Comment by Loeffelmann
18 days ago
I am currently a CS student in germany and our python lecturer told us at the first lesson that "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways and we will not be writing any code after we graduate. He then encouraged us to use AI on all assignments he gives us. He even allows us to cheat at the final exam by using LLMs.
I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.
I asked around with my fellow students what they thought about them and not one minded that they were essentially enrolled in a "how to proompt" class. When I asked one student that it was all nice and well that you pass the module but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end? He laughed and said "Yeah sure, do you think the same about maths"?
Please raise this with the university, be it 'Fachschaft' or the ombudsman for academic integrity. This is not representative for CS education here as far as I know. Other teachers or faculty want to know.
Besides that, these are ridiculous claims from the teacher. LLMs are powerful but in the end they are still a tool with random output, which needs to be carefully evaluated. Especially Python is my personal view much more subtle than people assume on first contact. Especially the whole numpy universe is like a separate language and quite complicated for a beginner if you want to write fast and efficient code.
I've had courses where LLMs where allowed for projects but we had to provide prompts.
> I am currently a CS student in germany and our python lecturer told us at the first lesson that "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways and we will not be writing any code after we graduate. He then encouraged us to use AI on all assignments he gives us. He even allows us to cheat at the final exam by using LLMs.
> I was about to have a word with him after the lecture but when he started talking about how crypto is going to replace fiat any second now I knew he was a lost cause.
Knowing the education system in Germany rather well, I ask myself in which (kind of) educational establishment this happened, since I'd consider this to be rather unusual for at least universities (Universitäten) and Fachhochschulen (some other system of tertiary education that has no analogue in most countries).
It's a Fachhochschule. And yeah that lecture was very unusual it felt like the insane rablings of a techno evangelist who jumped on every hype train in the last 20 years. He said the most important technologies are IoT, Blockchain and AI
This sounds like the Fachhochschule hired some guest lecturer from the world of employment (since it is a goal of Fachhochschulen to also give the students a perspective from work environment in their lectures, this sometimes happens).
Unluckily the people responsible to hire a guest lecturer fell for a windbag. :-(
You do not have to put up with this. Your lecturer is significantly undermining your education (which you pay for!).
You should bring this up with the department chair of your study. The purpose of your CS degree is to build a strong theoretical foundation, replacing programming with prompting directly goes against this.
> Your lecturer is significantly undermining your education (which you pay for!).
In Germany, at state universities, you typically only pay money for the student self-administration. The huge "payment" is rather the opportunity cost.
> The purpose of your CS degree is to build a strong theoretical foundation
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533033 Loeffelmann wrote that this happened at a Fachhochschule, not at a university. The purpose of universities is to give the student a strong theoretical foundation to prepare them for doing research. The purpose of Fachhochschulen is to prepare the student for working in jobs outside of academia.
If the studen isn't paying out of pocket themselves, the tax payer is. Demand better. I am strongly on the side of a well funded government, education should at the very least be subsidized, and all that, but it's people like this that can be used to justify Doge and other insane """efficiency programmes""".
1 reply →
Don't believe them. I was also going to university in Germany and had to work so much to compensate for bad lecturers. Until now I can say I needed 100% of what I learned in university. Even the most esoteric stuff came back to bite me. For LLMs, they are close to useless if you can't review the stuff. Maybe at some point in the future they are better and can reason about their code, but as in fusion, self-driving, etc., you never know when this is. And there will always be people who have to develop this.
> but isn't the ideal outcome that you actually know the language by the end?
Given that it is billed as a Python course that is reasonable.
But, to be fair, the intent of the course is almost certainly to provide background in the tools so that you can observe CS concepts learned later. Which is kind of like astronomy majors learning how to use a telescope so that they can observe its concepts. If Google image search provided the same imagery just as well as a telescope, the frustration in being compelled to teach rudimentary telescope operation is understandable. It is not like the sciences are studied for the tools.
> It is not like the sciences are studied for the tools
The problem with this logic is that most university students don't go there to do science, they go there to, at best, become working experts in their field. Many employers now expect their javascript frontend developers to have a CS degree, which is simply absurd. Secondary vocational education is generally considered insufficient and tertiary vocational schools are "where you go if you can't get into university". This means universities get a huge number of applicants who want nothing to do with science or advanced theory, but just want to learn enough (and get the right paper!) to get a job in their preferred field.
This is now self-reinforcing. If you're a good programmer and want to work on business software, it would make sense for you to go to a tertiary vocational school (where I'm from that means 2 years, one semester of which is essentially an apprenticeship). But because "everyone goes to university", you'll be seen as a worse candidate for most jobs. At the same time, employers are pressuring universities to be "more practical" because "graduates come to the first day on the job useless". So universities lower the bar, taking more away from vocational, who then lower the bar in turn to stay afloat, devaluing themselves in the process.
> The problem with this logic is that most university students don't go there to do science, they go there to, at best, become working experts in their field. Many employers now expect their javascript frontend developers to have a CS degree, which is simply absurd. Secondary vocational education is generally considered insufficient and tertiary vocational schools are "where you go if you can't get into university". This means universities get a huge number of applicants who want nothing to do with science or advanced theory, but just want to learn enough (and get the right paper!) to get a job in their preferred field.
This is why in Germany there exists a third form of tertiary education that is neither vocational nor universities: Fachhochschulen (often translated with "schools of applied science").
2 replies →
> Many employers now expect their javascript frontend developers to have a CS degree
They don't actually – but when faced with long lines they will have to apply a filtering mechanism to get the numbers down to something manageable, and a degree is most legally accepted way to do it. Filtering by gender, race, etc. is off limits.
But if there are still too many in the queue even after applying that filter, employers will have to move on to something else, like credit score. So more and more getting a degree to evade the filter is a bit of a fool's errand. It might be okay if you are one of the few with one, but it isn't 1950 anymore. At this point one is late to the party.
A better marketing strategy is your best bet if you truly still want to work in a field that is oversaturated. Metaphorically, you don't have to bundle Android to capture market attention if you can stand out like the iPhone. Life will be a lot easier if you move on to a career that needs more people rather than getting caught up in the intense competition, though.
> At the same time, employers are pressuring universities to be "more practical" because "graduates come to the first day on the job useless".
College has sold itself as the place to give people awareness of the world, which is what employers truly seek. Employers don't want robots to carry out rote tasks, they want people to be able to think through never-before-experienced situations and deliver the best outcome.
When someone shows up useless, college has failed them. Not because college didn't teach them how to use some specific tool, but in allowing them to graduate without being able recognize that one shouldn't show up to a job completely useless. Naturally, employers are going to be "WTF?"
The response to that shouldn't be to double down on teaching tools to hide the real failing and avoid putting in the work to actually deliver on what is promised, but as long as the students keep showing up I suppose there is no reason to care about doing better.
You're being cheated out of an education by your feckless lecturer.
> "we didn't really need to learn python" because AI was going to take over anyways
Wow! I think this is an extreme comment to make. I get it.. but WOW! It really makes you wonder about the future of universities. If the answer is to let AI do our work.. even to cheat in final exams... what is the point of universities? Not only are we talking about Software Engineers dying.. but so if his lecturer job!
Anyway..
I am developer for over 20 years.
I have kids -- both are not even teenagers... but there are times I think to myself "is it worth them learning XYZ" because of AI?
By the time my eldest get his first job.. we are talking (atleast) around year 2032. We have to accept that AI is going to do some pretty cool things. HOWEVER, I still "believe" that AI will work alongside software developers. We still need to communicate with it - to do that, you need to understand how to communicate with it.
Point is, if any of my kids express interest in computer programming in the next year or so, I will HAPPILY encourage them to invest time in it. What I have to accept is that they will use AI.. a lot.. to build something in their chosen language.
I can see this being a typical question for new coders:-
"Can you create a flappy bird game in python"
Sure.. AI might spit something out in a matter of minutes and it might even work, but are they really learning? I think I would encourage my kids to ban using AI for (around) 4 days a week.
At the end of the day it is very difficult to know our future. Sometimes I have to think about my future.. not just my kids. I mean, would my job as a software engineer be over? If so, when? What would I do?
Overall It doesn't not bother me because I do think my role will transition with AI but for the younger generation, it can be a grey area understanding where they fit in all this.
I try to be optimistic that the next 100 years will be a very exiciting time for the human race (if we do not destroy ourselves beforehand)
To counter your lecturer, I am reminded of a John Carmack quote: "Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul"
Not even low-level -- any programming. If you really like to code, you are going to learn it whether in School, College, or University. To me, the best times I learned was outside of official education, shutting myself away in my bedroom. "Official education" is nothing more that doing what you are told for a peice of paper. What is its worth these days?
Whether AI exists or not - those that like coding will invest the time to code. This is what will seperate average to good programmers or developers. What seperates a good programmer to a great programmer will be their lack or AI generated code... to DIY!
Thats my view... but this is a large topic and I am only scratching the surface.
At the end of the day, the question is what do you do when things aren't working. Being resilient in the face of failure is the most important skill. If AI in 2032 never gets stuck anywhere ever, then that's a totally different world we'd living in. So assuming we don't, that's the underlying thing to pass on to your kids, regardless of the actual details. Just the other day I was vibe coding and the code had two fields for date and time instead of one timestamp field and it kept getting confused, but I had to go into the code and actually read it to figure out what went wrong. Low level programming is important for programmers because you have to dig deeper to find gold. The program isn't working like it's supposed to? look at the source. The library being called by that program isn't behaving like it's supposed to? look at the source. The binary doesn't match the source? stick it in a decompiler. At the end of the day, that's where the true value lies.
> If AI in 2032 never gets stuck anywhere ever, then that's a totally different world we'd living in.
Well, this. And at that point we'd likely be facing the same situation in just about every other information-intensive field as well. Yet it doesn't seem like anybody has any idea how to prepare students (or anybody else) for that kind of a future.
It seems absurd to give up on learning and understanding things ourselves because of a hypothetical future for which nobody has a better plan anyway.
Well, he has a point about Maths :) But, the difference is that basic Maths skills are enough to live a decent life for someone who doesn't do Maths for a career. Basic programming usually isn't enough to pass job interviews and one needs to know the language for a career, atleast for now. I'm actually learning a lot of basic Maths concepts now that I have a kid I need to teach sometimes and have some money I need to invest and understand about rate of return, compounding etc.
This is simply wrong.
If you think about math as only solving differential equations and inverting matrices by hand, then maybe. This might be how maths are taught in secondary school, but is not at all representative of university-level maths. I use many fields of math on a daily basis at my job and for my personal projects, all of which I've taken courses on:
* Formal logic: boolean algebra, set theory. These are the core of any algorithm.
* Graph theory: working with parse trees, ASTs, and other problems involving relationships.
* Linear algebra: any problem that requires working with vectors or matrices, e.g graphics, many areas of machine learning, ...
* Category theory: type systems, algebraic data types, many other functional programming abstractions.
I'm sure there are many more that I've taken for granted.