alt.hn

3/16/2026 at 10:24:02 AM

Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

by tathagatadg

3/16/2026 at 8:01:39 PM

I taught an intro course last semester. It was intended for non-CS majors, but it ended up with one module having all CS majors after all. They were very pessimistic about their job opportunities at graduation.

I explained that the foundational knowledge is still very much necessary for now, even if you end up only reviewing AI code. Honestly, computational thinking is as important as ever, although how persuasive I was about this is up for debate.

We used some tools AI models just aren't good at (visual languages are not a strength of language models, and I explained that they couldn't help from day one), but it meant some weaker students still tried to use AI and were confidently told incorrect instructions. They often ended up stuck because the newest group we've gotten is very adverse to office hours when ChatGPT exists (out of ~75 students, only one ever showed up, although I did meet with many right after class). I'm very concerned for these students, using AI as a crutch was definitely not helping them succeed, but the ability to get easy answers (even if totally wrong) is too appealing.

by gs17

3/16/2026 at 10:58:26 AM

I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools.

Two points of anecdata from that experience:

- The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent.

- The professors do not know how to adapt their capstone / project-level courses. Core CS is obviously still the same, but for courses where the goal is to build a 'complex system', no one knows what qualifies as 'complex' anymore. The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era. The capabilities are also advancing so quickly that any answer they arrive at today could be stale in a month.

FWIW.

by jtbetz22

3/16/2026 at 11:22:19 AM

When I was in college in the early 2000s, it was the same. Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology.

by jazz9k

3/16/2026 at 11:27:32 AM

I wish it was decade for me, in early 2010s they were still teaching 90s approach to handling complex projects(upfront design, with custom DSL for each project and fully modelled by BA without any contact with actual users, with domain experts being siloed away - and all of that connected to codegen tools for xml from the 90s)

by Xelbair

3/16/2026 at 2:44:35 PM

It can be worse! I went back to school for some graduate work in the early 00s after having been in the industry for a handful of years. There was a required class that was one of those "here's what life is like in the real world instead of academia".

The instructor was a phd student who'd never been in industry.

He kept correcting me about industry practices, telling me that I had no idea what the real world was like.

by jghn

3/16/2026 at 11:34:37 AM

I had to deal with Java codegens from UML specs in 2021. So, nothing has changed! :')

by super256

3/16/2026 at 5:18:54 PM

Still there, cs bachelor

by Divisibly3

3/16/2026 at 11:42:24 AM

Back when soap wasn’t just for hygiene.

by reactordev

3/16/2026 at 7:30:14 PM

I still see software sold as soa compliant, whatever that means. I think we have just started recycling and mixing sw memes at this loint. Like you see someone wearing bell-bottoms with an 80s dayglo jacket. We do agile soap waterfall kanban model driven design here.

by galangalalgol

3/16/2026 at 7:20:42 PM

Having taken a graduate-level CS course as a non-CS major, yes sw is about a decade behind what is actually being used. But the algorithms don't just magically go bad.

by enceladus06

3/16/2026 at 11:41:45 AM

Something tells me it was always like that. My university professors were teaching things nobody wanted to learn, and people were practically begging to be taught more up-to-date hireable skills.

Every time there was project work, we would be recommended using Swing or similar because that is what professors knew, but everyone used React because nobody hires Swing developers.

Someone once said "Our SQL professor's SQL knowledge is 10 years out of date. Probably because he has been a professor for around 10 years at this point" and that kind of stuck with me.

by petterroea

3/16/2026 at 6:51:42 PM

Someone told me that once a good idea came about it took about 5 years to process it into a book and then it took another 5 years to be accepted by people teaching outside of consultancies.

Of course, by then, it was antiquated.

by readthenotes1

3/16/2026 at 11:47:19 AM

This is why I have always said, that a degree in CS is useless without some degree of passion towards it.

No professor can enable you for tomorrow, and a CS career is one of constant education.

I'm glad I learned some STM32 assembly, but with the resources available today, I wouldn't get anywhere near as deep as I did in the early 2k's.

I am building a local low power RAG system for the programing languages I like, but I'll still include stm32 asm.

by Akuehne

3/16/2026 at 12:16:30 PM

> This is why I have always said, that a degree in CS is useless without some degree of passion towards it.

I would add I don't know how anyone can do any degree and career without some sort of passion for it.

For me personally, not only do I need passion but I have to have some sort of belief in the product and/or company I'm working for. In the early 00's I worked at a company, not software related nor was I working as a developer, and didn't like what I was doing nor did I believe in the product, it was lacking in so many areas where they were trying to frame it fit in the product market. I left after 3 years and did something completely different.

by fm2606

3/16/2026 at 11:59:54 AM

In the UK I did comp-sci from 2000, did a couple of extra modules. One was from engineering and covered communication theory -- nyquist etc. Another from was the English Department of all places and covered XML and data.

Very little coverage of tcp/ip in any of the courses. Language of choice in CompSci was Java at the time, which was reasonable as OOP was the rage.

Some compsci lecturers were very much of the opinion that computers got in the way of teaching Computer Science.

by iso1631

3/16/2026 at 12:15:16 PM

I did my CS undergrad in China but was already in the UK early 2000s. I was also abit surprised there's little mention of TCP/IP which is kinda considered classics if there's anything taught in CS at all. Java was definitly the new dominating force in industry and academia at that time.

However it depends on the resources the univ got. In some places there were other less Comp sci / software engineering focused degrees but got a little content overlap (I guess for financial benefits to enroll more students) such as e-commerce / digital degrees. They shared some courses with CS but not all.

by dumb1224

3/16/2026 at 1:06:42 PM

It's difficult to remember clearly from 25 years ago, the OSI model was certainly covered, and I clearly remember datagram programming, but nothing in terms of say network routing protocols.

The engineering course covered token ring. Remember in 2000, and certainly a few years before (when I suspect half the courses were created as lecturers often go years between updating them), Ethernet and IP were not the only kid on the block. Netbios/ipx was still in widespread use, Token ring (which I do remember being covered, as I'd encountered ipx and ip over serial and ethernet, but never token ring) was still being developed. HTTP was only 9 years old.

by iso1631

3/16/2026 at 12:49:04 PM

"Most professors were at least a decade behind current technology"

Surely there are some core concepts.

I hear that schools today aren't teaching how to build a compiler. But to me this seems like a task that contains so many useful skills that can be applied everywhere.

by FrustratedMonky

3/16/2026 at 11:28:04 AM

To be fair, college CS programs have always been decades behind in my experience. Maybe schools like Stanford and MIT are different but the majority of CS programs are not teaching tech that is actually used in the business world.

by someguyiguess

3/16/2026 at 11:33:36 AM

Maybe I’m an oddball, but I’d rather hire a new grad with sound fundamentals, but learned on an older tech stack, then somebody with all the buzzwords but no fundamentals.

And I’ve always found summer internships to be good way to find out. Even better if the candidate is willing to work part-time through their senior year.

by alistairSH

3/16/2026 at 11:48:58 AM

Yeah. I see a phrase like “hirable skills” and… it feels like “skills” that are probably going to be outdated every couple of months.

by kelipso

3/16/2026 at 1:10:34 PM

100%.

For me, "hireable skills" (for a new grad) are things like "can do a basic whiteboard exercise". I'll ask them to sketch out a program to solve a business problem. I do higher ed software, so usually start with "build a class registration system from scratch" - they're recent grads, so the problem domain is known; there's plenty of space to discussion to move in several different directions; fits nicely in 20-30 minutes.

Bare minimum, I'd expect them to ask clarifying questions (particularly around system constraints, performance, etc). And then sketch out a very basic system diagram (I don't expect them to know AWS or Azure, but do want to see things like "ID provider", "course catalog", "waitlist service", etc. Then I'll pick a service and have them pseudocode some of it.

Sadly, somewhere around 50% of grads CANNOT do the above. I'm not sure how, but I've left interviews thinking "I hope they get a refund" more than a few times.

by alistairSH

3/16/2026 at 11:47:08 AM

The Pythagoras theorem doesn’t change even if you use an LLM. Fundamentals shouldn’t either. Don’t see why schools should see this any differently.

by compounding_it

3/16/2026 at 12:13:03 PM

I agree. That's why universities should never teach any practical real world programming languages. They should stick to Scheme and MMIX.

by daymanstep