Something is happening in the industry
Somebody was stuck under a very large rock…
They briefly cover that in the article.
It’s too easy to just blame AI, though, Farid said.
“Something is happening in the industry,” he said. “I think it’s a confluence of many things. I think AI is part of it. I think there’s a thinning of the ranks that’s happening, that’s part of it, but something is brewing.”
A problem is that this professor seems pragmatically isolated from the industry, so he has no idea what he’s talking about.
He has been pumping the industry full of people looking for high-paying jobs while often barely caring about technology at all.
The problem isn’t just AI, in my experience there has been a glut of mediocre workers in tech for decades now. I interviewed quite a few from this professor’s university. I can’t remember if it was a graduate from Stanford or Berkeley who spent the entire interview on his phone.
I don’t get the impression this is a conclusion he just came to, he’s just being interviewed about it.
Yup and I wonder. Is AI creating the slowdown or is investment in AI keeping it from being even worse?
I’d wager that investment in AI is holding the rest of the sector down. AI is getting 100s of billions, most of it getting burned on compute, because everyone expects/hopes AI is going to be successful. Meanwhile, companies need to hire experienced devs at enormous expense to clean up the vibe coded slop.
Like half of IT companies are holding back to hire more staff they usually would because they are still unsure how much work AI will save them.
New light novel just dropped “I Filtered Politics to /dev/null And Accidentally Missed The Rise of the Fourth Reich, Now I Wander The Wasteland”
Whoa, a university professor barely knew anything about the greater tech industry?! No way!
“For people like your son, by the way, who four years ago were promised, go study computer science, it’s going to be a great career. It is future-proof — that changed in four years," UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid said during a recent episode of Nova’s “Particles of Thought” podcast. “That is astonishing.”
“It is future-proof” is so stupid I hope he didn’t really say it out loud.
This same exact crap has been happening since the early 2000s, he was just insulated by being in Northern California as a professor at UC Berkeley. He’s been cherry-picking data the whole time and now he’s surprised.
The bubble academia lives in sometimes is genuinely incredible.
Also, give it a few years. There are a shocking number of unprofitable AI companies right now that are employing real people too.
Thoughtless dweebs like this guy kept pumping “it is future-proof” for thirty years and here we are. Millions of people who barely cared in the first place can’t find jobs.
“I don’t think AI is going to put lawyers out of business, but I think lawyers who use AI will put those who don’t use AI out of business,” he said. “And I think you can say that about every profession.”
What is the justification for this statement? There is no rigorous evidence that AI improves productivity or quality, and there are now multiple rigorous studies showing decreased productivity and quality with use of AI. Without supporting evidence, this kind of a statement really makes me think this guy has no idea what he’s talking about.
