> "The prediction was that software engineers would lose their jobs first, and the recent trend went the other way: demand for software engineers is higher than ever"
Hard to take anything the author says seriously making nonsensical claims like this. The software engineering job market has been getting worse every year since 2022 by virtually every metric. This is especially true at the entry and mid level. For example, computer engineering and computer science majors now have the #2 and #4 highest unemployment rates amongst recent graduates [1]
Students are smart to be cautious about the future, and it's annoying that adults with no skin in the game so flippantly dismiss these concerns without any data to back it up.
'In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they do not believe there is a place for them in the future.'
It's quite a leap to go from "I'm afraid of not getting a job after graduating" to "I do not believe there is a place for me in the future". Maybe it hasn't been the case for computer scientists in the past decade, but it's pretty normal to be worried about getting a job after graduating from one's college problem, even if one knows that most people get jobs when they graduate.
I stopped reading soon after that, when it became obvious that the article was LLM-written.
> The other story arrives by email. PhD students who cannot wait to graduate, because they want to join a frontier lab and they have concluded that research in academia is meaningless. They are counting the years until they can leave.
> I believe both stories are wrong, and wrong for the same reason. They assume the future of research belongs to whoever has the most GPUs.
As a current grad student in an mlsys lab, the sentiment is definitely true. However, I think the root cause is almost certainly not the lack of GPUs in academia, at least it's not the complete reason. The problem is the most important innovations really come from the industry right now. If you want to work on LLM inference serving, it is the frontier labs or hyperscalers that have the most incentives to solve the problems because improving the TPOT by 1% can save them tons of money. It is also much easier to catch up with the fast-growing field if you are in the industry because you get to talk to so many insiders (at least that has been my experience during the summer internship).
Papers only amplify this problem. Traditionally, academia is supposed to work on radical ideas that industries don't want to try. In recent years, these ideas are harder to get in as papers because the quality of peer review at top conferences is awful nowadays.
I'm not even going to talk about the AI slops in research papers and their artifacts. Guess why I'm posting on HN right now instead of working?
Finally, it's very disappointing to see that a professor at top school is so careless about editing stuff created by LLM. He might be busy, but the number of people that get discouraged by the LLM writing style will hurt his purpose of promoting the open source week. And apparently some people from industry had a better sense of that [1]. Yet another example of why some people prefer industry to academia these days.
Big claims require and all, but he's an Asst. Prof at CMU, so not the usual suspect for AIP - and presumably there's pudding on the way given the description of this "Open Source Week" thingy. Will be interesting to see what comes out...
> "The prediction was that software engineers would lose their jobs first, and the recent trend went the other way: demand for software engineers is higher than ever"
Hard to take anything the author says seriously making nonsensical claims like this. The software engineering job market has been getting worse every year since 2022 by virtually every metric. This is especially true at the entry and mid level. For example, computer engineering and computer science majors now have the #2 and #4 highest unemployment rates amongst recent graduates [1]
Students are smart to be cautious about the future, and it's annoying that adults with no skin in the game so flippantly dismiss these concerns without any data to back it up.
[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market?utm...
'In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they do not believe there is a place for them in the future.'
It's quite a leap to go from "I'm afraid of not getting a job after graduating" to "I do not believe there is a place for me in the future". Maybe it hasn't been the case for computer scientists in the past decade, but it's pretty normal to be worried about getting a job after graduating from one's college problem, even if one knows that most people get jobs when they graduate.
I stopped reading soon after that, when it became obvious that the article was LLM-written.
CSU is #2 in the country for CS program. If those students don't think they can find a job, it's bleak.
> The other story arrives by email. PhD students who cannot wait to graduate, because they want to join a frontier lab and they have concluded that research in academia is meaningless. They are counting the years until they can leave.
> I believe both stories are wrong, and wrong for the same reason. They assume the future of research belongs to whoever has the most GPUs.
As a current grad student in an mlsys lab, the sentiment is definitely true. However, I think the root cause is almost certainly not the lack of GPUs in academia, at least it's not the complete reason. The problem is the most important innovations really come from the industry right now. If you want to work on LLM inference serving, it is the frontier labs or hyperscalers that have the most incentives to solve the problems because improving the TPOT by 1% can save them tons of money. It is also much easier to catch up with the fast-growing field if you are in the industry because you get to talk to so many insiders (at least that has been my experience during the summer internship).
Papers only amplify this problem. Traditionally, academia is supposed to work on radical ideas that industries don't want to try. In recent years, these ideas are harder to get in as papers because the quality of peer review at top conferences is awful nowadays.
I'm not even going to talk about the AI slops in research papers and their artifacts. Guess why I'm posting on HN right now instead of working?
Finally, it's very disappointing to see that a professor at top school is so careless about editing stuff created by LLM. He might be busy, but the number of people that get discouraged by the LLM writing style will hurt his purpose of promoting the open source week. And apparently some people from industry had a better sense of that [1]. Yet another example of why some people prefer industry to academia these days.
[1] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576
Who's wee? The name of the system?
Absent evidence, this reads like AI psychosis.
Big claims require and all, but he's an Asst. Prof at CMU, so not the usual suspect for AIP - and presumably there's pudding on the way given the description of this "Open Source Week" thingy. Will be interesting to see what comes out...
'psychosis' might be a strong word, but definitely written or at least heavily edited by an LLM. I would guess Claude's writing style.