Is a Computer Science Degree WORTHLESS 🤯? (in the age of AI)

four years ago in 2019 I started my computer science degree next to my job little did I know that by 2023 we have powerful AIS and language models that can teach me literally anything for free they can code better than I do sometimes an Ultimate Machine learning and much other domains I also specialized in machine learning and AI but nowadays you can build a decent machine learning model very easily with very few to no examples the so-called zero shot or few shot learning machine learning is getting very different from what we used to know traditional machine learning just like any other field is turned on his head with the rise of powerful language models nowadays so what's the point of getting a computer science degree aren't we all going to be out of job soon I still have one more semester to go before I can graduate so it's time for me to reflect and evaluate my decision to get this degree things are very uncertain today and we're all in different situations but I hope to share some of my thoughts with some of you who may be asking yourself the same question question so first thing first let's ask ourselves this question again why should you take a computer science degree in the first place and what have I learned from it my primary motivation to get a formal degree in computer science was to have a structure and guided roadmap for getting the fundamental Knowledge and Skills these include everything from programming algorithms and data structures how computers work computer security and learn about different Technologies like machine learning and AI the curriculum helps you learn from the basic concepts to the more advanced things and also try to introduce some broader topics and case studies that you can also dive into this talk to helps you avoid jumping around mindlessly and get confused you also get various assignments and exams to evaluate your understanding for me having those fundamentals makes it easier for me to learn something new in Tech often I can say yeah this rings a bell and once in a while something would click and I would get some Erica moments when I actually understand something that I learned in the past when we just start out in learning something we Face a deep unknown unknown we just don't know what we don't know even with chat TPT nowadays to effectively use it you need to know what to ask if you just say tell me everything I don't know to master python that would be a very tough case for AI to answer you can ask it to give you a roadmap but how do you know if it's complete and especially on topics that are important but less talked about on the internet this may change in the future but in my opinion AI tools nowadays are still more useful as a tutor than a real Mentor another important motivation is that a degree can help you stand out in the market where a lot of people are self-taught it's not a secret that recruiters almost always look at your formal education as a starting point unless you are outstanding in your working experience I'm not saying the self-taught route is inferior to a formal education by any means in fact it's even more important I'm just saying this is a status quo but something I learned that's perhaps more important than a degree itself is that I became better at problem solving skills at least now I'm used to debugging issues on my own and figuring things out even with sloppy documentation this is because I have done several projects during my study and seen how my classmates solve problems I've also seen my instructors approach the issues and learn from their thought process I think there's a magic in observing someone do something you can learn so much from it and of course I got a portfolio of some nice projects that I can show and perhaps a key takeaway from all this that I deeply internalized is that all complex things start with simple steps and they are built up and refined over time it's no magic and because of that I gained some extra confidence in myself whenever I do or learn something so fast forward to 2023 where AI is changing everything including the tech jobs with a computer science degree still be worth it let's imagine this scenario two candidates apply for the same software engineer or data scientist job and by the way most of the job is now just using AI tools one candidate has a computer science degree and the other one has only some experience prompting chatibility to help him do the job if you were an employer which candidate would you choose with everything equal I would choose the one with a computer science degree at least I have some expectations that he's equipped with the right Basics so he may have a better detector if the AI is saying something wrong yeah detector is super important these days I'd assume he know how to properly follow the instructions provided by the AI and test and troubleshoot problems if they arise imagine one day you woke up and decide to want to create an app you've got everything the idea business canvas Revenue model the launch timeline everything is ready but a week before launching you can't shake the feeling that you're missing something staring at your laptop you realize what it is you don't know how to code not python not JavaScript just maybe some basic sequel from an online course Don't Panic you can solve this problem you just need charity after many hours wrestling which activity and trying to get something working finally you're happy with what you have the app is launched you're super excited a few days later you got notifications that your website has been hacked it turned out summer Taco has used SQL detection to steal passwords and sensitive information from all your users well because chat Deputy didn't say anything about this and heck you didn't know SQL injection was even a thing this scenario seems absurd but I bet it could happen if someone does not have complete understanding of developing applications and if he just solely relies on what an AI gives him also I believe someone with the solid computer science or programming background can use AI tools much more effectively a friend of mine works as a data scientist for a company and he told me he used Bing to help him with coding but apparently he can't tell his manager he's doing that he told me that a lot of times it comes down to actually describing exactly what you want and giving the right hints to the AI to accomplish that if there's an error or something is wrong usually relatives need to iterate maybe two or three times with the AI to get to a very good solution sometimes he wrote the code himself and asked the AI to optimize his code and see what he comes up with so I think this may be the difference between someone with a solid background using Ai and someone who is without maybe I'm just trying to convince myself you know that my degree is not completely useless but I do believe in the world of fast changing technology nowadays it's more important than ever to invest in learning the fundamental Knowledge and Skills and a formal education can be a very good start you might say okay I know having a degree makes me more competitive in the job market but what if there will be no demand for my skills what if everything will be automated by AI in the next few years it's no doubt that AI would displace a lot of jobs it already is McKenzie estimated that 400 to 800 million individuals will be displaced by Automation and need to find new jobs by 2030 around the world but here's the silver lining the category degrees with the highest percentage top growth net of automation include on the top of the list professionals such as Engineers scientists accountants and analysts I.T professionals and other technology Specialists these professionals are the people with a tech background computer science major included you might be asking how is it possible that jobs will continue to grow even if more of them are getting automated well it is because when AI makes goods and services cheaper economics 101 tells us that the demand for the goods and services will increase and this in turn will create more jobs instead of reducing them looking back at the Industrial Revolution during the Industrial Revolution more and more tasks in the weaving process were automated prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do this caused output to grow explosively this made cloth cheaper and increased demand for it which in turn creates more job for Weavers in other words technology gradually changed the nature of the Weaver's job and the skills required to do it rather than placing it all together I suspect the same thing will happen with AI as well perhaps even on a larger scale the way we work will change the nature of our tech jobs will change and hopefully we work Less hours probably will need less low level programmers but more people who can understand the business contacts and translate them into the technical requirements they also have a good overview of the architecture of the whole system and how different parts work together they know how to integrate new code into a legacy code base within an organization and make sure nothing else breaks they know how to test the code created by AI in a sandbox find box take care of the whole system run smoothly and so on besides that we will surely need more AI safety engineers and people who can create laws around AI basically Bridging the Gap between research business and regulations at oh yeah we also need more cyber security engineers and more people who can communicate effectively between different teams and with decent human skills there's no no doubt that the transition could be painful for lovers new graduates or experienced people alike some people might want to hold on to the jobs that are being automated but I think frankly if a job can be so easily automated is it the job worth having anyway as Wall Street Journal put it jobs that robots can replace are not good jobs in the first place as humans we climb up the wrongs of drudgery physically tasking or mind-numbing jobs to jobs that use what got us to the top of the food chain our brains in short I believe that computer science and other Tech qualifications are still very relevant and perhaps more relevant than ever in the world of AI so do not let pessimistic voices tell you that your degree or any learning effort will be useless if you can afford to go to school I would still do it if I were you yes many things we learned will sooner or later be outed but a degree more likely than not can give you a solid foundation good problem solving skills a confident mentality and a nice portfolio of projects but that's it having a degree is not not a guarantee for a career that's set for life we still need to keep learning and learning relearning things perhaps even Reinventing ourselves every few years I'd also highly encourage you to get an internship some project experience and even freelancing experience while you're studying for degree a degree is good but I think working experience is what actually sells so I try to combine study with actually doing stuff next to your study also go to as many events and conferences as you can to learn about the new developments in the fields and connect to people because yeah being a student you can get scholarships to do a lot of activities for free and also other nice books as well with all of this I don't see how someone wouldn't land a tech job even in today's uncertain markets and thinking outside the box maybe you even want to start a company and create your own job even if AI will replace every single one of us in the next five or ten years I think you'll still be making good money and get valuable experience in the meantime until then take care and I'll see you next video bye [Music]

Channel: Thu Vu data analytics

Views: 29,133

Keywords: data analytics, data science, python, data, tableau, bi, programming, technology, coding, data visualization, python tutorial, data analyst, data scientist, data analysis, power bi, python data anlysis, data nerd, big data, learn to code, business intelligence, how to use r, r data analysis, vscode

Id: S5U76LPu_bQ

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023