As someone who let their parents influence their degree choices, DON’T LET THEM DECIDE FOR YOU!!! (please read that not as yell but the unhinged screaming of a man with 20 years of regret).

The only person in your life that will make a decision in your best interest is you. Other people will always be motivated by their own wants, needs, and views. Your parents views on AI and CS are likley not well informed.

You definitely should do some degree, but it doesn’t have to be a compsci one - is my personal take.

I did myself personally do a compsci degree, but to get into software it turned out to be quite unnecessary - if you are already building things and contributing to projects then just like being an artist the strength of your experience and your portfolio matter far more than your on-paper qualifications.

There’s also the consideration that in computing especially, the industry moves so fast that a lot of what you learn at uni may already be old by the time you learn it, making actual experience and portfolio even more valuable.

In the company I work for, there are brilliant software engineers who have degrees in music and language, and even a former medical doctor!

Point is, if you want to get into software a compsci degree isn’t the main factor. You should do some degree, but study whatever you believe will bring you the most joy and personal fulfilment - and if the answer to that is actually compsci then great.

What is their “reasonable” alternative that won’t be impacted by AI?

I was pursuing computer science back in 2003 in community college. I walked away from it for a few reasons. First it looked like programming jobs would all be outsourced to India. Second, several notable viruses were programmed by teenagers (MSBlast), and Google was hiring people without degrees. It just seemed like my four year degree would not land me a job - I needed to be gifted in ways I already wasn’t.

Obviously, all of that was wrong. I could have made a killing if I stayed with it, especially since I live in proximity to Silicon Valley. But I will never know. I could have been miserable and bouncing between tech bro Web 3.0 startups.

I don’t have the exact quote in front of me but at the beginning or end of Learn Python the Hard Way, Zed Shaw talks about how in technology industries, skilled programmers are a dime a dozen, but in any other industry those who can leverage programming are adept tech ninja gods who are well respected and valued. I have found that to be true in my experience for what it’s worth. I still enjoy programming and it sets me apart from many of my peers. If I was programming 40+ hours per week I’m not sure I would enjoy it. In other words: it’s not about the tool but what you do with it that matters.

Your parents may or may not be correct. But it wouldn’t hurt for you to expand your horizons. Nobody can take programming away from you. Maybe you’ll work on new 3d printers or drones or mechanical engineering or some other interest that you haven’t yet found.

Your parent has no idea what they’re talking about. This is what happens when AI companies are given more money than they know what to do with; their marketing gets more and more unhinged, and eventually leaks out to the laymen.

I guess what might help you convince them is some perspective. It’s true that LLMs can generate code, but what a laymen doesn’t see is that the code they generate is in a language built by humans, using frameworks and tools built by humans, running on platforms built by humans, and distributed through infrastructure built by humans. Additionally, LLMs themselves are built by humans.

Could all of that be AI generated too? No. Anthropic already tried to build a browser and a compiler with Claude recently, and both projects failed spectacularly. The transformer model powering current LLMs has hit a wall; advancements have slowed down significantly in recent years, and the only thing that will get things going is another breakthrough. You’re better off gambling your tuition at a casino than betting we’ll have a breakthrough within 7 years (or worse, predicting the impact it will have on job markets)

And of course, the idea that an administrative role is safe is silly. There are already experiments to have LLMs run physical businesses on their own. If I had to make a prediction, I’d say business roles are much easier for an LLM to completely replace than engineering.

And finally, the bubble. LLMs today are affordable because of a frenzied market of degenerate gamblers; when the bubble pops (which will happen within 7 years), these AI companies will be forced to restructure or die. Anthropic charges $200/mo for their top models, and that has rate limits that people hit regularly. If Anthropic can’t afford unmetered access at $200/mo while they’re swimming in cash, then there’s no way in hell those prices don’t explode post-bubble. I’m not saying AI companies will die, but you and I aren’t going to be able to use them.

Like @Newsteinleo@infosec.pub said, don’t let them decide this for you. If they won’t help pay your tuition, then get your own student loans, and go to a public university to save money.

A) do what you enjoy the most, that will lead to you making the most money. You can be a lawyer who hates it and you’ll make less than money than a barber who loves being a barber. The latter will be happy motivated creative eventually stsrt their own barber shop etc. The miserable lawyer will take a salary job find the easiest job possible, be making a mediocre salary forever. Yes, a lawyer has a much higher floor, the cheapest lawyer is still making like $60K a year, versus the cheapest barber making minimum wage, but again if you really like what you’re doing you’ll be motivated and happy and move up in the profession.

B) it’s normal to be scared because a lot will change in software industry because of AI – still, a hundred years after the invention of the car we still have tons of car mechanics, and we still have lots of people working in auto manufacturing. Think about how much technology robotics and even AI too has changed the automobile industry. Yes, a professional mechanic in 2026 has to be proficient on computers in a way that didn’t exist two decades ago because of all the computerized diagnostics, but we still need mechanics. And a lot of car work is basic stuff people used to do for themselves, changing the oil changing bulbs – in other words the technology made the consumers rely more on professionals for help, even if it’s doing stuff that 50 years ago mechanics didn’t bother with because back then everyone just changed their own oil.

So yeah, do what you love, and computer science is a perfectly reasonable economic choice, even if right now software hiring is very slow. (That’s more of a function of the financial health of major software companies than anything to do with the underlying value software devs bring to the market.)

It is hard to imagine CS becoming completely obselete. First of all, AI, even under the assumption that it will take hold everywhere in future, still is in its infancy. It might require a complete paradigm shift to become AGI.

A non-desirable situation is that many jobs in industry will transform into AI code supervision (it might be that this business vision completely fails and slowly disappears too since lowering your dev numbers will create bottle necks which AI can not solve unless it is AGI). If this business model sticks however, you should know checking code all the time without writing any could be quite a soul destroying process. This could turn into a situation where you only do your job to earn money and really code on the side for your personal projects (which was the case for many software devs before the AI but likely more so in this context).

If AI does not turn into AGI, I suspect it will still remain as a tool. Companies who fired junior devs in favour of AI hoping they can one day completely go dev free will likely suffer from experience gaps and try to refill their ranks. I suppose like with everything software jobs will suffer from enshitification too with CEOs favouring quantitative output metrics over qualitative ones. Overall I am not sure if it is a bleak future for just CS or for everything so my vote would be do what is your passion but be ready to be flexible with what you do with it.

If AI turns into AGI and tech oligarchs own it, even with ethical problems aside, it will be more than just CS that suffers from it.

I would say, if its something you are passionate about and relatively good at then its a good path for you. The people who get into CS just for the money and job opportunities won’t be the ones to last in a shrinking market.

Also. What you study in college does not have to be what you do for a job or do forever. The purpose of college is to get a well rounded education not simply career training.

So you could get a degree in CS and end up working in something completely unrelated. Or you could get a degree in History, and keep learning CS for fun and end up working in CS for the rest of your life.

You could save yourself the money and find/complete the relevant coursework instead, if you have the motivation for it. Writing programs and getting them to work is the main thing you do in undergrad CS.

Tbh. I wouldn’t go into CS rn if you let me re do it.

I really wouldn’t. It’s ASS. The industry is facing problems much beyond just LLMs. There’s a culture problem neigh unsolvable. If you want to be pissed of 24/7 then be my guest.

If I had the option I would probably go into some branch of biology or chemistry.

I’m a technical lead for an AI-based startup and enthusiast about AI. I’ve been in software development for about 30 years. I’m responsible for making sure my teams use AI in their development process and enabling them and measuring the results. So from the perspective of your average lemming, I am biased towards AI and all of the terrible things it heralds, and probably literally Satan. I want you to keep that perspective in mind as you read my thoughts.

AI can create simple applications well. Of there is a tedious part of your job that takes time and focus away from your key job duties, AI can probably write a Python script to automate that for you.

The capabilities of AI are continuing to expand through breaking your ask up into multiple smaller tasks and executing them and verifying the output. However the ability of AI is growing at a smaller exponent than the cost. AI is not sustainable currently. At some point, the true cost of all the data center construction, hardware, electricity, etc will have to be passed on to customers and AI development projects will become vastly more expensive.

AI doesn’t think and doesn’t learn (though RAG pipelines can make it more effective) which means it can’t learn through failure. The number of times it has led me in a circle because it doesn’t know how to fix something and keeps trying different things until it has spent $10-20 in tokens just to reinvent the original problem is high.

The hardest parts of development aren’t working the code. The hardest parts are translating requirements into code. Identifying and reasoning about edge cases. Planning and architecting. Identifying design tradeoffs and recommending / picking the right one. Coordinating with stakeholders.

AI can help with those tasks but it can’t do those tasks. AI might slightly reduce the number of CSEs in the world a bit, but it will never, ever replace a significant number of us. It can’t. The code it produces sucks without knowledgeable human guidance.

My teams are seeing a 10-12% self-reported productivity gain (or will take a few months before we have verifiable velocity management so take that with a grain of salt). We are aspiring to maybe 25% productivity gains on greenfield development. But to be honest that’s the company line. I’m hopeful but skeptical we will see even that. I use AI every day and it is helpful in lots of ways, but you have to recognize when it’s going off the rails or doing the wrong thing.

I’m actually in the middle of reviewing a draft acceptance criteria for a project I’m leading. It read all of the technical requirements and diagrams. It missed a bunch of stuff, got a bunch of stuff wrong, and most of what’s left is not written for the right audience — this should be a product owner document that doesn’t require examining code or databases to determine success, but because much of what we have is technical documentation, that’s what it wrote everywhere.

I know this is getting long, but I want you to understand CSE jobs aren’t going anywhere for a bunch of reasons. It remains a great field. There is likely to be some pain in the industry over the next few years as CEOs learn we cannot be replaced so easily, but if you are just getting started, I have a feeling you might enter the market on the other side of that just as there is a big hiring boom as they realize they’ve fucked up.

Good luck!

I wish people would stop treating college like job training. Study what you’re most passionate about and interested in. Study whatever you would not regret studying, even if you never got a job related to that thing. Without “networking” I do think it will be very hard to find your first job related to CS for the foreseeable future (it’s been like that before as well).

CS will go in a several different directions:

• Some will be over AI agents to make high value, low risk things
• Some will be after AI agents to trouble shoot and repair
• Some will build stuff completely without AI just cause

There’s gonna be room for all of those in industry. Companies are gonna move away from large scale general solutions and expect boutique in house software that does exactly what they need to be developed with the help of AI and others are gonna expect human maintenance in legacy languages.

The trades will always be available, but so will developers–it’s the balance of expectations and the tools we use that are changing–same as always.

Personally, I hate it. I still do my development by hand, though I’ve had to learn to use the tools for compliance.

I’ve spent the last year job searching and I’ve been made to feel like my degree isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. I’ve applied to hundreds of openings that claim to be entry level, only to get the same form letter back telling me they’ve decided to go with a more qualified applicant. Haven’t even landed a single interview. Feels like I can’t get experience because I don’t have experience.

I won’t tell you not to pursue your passion, I got my degree in CS because I sincerely enjoy programming. But do be aware that the job market is hell right now, and it may only get worse.

Other comments are right that AI shouldn’t be replacing programmers, but they aren’t really answering the question of whether you can get a job. It’s not that AI will completely replace all programmers, but employers do seem to think they don’t need entry-level roles anymore, and the supply of fresh grads outpaces the demand of job openings. If all you have is a degree and nothing else, you’ll have a very hard time getting a foot in the door.

My best advice I can offer is to get at least one internship under your belt before you graduate. Most internship positions explicitly say they’re only for current students, so you have a limited time to get something you can put on your resume. I feel like that was my mistake and now it’s too late for me.

Software dev with over 17 years experience here, who also uses AI a lot in his job.

Why? Because AI will take them all (or is more likely to take them all).

People are pretty stupid

How the hell would AI be able to take over… without people with CS skills to… make the… AI?

Its literally like claiming that engineers jobs will be taken over by robots… Who is going to make and design the robots…?

AI isnt going to take over our jobs, AI is a tool we use to do our jobs better/faster.

Its akin to what happened with carriage drivers when the automobile was invented. Horses lost their jobs, for sure, but cab drivers now vastly outnumber how many horse carriages we used to have.

When the cost and time to do a job goes down, demand goes up exponentially because budgets follow a curve, down to a breaking point but a breaking point we arent anywhere remotely close to.

When you halve the cost of your product, you MORE than double your demand because as price goes down, the buyers who can afford you go up EXPONENTIALLY.

So don’t worry about it, but you DO need to extremely critically be very aware of and be ready to learn how to use AI.

Also, a Comp Sci degree is a theoretical math degree focused on the theory of programming. Its not recommended for a practical path in life if you want to be actually making software.

Computer Sciences: Publishing papers on math theory with respect to AI, Encryption, Math, Game Theory, Set Theory, stuff like that

Computer Engineering: Designing and building hardware, and creating firmware for it. ESp32s and Arduinos go BRRRRRR. Get read to solder stuff.

Software Engineering: I wanna make programs that do stuff for people, but I demand a higher salary and in turn am eligible for more advanced work where peoples lives and safety might be at stake. However, I have to spend an extra 40 to 50 grand to get this title.

Software Developer: I wanna make programs too, but Im not gonna spend 40 grand on a fancy ring I can show off at parties and I cant call myself an “engineer” or I might get in trouble, but unless the stuff Im working on involves human lives/safety or mission critical things like bank software, no one gives a shit. You’ll make less money but also have a waaay eaiser time finding work

Make sure you know which one you want and pick accordingly.