Microsoft and CMU Team Up to Train Early Career Software Engineers
cs.cmu.edu38 points by azhenley 4 hours ago
38 points by azhenley 4 hours ago
> "With so many companies worldwide faced with upheaval due to AI in software development, I believe this program will become a template for rapidly leveling up new developers across the industry."
This seems cognitively dissonant with the AI upheaval resulting in the industry needing fewer developers. Maybe they want cheaper developers?
It feels like it's all senior developers now and nobody new. At some point they will want someone new and won't be able to find them.
> At some point they will want someone new
If we freeze AI models at their current stage of development, then yes. If not, given the rate at which models are improving (compare Claude today to Claude 1 year ago), in 3 to 5 years software development could be fully automated.
we dont' need to "freeze" models if next versions aren't a huge improvement over previous ones. That seems to be case now.
Are you sure that's how this works?
Let's see, my grandparents were about 160cm when they were 35. My parents were about 170cm when they were 35 and I am about 180cm around 35. You are saying I can expect my grandchildren to be around 200cm at that age and their grandchildren 220cm?
Are you sure that AI model progression and the height of your family members are 35 is related? It seems unlikely but I guess you'd know better than I.
If we didn't have any humans before your grandparents, and these were the only data points we have to extrapolate from, then, yes, this would be a very reasonable prediction.
Some of that is long pre-existing, where most companies go: "Let someone else train juniors, we'll hire them away afterwards."
Is there evidence that overall software developer positions are declining relative to other jobs? It wouldn't surprise me if Jevons paradox applied here.
Curious how realistic the skills learned in such a program are still applicable in 1-2 years. This industry is moving very fast, it feels like the self motivated, self starter, self learner has been thriving. Probably a good thing to have such a program, but I have doubts.
The industry feels like it’s moving at lightspeed but I feel the fundamentals that were true 30-50 years ago still hold up for most real life work
The YC meta model is probably a better school than school now. I'm sure YC knows that.
If you need to be told what to do, it's a short step to your AI replacement being told what to do; money will ensure it. If your job is to discover and capture new things in an exploding possibility space, that's a career.
Schools should teach hacking, but it doesn't seem that's what this program is doing.
> students will take DevOps: Engineering for Secure Development and Deployment
... in Github Actions? What a great way to discourage them from entering the industry.
Microsoft? Maybe they’re hopeful the next admin will make OPT cheap labor again.
"software engineer" is likely a career long gone. "Product engineer" and architect is probably the only software-adjacent title that will have consistent demand for awhile.
Basically still just a prompt jockey but knows the difference between outputs that are good and bad.
I was a huge AI skeptic from the beginning through ~2025. But once Opus came out, it's pretty obvious writing code by hand is an obsolete skill on its own. You still need to know how to read code, how to know what good/bad code looks like, and if it matches what you're truly asking for. But there's really no reason to be typing code with your own fingers in 2026 and beyond.
2024 me would be shocked at current me saying this.
>how to know what good/bad code looks like, and if it matches what you're truly asking for
And how you would know to do that, if you're not writing code?
> writing code by hand is an obsolete skill on its own. You still need to know how to read code, how to know what good/bad code looks like,
It's my impression that the best way to be able to read code and distinguish good from bad is to write code. Get burned a few times and you know why certain patterns are a bad idea. You don't internalize that equally well from a powerpoint slide.
Compare this to math. Every successful mathematician has gone through the motions of proving certain basic theorems in math. Like Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers. And then they went through related exercises. This was all learned with sweat. The statement above is akin to saying there is no point in doing any proofs by hand anymore, just read one and you will have sufficient understanding of mathematics and become a good mathematician. I don't think that's true. (And I also believe that many sw eng people would be better at their job had they groked the proof of the halting problem.)
Yep. If you think your job involves "writing code" as the core part of your responsibilities, write yourself off immediately. That career is dead and dusted. Sadly most companies still haven't realized this, given how few Architect openings exist (and those that do, most are asking for 20+ years of exp lol)
In my professional experience most people I encountered that held the architect title didnt really know anything about proper software engineering and just knew how to talk well and hold meetings with many different stakeholders - which tbf is not a trivial skill, but I can’t imagine everyone becoming architects and no one doing actual work they understand.
Definition of what the role actually means can change as well over time, in the same way that a civil engineer also isn’t physically doing the construction.
Most companies aren't gonna need an architect, but if you can tell and demonstrate a good story around quality/risk/stability they might be interested in that.
Can anyone share syllabi for these?
Im sorry for being so negative but MS sold software engineers (and US high school and college students) down the river so long ago, the nerve of them now even pretending to care is just so offensive. This business has gotten so rotten, the best thing I can tell anyone is to find something rewarding to do with your life.
Now that you have learnt Software Engineering, hunting for a job is easy just make 10^10^10^10 job applications.
“So you type your request into this chat window…”
The assumption here is that senior engineers are still needed to review AI-generated code. That assumption might not be valid for very long. I find myself reviewing AI-generated code less and less because the code quality is very good -- and getting better every month. Soon reviewing AI-generated code will be like manually verifying the results of a calculator--it is a waste of time. At that point all you need is an architect. I predict senior software engineers will be obsolete within a year.
> At that point all you need is an architect.
What value would an architect provide that a SOTA LLM can't?
As of now it is insufficient to outline the end-user requirements, AI will ask you a bunch of questions that requires you to make architectural decisions. I think within 3 to 5 years that might change as well.
If you say "yeah go with your own recommendation" every time you'll get something that'll at least kinda work sooner or later. Not sure you need an "architect."
But is that workflow enough in a competitive world anyway, or will there be an edge for people who do more than "outline the end-user requirements" like it's the waterfall 70s?
As a principal, I still catch people submitting shitty AI code on a weekly basis. Their brains are rotting to the point that they can't tell if the code is doing the correct thing or not.
Just left my programming job due to this. Stopped thinking, stopped caring. AI destroyed my coding joy, so I’m finished with that. Leadership challenges next - hope to use my brain a bit more.
You won’t, leadership requires even less brain.
Good leadership requires brains. Average leadership is attainable without brains.
I've found myself engaging more with AI writing code. There is no easy time during the work day. I'm talking to product about what they want, communicating with AI to write it, and verifying that it covers what was asked for. And the better I get at it, the more of the product I need to learn at a faster pace. If I find some downtime, I work on additional features at the same time, something I wouldn't do on my own.
Quite simply, I'm more mentally drained at the end of a day working with AI than I am a normal day of coding. There is still a lot of energy and thought that needs to go into what needs to be written.
> mentally drained
Anecdotally, I find my final mood often depends on whether I know the origin and trustworthiness of the stuff in front of me, ex:
1. [Good] I know what I wanted, I have a concept of what "correct" looks like. I use the LLM to generate an output, and I check it. Even if it's annoyingly wrong, I can fix it up.
2. [Bad] Someone else had a concept, and they put it through an LLM to generate something (Ticket, PR, review comment.) However the provenance is lost, I have to guess which parts of the thing are "real" and which are nonsense the human never actually intended or even noticed.
I think some of the latter drain comes from how reading means inferring/simulate the mind of the writer, but LLM output is wrong enough that little warning flags never stop popping up.
The issue is the higher ups don't even seem to care. You just turn into the guy that's yelling at the clouds. I don't know what the future of this industry is.