Ask HN: Given AI advancements, is a master’s degree in CS worthless?
&gt; I just really worry the degree will mostly be worthless by the time I graduate considering the rate at which AI is advancing... The degree would mostly be for personal knowledge&#x2F;fulfillment, but I don’t want to bother with it if we’re all going to be unemployable in a few years anyways.<p>I went to university from 2005-2008. Back then, with dot-com scars still fresh in everyone&#x27;s mind, an extremely common piece of &quot;advice&quot; I received was: <i>Don&#x27;t bother going into programming; software development is going to all be outsourced to offshore developers. You&#x27;ll never make more than $50k&#x2F;year in your career as a developer, the competition from India and Bangladesh will be too high.</i><p>As much as futurists hate to admit it, coding AI is still way worse at many things than even the now-near-universally-loathed &quot;outsourced dev&quot; boogeyman. Your job as a software developer isn&#x27;t to write functions that reverse a binary tree or solve the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. I haven&#x27;t seen any evidence that AI can evaluate a legacy codebase and determine what the best integration path forward is. I haven&#x27;t seen any evidence that an AI can figure out how to put together a backwards-compatible API. I haven&#x27;t seen any evidence that an API can put together a build pipeline.<p>Your question is based on an assumption that because ChatGPT can spit out some pretty impressive stuff that an entire career path isn&#x27;t going to be viable. I will tell you emphatically that assumption is <i>wrong</i>. Spend a few years in the industry and you&#x27;ll understand that ChatGPT is impressive, but only touches about 5-10% of what a software developer really needs to do.<p>It will be an important tool for developers going forward, and <i>maybe</i> reduce the overall number of devs needed in the world due to increased efficiency, but no, it&#x27;s not going to replace software developers. Not even juniors.