alt Hacker NewsI am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools.
Two points of anecdata from that experience:
- The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent.
- The professors do not know how to adapt their capstone / project-level courses. Core CS is obviously still the same, but for courses where the goal is to build a 'complex system', no one knows what qualifies as 'complex' anymore. The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era. The capabilities are also advancing so quickly that any answer they arrive at today could be stale in a month.
FWIW.
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To be fair, college CS programs have always been decades behind in my experience. Maybe schools like Stanford and MIT are different but the majority of CS programs are not teaching tech that is actually used in the business world.
Interesting that the algorithmic finance firms are still recruiting. Perhaps they still need a pipeline of rigorous thinkers, or are unwilling to cede significant influence over P+L to llms.
> but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era.
I have no idea what is complicated anymore. You can build a 3d game engine in a weekend or two with Ai.
> Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent.
This is the most made up thing I've ever seen on hn. Those firms hire probably 10 new grads a year (maybe combined!). Unless you're saying the collective talent graduating "high-tier CS programs" numbers in the 10s, this is literally impossible.
> They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus
Really? As in FAANG has stopped recruiting graduates?
When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.