The computer science major is in trouble. At Berkeley, it's complicated

3 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by PopAlongKid

1 Comments

jdw64

8 hours ago

Wow, but it's surprising that even those prestigious computer science graduates have to worry about employment.

Personally, I think current LLMs have clear limits, so would engineering majors be at risk? That's a bit of a difficult point.

Because LLMs are good at writing code, but as complexity increasingly grows, if a person handles it, the number of lines one individual has to deal with will grow exponentially. To maintain that or find bugs, you'd need major-specific knowledge. After all, building a program is fundamentally about controlling complexity.

There's a slightly difficult point here. It's true that frontier AIs are good at coding, but once you start running agents at a large scale, token efficiency varies depending on whether a human intervenes or not. Ultimately, if you compare current token costs, isn't hiring a junior person cheaper? Is the US a different situation? Thinking about the API prices of GPT 6 or Fable makes me think that even more.