They can't. Universities will eventually catch up to the demand of companies, just like how the one I attended switched from C/C++ to only managed languages.
With that the students were more directly a match for the in-demand roles, but reality is that other roles will see a reduction of supply.
The question here is: Will there be a need in the future for people who can actually code?
I think so. I also believe the field is evolving and that the pendulum always swings to extremes. Right now we are just beginning to see the consequences of the impact of AI on stability & maintainability of software. And we have not seen the impact of when it catastrophically goes wrong.
If you, together with your AI buddy, cannot solve the problem on this giant AI codebase, pulling in a colleague probably isn't going to help anymore.
The amount of code that is now being generated with AI (and accepted because it looks good enough) is causing long-term stability to suffer. What we are seeing is that AI is very eager to make the fixes without any regard towards past behavior or future behavior.
Of course, this is partially prevented by having better prompts, and human reviews. But this is not the future companies want us to go. They want us to prompt and move on.
AI will very eagerly create 10,000 pipes from a lake to 10,000 houses in need of water. And branch off of them. And again.
Until one day you realize the pipes have lead in them and you need to replace them.
Today this is already hard. With AI it's even harder because there is no unified implementation somewhere. It's all copy pasted for the sake of speed and shipping.
I have yet to see a Software Engineer who stands behind every line of code produced to be faster on net-new development using AI. In fact, most of the time they're slower because the AI doesn't know. And even when they use AI the outcome is worse because there is less learning. The kind of learning that eventually pushes the boundaries in 'how can we make things better'.
With that the students were more directly a match for the in-demand roles, but reality is that other roles will see a reduction of supply.
The question here is: Will there be a need in the future for people who can actually code?
I think so. I also believe the field is evolving and that the pendulum always swings to extremes. Right now we are just beginning to see the consequences of the impact of AI on stability & maintainability of software. And we have not seen the impact of when it catastrophically goes wrong.
If you, together with your AI buddy, cannot solve the problem on this giant AI codebase, pulling in a colleague probably isn't going to help anymore.
The amount of code that is now being generated with AI (and accepted because it looks good enough) is causing long-term stability to suffer. What we are seeing is that AI is very eager to make the fixes without any regard towards past behavior or future behavior.
Of course, this is partially prevented by having better prompts, and human reviews. But this is not the future companies want us to go. They want us to prompt and move on.
AI will very eagerly create 10,000 pipes from a lake to 10,000 houses in need of water. And branch off of them. And again.
Until one day you realize the pipes have lead in them and you need to replace them.
Today this is already hard. With AI it's even harder because there is no unified implementation somewhere. It's all copy pasted for the sake of speed and shipping.
I have yet to see a Software Engineer who stands behind every line of code produced to be faster on net-new development using AI. In fact, most of the time they're slower because the AI doesn't know. And even when they use AI the outcome is worse because there is less learning. The kind of learning that eventually pushes the boundaries in 'how can we make things better'.