I went to university 2005-2008 and I was advised by many people at the time to not go into computer science. The reasoning was that outsourced software developers in low-cost regions like India and SEA would destroy salaries, and software developers should not expect to make more than $50k/year due to the competition.

Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by deep learning and neural networks. A quick Google search says an average radiologist in the US currently makes between $340,000 to $500,000 per year.

This might be the professional/career version of "buy when there's blood in the streets."

Can anyone really blame the students? If I were in their shoes, I probably wouldn't bother studying CS right now. From their perspective, it doesn't really matter whether AI is bullshit in any capacity; it matters whether businesses who are buying the AI hype are going to hire you or not.

Hell, I should probably be studying how to be a carpenter given the level at which companies are pushing vibe coding on their engineers.

"after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major"

That's such a terrible trend.

Reminds me of my peers back in ~2001 who opted not to take a computer science degree even though they loved programming because they thought all the software engineering jobs would be outsourced to countries like India and there wouldn't be any career opportunities for them. A very expensive mistake!

Certainly, I even know of experienced devs switching out of tech entirely. I think the next couple of decades are going to be very good for software engineers. There will be an explosion of demand yet a contraction in supply. We are in 2010 again.

It's backpedaling but I don't think it's planning ahead to prevent a developer shortage - rather it's pandering to the market's increasing skepticism around AI and that ultimately the promised moonshot of AI obsoleting all knowledge work didn't actually arrive (at least not in the near future).

It's similar to all those people who were hyping up blockchain/crypto/NFTs/web3 as the future, and now that it all came to pass they adapted to the next grift (currently it's AI). He is now toning down his messaging in preparation of a cooldown of the AI hype to appear rational and relevant to whatever comes next.

Or maybe they realize the AI needs humans in the loop for the foreseeable future for enterprise use cases and juniors (and people from LCL areas) are cheaper and make the economics make some sort of sense.

Agreed.

Considering the talk around junior devs lately on HN, there's way too many of them, it would indeed be amusing.

> changing their major

To what?