS always?
The “arrogogsnce” that employers got a glimpse of during COVID when people sat on their ass and got paid while other hard workers became rare and therefore valuable, is what business owners are targeting here. They want a reset of job salary expectations because all these “greedy” employees got a bit too uppity with that COVID salary. Back when they were begging for people and had to PAY appropriately. And owners can’t have that “arrogant” shit now.
So it’s
Re:What could go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
This quote from the summary about two engineers with an AI assistant being more productive than ten engineers without one just doesn't add up. I have done vibe coding both on hobby projects and at work, and it doesn't make me anywhere near that productive. I spend so much time asking it to re-do what it did wrong or manually fixing its bugs myself that I wind up only a little ahead in productivity. Not even double my usual pace.
Maybe if I am starting from scratch working on a relatively simple tool, it doubles my productivity. But it nowhere near quintuples it, and most of my work isn't nearly as AI-friendly as that kind of project.
My current employer has been pushing the team to be more productive, with everyone encouraged to use AI as much as possible, and the result has been rushed-out buggy code with security holes and questionable design decisions. Despite the fact that the team's productivity has obviously not made a 5x jump, they still refuse to hire more people. At least in our case, this has nothing to do with AI making us so much more productive, and everything to do with leadership being cheap and not wanting to shell out for the talent that they obviously need in order to produce at the pace they want.
I realize that my individual lived experience is not data. Ok, fine, so I can't prove my claims. But I still stand by them, because I have used the best AI tools available and they don't come even close to what people are claiming. I still think that the recent economic mudpit caused by the high interest rates (made in response to high inflation) has much more to do with the lack of jobs than these AI tools.
Can confirm... (Score:5, Informative)
Career dev here, with decades of experience at startups and multinational software companies... and yeah that's been my experience too.
Vibe coding has been great for learning new languages and platforms, using prompts like "this needs to ____ using ____" because it streamlines the process of looking up documentation / code samples and translating them to my immediate scenario. But I have had only mediocre results when asking it to write more than a few lines of code at a time. It goes off in the wrong direction too often, imagines that it can call APIs that don't exist, "fixes" failing unit tests by deleting them, etc, etc.
The weak job market has everything to do with pandemic-era over-hiring and current economic uncertainty, and very little to do with AI-enhanced productivity. It's not so different from the slowdowns in 2000 and 2008. Those were awful times to graduate into the job market, but the industry recovered, and software engineering remained a great career. I expect the same to happen this time around.
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More than 20years wearing various tech hats with a heavy emphasis on security, code, and *nix. I've had the same experience and not only does it go the wrong direction but it will helpfully "summarize" code and loop and give up on paths just to circle back around and repeat "fixes" which have already failed.
"The weak job market has everything to do with pandemic-era over-hiring and current economic uncertainty"
The uncertainty is a big effort to spin the inertia of rampant inflation and recession we were in
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The weak job market has everything to do with pandemic-era over-hiring and current economic uncertainty, and very little to do with AI-enhanced productivity
Stop repeating talking points from your enemies. This is ALWAYS about creating numbers for shareholders. It's not overhiring, it's we think we can keep this bullshit limping along (bad times) or we think we can make the number go up MORE (good times)
before anyone pipes up with that fiduciary duty horseshit.... no they're not bound with a fucking gun to their head like they say every round of "unfortunate" layoffs. Look at the conduct of various CEOs, takes a lot to get that treatment. Also historically
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The weak job market has everything to do with pandemic-era over-hiring and current economic uncertainty, and very little to do with AI-enhanced productivity
Stop repeating talking points from your enemies. This is ALWAYS about creating numbers for shareholders.
What’s the point? It’s been the same since 1789 in the U.S., regardless of which “enemy” is in power. But the oft touted alternative of feudalistic authoritarian elite redistributionism? Which inevitably involves rejecting blind justice, property rights, decentralized governance, and free speech? That has an extremely poor track record. Particularly for the lowest quintiles. Witness the U.S. confederacy, Lenin’s utopia, etc.
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This quote from the summary about two engineers with an AI assistant being more productive than ten engineers without one just doesn't add up. I have done vibe coding both on hobby projects and at work, and it doesn't make me anywhere near that productive.
I've wondered about that, too.
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It could very well be that they're talking about 10 unqualified guys with diploma mill degrees, or they could be talking about 10 engineers working on a stack of shit they have no experience in.
LLMs are great when you have no idea what you're doing.
But having a working search engine was quite a productivity enhancer, having good internal documentation was pretty cool, not using products and frameworks with bad customer documentation is pretty helpful... also bothering to set up the doxygen, man page, javad
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Until the LLM fucks something up and can't unfuck it and neither can the no-idea user.
Meaningless anecdotal evidence: I hate doing CSS so got Copilot to do the CSS for a web app. Fucked it up royally, an item wouldn't fill the screen, AI couldn't fix over multiple iterations, so I had to dive in. Luckily I a have decent grounding and could see the AI had put a maximum width in.
Conclusion: AI makes a task faster for someone with no idea, until it made
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AI programming will have it's own brand of disaster, created by all the barely working code it created.
Windows 11 is already suffering from it quite greatly.
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How are juniors supposed to be mentored and gain on the job experience to become the seniors of the future then?
I suppose many companies are thinking that other companies will hire these juniors and that the best of the juniors will be filtered out through those experiences. Sort of like how major league baseball teams think of the farm teams. These companies likely realize that long-term employment, even at the most sought after companies, is becoming more and more rare, so many of the juniors trained at a company will mature and then join a competitor.
Re: What could go wrong? (Score:3, Informative)
Well from TFS, that isn't even what the concern is:
As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before.
They went into it with this idea that their pedigree guaranteed they'd have a cushy job somewhere. That has never been the case. I still remember about a year ago slashdot ran a piece about a construction worker who went to a coding bootcamp expecting that he'd get a high paying programming job, and the narrative is that it didn't happen because AI.
But that's just downright false, not to mention really naive and stupid, as any experienced developer will tel
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"Even before AI, going to a boot camp might have gotten you a $30k salaried position at a shitty software mill somewhere in Bumblefuck, South Dakota. And only if you were lucky."
Nah, a bootcamp/cert would easily get you an entry level enterprise position paying $65-70k and many places trained those new hires anyway... assuming you left Bumblefuck, South Dakota. In fact, they almost certainly wouldn't hire someone without a degree in bumblefuck because they only need 3 guys whereas the enterprise can afford
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this is all fantasy, do you even work in tech?
Most boom camp grads end up a "support engineer" or nothing, the only real hope anyone had of getting good work that was was being the number 1 in their class and getting a hook up or the ability to survive for extended periods of time waiting for the perfect job to break into the industry.
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this is all fantasy, do you even work in tech? the only real hope anyone had of getting good work that was was being the number 1 in their class and getting a hook up or the ability to survive for extended periods of time waiting for the perfect job to break into the industry.
Did something change in the last couple years? Having worked in software for thirty years - in manufacturing and pure software (developing middleware platforms) - this was not my experience at all. Credentialism existed in isolated pockets - it wasn’t the norm.
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No worries, most of the seniors have already been axed and either outsourced or replaced with H1Bs.
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How are juniors supposed to be mentored and gain on the job experience to become the seniors of the future then?
They aren’t. That is AIs job now.
The advice to “go learn something else” that we’ve given out during every other Industrial Revolution shaking up the job market, is now dead. Because AI is targeting the human mind. The greedy human mind infected with the Disease of Greed. The same disease that sells worthless CS degrees even though degree pimps know they are worthless.
Should have stopped pushing four-year degrees, but all those managers that were forced to get theirs, are forcing
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Should have stopped pushing four-year degrees, but all those managers that were forced to get theirs, are forcing you to get yours with that ringknocker mentality for damn near every job. Doesn’t matter how much more expensive, or how much more worthless they are in the hands of someone with little experience struggling to gain it with junior employment. Won’t be “fair” if you don’t have to spend $50K and four years like they all did.
My degree was one of the easiest milestones of my life while simultaneously being one of the most enriching. If you're too stupid to pass or you were dumb enough waste that time on a dolled up trade school, i simply don't want to interact with you at work.
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How are juniors supposed to be mentored and gain on the job experience to become the seniors of the future then?
They won't and the companies don't care. The plan is to just pay millions of dollars to poach the lucky few from their competitors.
Buying Your Degree No Longer Guarantee Job (Score:1)
Finally employers are looking at what students can do instead of looking at the silly paper that mom and dad bought for them.
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Finally employers are looking at what students can do instead of looking at the silly paper that mom and dad bought for them.
If that were the case, the article title would be "Employers choose to hire community college graduates instead of Stanford"
You think they are hiring more non-Ivy-league students instead?
Elite computer science degrees don't give hands on (Score:2)
Elite computer science degrees don't give hands on skills for all tech job and we don't need ALL theory loaded coders.
we also need hands on people doing the system admin work / helpdesk / desktop / data center work / networking / etc.
They also teach them useless langs/skills (Score:2, Informative)
They pretty much fall into two camps: the ones who were taught trendy skills and the ones taught academic skills. The trendy coders used to be the ones who only learned Java, but lately it's morphed into Rust, Swift, Go, and Python. The academic coders learned three dial
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You're one of the stupidest people on the entire site. You're exactly the reason that some companies pay close attention to pedigree. Not because it's a guarantee of success, it's assurance that they're not you.
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Right? Dude pisses me off because i was writing c and assembly about the time i got expelled from high school. Then i went into the military to pay for college. Then i worked for a few years in tech based on the "you don't need a fancy degree" meme before realizing that was an absolute lie that wasted years of my life.
I'm pretty old now and kinda tired of dealing with people who don't actually know what a computer does.
If we hire no junior developers (Score:1)
how will there ever be more senior developers?
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Who is going to volunteer their own money to fix that?
those considered "cracked engineers" (Score:3)
Really?
What a difference two extra letters make.
Re: those considered "cracked engineers" (Score:2)
Would you believe I was once a crackhead engineer?
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Would you believe I was once a crackhead engineer?
Were you a crackhead who was also an engineer or did you engineer crackheads? :-)
'Cause that seems more ambiguous than, say, electrical engineer.
OR (Score:2)
As our AI overlords proclaimed us, humans formerly qualified/needed to learn this trade.
The worst part is.. (Score:2)
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Just a few years ago (Score:2)
It used to be that recruiters/companies would get their hands on a list of Stanford CS 106B students and start offering them jobs (part time, summer, or even full time). Note: That class is laughably basic. I'm talking like "what's a linked list?" type questions on the final exam.
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It used to be that recruiters/companies would get their hands on a list of Stanford CS 106B students and start offering them jobs (part time, summer, or even full time). Note: That class is laughably basic. I'm talking like "what's a linked list?" type questions on the final exam.
Some years ago, my boss, who had a PhD in EE from Stanford, told me that he didn't have a high opinion of undergrad CS students at Stanford. The grad students were top notch, but he thought less of the undergrads. In a way, it makes sense. The undergrads at Stanford are smart, but they earned their way there based on high school work. The grad students competed at the university level.
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It used to be that recruiters/companies would get their hands on a list of Stanford CS 106B students and start offering them jobs (part time, summer, or even full time). Note: That class is laughably basic. I'm talking like "what's a linked list?" type questions on the final exam.
Some years ago, my boss, who had a PhD in EE from Stanford, told me that he didn't have a high opinion of undergrad CS students at Stanford. The grad students were top notch, but he thought less of the undergrads. In a way, it makes sense. The undergrads at Stanford are smart, but they earned their way there based on high school work. The grad students competed at the university level.
Only the degree pimps selling degrees could convince the masses that after four years and six figures spent at an elite university where the goal is to graduate, you are still considered nothing more than a shitty “under” grad, and now need to spend far more to be recognized as a full graduate, and someone worth hiring.
Smells like the greedy arrogance at Ferrari. Where you buy the car, and after two years you get the luxury of paying Ferrari tens of thousands more for a certificate that finally
Re:Just a few years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in various positions in two FAANG companies for the last decade.
We used to have "intern season" where we would compete to bring the best students in for internships and hopefully call dibs on the brightest. This is no longer happening, and the change was so sudden it left many nothing short of shell-shocked. C-suites all in a sudden think they can do without any workers, no matter the level. Headcount increases are systematically denied, vacancies are not backfilled. People are burning out like cinder and leaving in droves. Hell, my own manager resigned two days ago. I'm also interviewing to leave this hellhole.
And all of this because some rich moron interacted with a chatbot smarter than them.
Re: Just a few years ago (Score:2)
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One thing doesn't really exclude the other. They're still investing billions in AI (I develop power delivery control systems for datacenters, and I'm going nuts), that would be a very expensive smoke and mirrors.
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One thing doesn't really exclude the other. They're still investing billions in AI (I develop power delivery control systems for datacenters, and I'm going nuts), that would be a very expensive smoke and mirrors.
The handful of billionaires investing billions, walk around wearing a Too Big To Fail lapel pin. They weild great power to privatize profit while socializing losses. In case we were wondering who’s paying for the smoke and the mirrors, and why they don’t care about cost.
The expensive part will be when they fail and take the stock market down with them.
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They have zero risk really. This shit could all blow up and they'll still have a nice car, nice house, schools paid for their kids, and good end of life care.
Whenever one of these guys sees like a month of ACTUAL JAIL TIME the industry standards for their behaviors adapt rapidly.
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...They're still investing billions in AI
You just clarified where the money is going to, as opposed to hiring Stanford CS grads.
To back up your point, last week Fox News said we should all buy re-usable artificial Christmas trees so that land can go to data centers [mediaite.com].
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C-suites all in a sudden think they can do without any workers
I think it would be easier to replace a C-Suite with AI.
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It seems extremely well suited to the task right?
An LLM could know all of wikipedia plus all of a company's history, financial data, tech documentation, legal references, etc. Less paid executive assistants and department heads could interact with it and it would hallucinate from time to time but it's already part of those people's jobs to catch higher level misunderstandings, the only difference is now there wouldn't be any political pressure to not correct the head honcho.
This is more an indicator of bullshit companies. (Score:3)
Previously companies making bullshit products had to bid hard to acquire developers to write their stuff. Now they are saving on the developers by sending that money to AI companies ... but it's still bullshit products. We're due for another economic downturn to take the tide out and see who isn't wearing trunks, as Warren Buffett once put it, so that the developers left over can aggregate into fewer companies that are trying to do actual things.
Who's fault? Big Tech or the Graduates? (Score:3)
The irony is tech jobs just out of the market aren't exceptionally glamorous and typically focus on a single feature and a very menial task to boot that basically any college graduate in the relevant degree could perform, but candidates with internship experience easily edge out those with prestigious degrees sans any relevant work experience.
The internship is commonly the free or low cost method of determining whether or not a new grad has the ability to sit down, shut up, and do the work, eg work as a team.
Team work in any business is incredibly important.
Being able to listen to your peers or those just above you in terms of experience (not only expertise) and simply submit to the process that is professional work. Then there's also the part about learning how to talk to one another w/o unintentionally undermine one another's work because you might not know all the background to a situation. Oftentimes at work there're forums, opportunities, to learn the lore on why things are the way they are, but new students w/o previous work experience might be missing out on social etiquette or simply not have the awareness needed from those who actually go out of their way to pursue an internship.
The thing is, this isn't a new problem. Students, even from my day, always thought that they could just get a job w/ a college degree. With assumption, a lot of them ended up getting jobs where they could and ended up sticking in those industries. Sometimes in Finance/Accounting, some in Admin, some just working in service industry labor. The assertive bunch always found a way to network, make their name known, and get a decent job.
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"some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn't have considered before."
yeah, I also remember this moment when I graduated 30+ years ago. I came out of college with a list in my head of about three famous companies that I wanted to work for. Thing is, 99.99% of people don't work for those companies. Leaving college is a hard reality check for sure.
Of course, I didn't work in software - since we're talking about Stanford grads and software engineering, there has been a 25 year
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Nor is living when you are working for free.
AFAICT, approximately all software development internships are paid, most of them reasonably well. I have two insights into this, the first is as working SWE. My employers and all of the others around them pay interns pretty well. The second is as a member of the industry advisors board for my alma mater, a non-prestigious four-year state university. Talking to other industry reps and to professors and university job placement support staff, I've yet to encounter anyone who knows of any unpaid internship
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I've never seen one either. How formal are they? When and how long are they expected to be slaved at?
get your name out there (Score:2)
folks looking for jobs: get your name on a published project. if you can’t find a team, then publish something yourself. get your name on an App Store project (any app store). if you can’t get your name on something, then honestly, you’re probably not worth a potential employer’s attention.
No problem, There will always be SBUX (Score:2)
You're in a fucking recession (Score:4, Informative)
Right wing trickle down economics not only don't work but they do active harm. Normally we go through a cycle where we elect a republican because they are better at messaging than they wreck the economy and we come to our senses briefly and then we elect the Democrat and then have eight years of relatives stability and then flip back and forth between chaotic destruction by people who know how to push our buttons and boring ass administrators who know how to run a country...
We only got 4 years of those boring ass administrators and it was not enough time for them to fix the mess. It actually is never enough time to for them to fix the mess there's always a bit left over and is always a bit of resentment because they didn't fix things fast enough. This is typically because in between major elections we put the Republicans in charge of Congress and they sabotage any attempt by the Democrats to fix the damage their policies caused.
You would think after a 40 or 50 years Americans would have figured out this pattern but nope.
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Of course, voting for any minority party will create some measure of political correction but that t
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In the elections we've been seeing so far it's been large swings leftward, the current polling from Atlas Intel who was pretty accurate in 2024 has Trump at 39% approval and negative on every issue, even immigration.
https://atlasintel.org/poll/us... [atlasintel.org]
Right now, which is absolutely too early to tell, the top 3 candidates in the poll were Newsom, AOC and Buttigieg. Way to go Republicans it would be sweet justice if any of those end up President, you earned it.
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And he lost post-covid. The thing about 2024 is he wasn't president, easier to sane wash when he's not in power.
Something is happening, that speech he made, that was flailing for Trump.
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In the elections we've been seeing so far it's been large swings leftward, the current polling from Atlas Intel who was pretty accurate in 2024 has Trump at 39% approval and negative on every issue, even immigration.
https://atlasintel.org/poll/us... [atlasintel.org]
Right now, which is absolutely too early to tell, the top 3 candidates in the poll were Newsom, AOC and Buttigieg. Way to go Republicans it would be sweet justice if any of those end up President, you earned it.
Way to go Republicans? Hell, Republicans would love to see AOC run. They’d throw her up against Ben Shapiro or the like who would debate that mind just for fun. The mental bitch-slapping would be even funnier than when Tulsi left Kamala the Kackler in a puddle of her own piss on a primary stage years ago.
Liberals clearly didn’t learn their lesson the last time. Selfish ignorance and zero accountability is exactly what created and elected President Trump. Twice. While electing the Dumb and D
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Good luck with that.
Ben Shapiro is becoming a pariah in the Republican party so good luck with that, he's a MAGA outcast now. He's also not running because even he knows the GoP won't elect a Jew. You don't even know what the right is now.
AOC won't be the nominee but it is hilarious to think how much shed trounce Vance. Enjoy President Newsom though lol.
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Good luck with that.
Ben Shapiro is becoming a pariah in the Republican party so good luck with that, he's a MAGA outcast now. He's also not running because even he knows the GoP won't elect a Jew. You don't even know what the right is now.
You're right. He will not bend from his beliefs. But I didn't say he would do it for some political win. He'd do the debate for fun. Much like Michael Knowles would. Or how about Elon Musk. Now we're really talking salty popcorn.
If you want to see a win for Republicans, Nick Freitas would be my choice for worthy opponent. It's not difficult to find a worthy/entertaining adversary against AOC. The Squad's most extreme beliefs are about as favored by Americans as The View is.
AOC won't be the nominee but it is hilarious to think how much shed trounce Vance. Enjoy President Newsom though lol.
Trounce Vance? I doubt A
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At very cursory glance Freitas looks to be a more normal Republican and not a Trump nutter but hso hopefully you're right, that's what should be running and winning but we will see how they handle a post-Trump world where Trump I am thinking becomes more and more persona-non-grata. He has to also win a national office.
AOC meanwhile has won multiple times and if you pay attention is actually quite a savvy politician. All that paragraph if you want to go on and think shes just some bimbo go right ahead. Now
Predicting and Results. (Score:3)
Right now, which is absolutely too early to tell..
..which turns every poll into nothing but political clickbait packaged with bias and fed into the highest revenue-generating echo chamber. Until it absolutely is not too early to tell.
As far as that leftward swing, Seattle's new mayor is hell bent on taxing the living shit out of everyone. Not sure how long she'll last with that strategy. We might see our first tactical recall vote. Mamdani was aggressive at first, but now seems to be learning fast enough to maybe survive the kinds of liberal policies t
Re: You're in a fucking recession (Score:2)
Our economy has been slowly unraveling since 2023. If Kamala was president now the post-lockdown economic cycle wouldn't just magically disappear.
I would concede that when it looks like a downturn is coming, strong Democrats don't line up to have that on their legacy, so Republicans tend to win
They changed the name to job creators (Score:2)
Also Trump fucks kids.
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You would think after a 40 or 50 years Americans would have figured out this pattern but nope.
Trying to constantly find a reason to blame the other political party, while getting ignorant citizens to engage in that shit-slinging too, is exactly why that “pattern” works for both Democrats and Republicans enriching themselves nicely abusing that Weapon of Mass Distraction.
Imagine waking up tomorrow to a single political party in America. ONE. I’d love to hear the finger pointing excuses then, which we waste the majority of our time on now.
Sure. I’m guilty as hell too. But s
Commission as an officer (Score:3)
American rewards with money what it truly values, and it truly values war.
A stint in the Space Force, Air Force etc can open DoD and many other doors via the human network officers naturally acquire. It's an instant career or a useful stepping stone. The security clearance won't hurt either.
The Guard and Reserve are options for those wanting to hold civilian employment but active duty retires much sooner. An officer makes enough to fully retire at twenty years and never need to work again.
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Also your boss is a Fox News anchor and POTUS thinks you're a sucker.
Re:Commission as an officer (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't matter. A 2LT starts at about $50K and moves up to $85K at the end of four years. Plus all the benefits of housing, meals and full medical. Computer Science majors also don't get sent to the front lines very often. Do you think every engineer working for big tech companies adore the company owner?
If the person decides after four years to get out, they have VA benefits, GI Bill to further their education, and a great networking base. Plus, many companies look favorably on veteran officers. They might not have experience in the latest coding environments, but they do have experience working in teams, leading groups, and focusing on results instead of office politics.
Four years in the military as an officer is a great way to kick start a career.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah but you can't have a beard anymore. And if you're a woman you can't advance. Also your boss is a Fox News anchor and POTUS thinks you're a sucker.
The US Military is about the most colorblind non-sexist organization out there. They can’t afford to see in color when you need a standing army all wearing the same flag on their shoulder. The only gender roles being suppressed for women are combat roles. For many a valid reason not to be debated ignorantly again.
If the graduates think it’s such a horrible option, there’s always six more months of submitting applications.
That matters little IRL. (Score:2)
In the vast majority of military careers pols matter little. Careers outlast multiple POTUS and mostly take place far away from them. When you're chilling at a NATO base, Japan or South Korea what happens in DC is of nil interest unless you have or want orders there.
Why would anyone care what the President of the US thinks of their job so long as their pay shows up? I don't value the respect of those I hold in contempt nor grudge their indifference to me. We owe each other nothing not spelt out in law.
From
"AI-savvy developers" (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got a lot of software development experience and I used to write a considerable amount of code by hand. Over the past few months that amount has dwindled considerably. Now I just prompt AI to do most of the coding. I compose the prompts, review the work, sharpen up the requirements, run the test cases, and guide the debug sessions. It takes some coddling at times but I frequently get at least a weeks worth of work out of it in a day with full documentation. 5x performance is not at all unusual if you know what you are doing. Like it or not, this is a significant paradigm change.
I don't really care much about how well you could write the code yourself. We don't need you to do that anymore. What I care about is how much valuable work you can get done coupled with a very large boost of AI assistance. Someone straight out of Stanford had better be 'AI-savvy' at this point in time as part of the package. If you are a smart, well-educated person who can make it sing you will be well worth hiring. Otherwise no.
Re: "AI-savvy developers" (Score:2)
I call bullshit.
Re: (Score:2)
How about try it before you say it doesn't work.
I've gotten similar result with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio.
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I hear people making this claim but they never offer any examples. Please, post an example of what you're doing or a link to a blog showing such an example. Not a trivial one, a real world example. It would help a lot of people if you did.
Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not going to post personally identifying information here, but I will share this screenshot from the dashboard of the AI system I frequently use. As you can see, I often get ~2k lines of code per day and sometimes as much as 6k. And mind you, this is production-quality code plus documentation that has been incorporated into a working system comprised of multiple distributed microservices.
According to Perplexity, "Modern practitioners and engineering managers often report that developers may commit aroun
Re: (Score:1)
Nobody who hasn't used Windsurf (which it looks like you're doing based on seeing 'Cascade' in there) will get it. You're also clocking in on Sat/Sun. My GitHub profile looks the same. It's AMAZING what you can achieve with AI and 6 hours uninterrupted by meetings. I will +1 your story and back it with experience as well.
Re: (Score:2)
I generally do use Windsurf, but now also Google's Antigravity which is similar and their recent models are very good.
I totally get it that people here are suspicious and even hostile to AI. This is work that humans used to do and it is unsettling that machines can now do most of it.
But clearly things have changed and like it or not, a Stanford graduate who wants to keep up with developers like me and you is going to have to jump into AI coding assistance with both feet. The job interviews of the future are
Re: (Score:2)
If you are really this productive using AI tools for software development, you could probably make even more money than you do presently by making video courses for how to achieve the results that you have. Because for a large majority of software developers, AI modes pose more problems than they solve. Browse this thread to look for examples, including: hallucinations of API methods that don't exist; conflation of two separate technologies that share a common terminology; lack of coherence when asking th
Re: (Score:2)
>> Browse this thread to look for examples
I don't count on slashdot commentary for an accurate assessment of the state of the art. Some negatively biased curmudgeon who dabbled briefly with one of the low-grade models and had a bad experience is not representative. Contrary to what the peanut gallery here says, "76% of professional developers either use AI coding tools or plan to adopt them soon, with 62% already using them and 14% planning to adopt them" so it must be working out pretty well for most
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>> LLMs are really good at automating the process of turning 1000 lines of otherwise approachable code into "enterprise grade" crap nobody wants to deal with
I can relate to that. Sometimes I'll be working on some hunk of existing legacy code that's easy to read but it is brittle and has always caused problems. I'll ask the LLM to suggest improvements, they are good at that. What typically happens is that every input and variable is now sanity-checked before use. There are additional try/catch blocks.
I see the problem (Score:2)
"most prominent tech brands"
They tend to follow the fad of the day
Smaller companies are a better option
Re: I see the problem (Score:3)
I'm glad I did performing arts. (Score:2)
I'm your type A 80ies computer kid and have been programming since my teens, starting out with Sharps Basic and Opcode on a portable pocket computer (called "handheld computer" back then). However, I didn't study CS but did a performing arts diploma with 5 years of full-time training instead, because my creative streak was stronger. Performing arts sure did help me with my career. Giving presentations and talking in public is no sweat for me whatsoever and it sure does help with office politics having stood
And it's the fault of Stanford grads (Score:2)
They've ruined everything
What happens when it isn't free anymore? (Score:2)
One reason vibe-coding is catching on with smaller firms is that, well, AI is "free" to them right now. I can go download Visual Studio Code, and get CoPilot for free...or maybe I ditch that and put Claude on it. Doesn't matter. I could still use it to generate code and hey, I'm not paying a thing.
They're getting "inexperienced junior developers" for free.
But 2 problems with that. The obvious one is noted above several times: how do you get senior, experienced developers when you haven't trained any junior
Re: (Score:2)
https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org] pretty much covered my thought about job satisfaction. If all you're doing each day, hour after hour, is "code reviews", that seems to me a really shitty job.
doubtful (Score:2)
Job hunting has always been stressful, even for Stanford grads, but some current 22-year-old wouldn't know that. I doubt that a Stanford CS degree doesn't give you a leg up. Show me data! I don't doubt that total "computer" hiring is down because web page designers are replaced by AI tools.
Re: (Score:2)
Stanford is no different than any other C.S. majors. The market is over saturated with C.S. graduates and has been for many years. Take a look at the YouTube "Coding for Everyone" video and it explains the situation.
Re: Guaranteed jobs? (Score:2)
Wow, a troll implosion (Score:2)
And in the process of feeding a troll and propagating a vacuous Subject, too.
Funny story time. I knew one of the seminal trolls many years ago. Perhaps he thought he was a flame warrior? When I first encountered him he was actually a master's student in the same department where I got my CS degree. He just loved being a nasty offensive and trollish person, apparently for the sake of being nasty.
Later on I heard that he was working in a fast food place, perhaps flipping burgers. Hard to imagine a person with
Re: Wow, a troll implosion (Score:2)
Re: US productivity is awful (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
i noticed the difficulty and complexity increasing while solving problems that aren't that hard.
Eventually i had to wonder if this is the new normal, after several years of supposedly cleaning up and eliminating tech debt, supposed maintainability improvements through automation, and yet now the most trivial things were like moving mountains.
KPIs improves when they were related to our customer satisfaction, ill grant that, but i don't see that being sustained with massive turnover, no documentation, and de