"get a degree and you'll have a job" backfired

The best programmers, sysadmins, and other techies I’ve worked with had humanities degrees. Being a STEMlord who can’t be nice or express yourself well in words will put you at a disadvantage in even the nerdiest of jobs.

Let's be real, a lot of people got in in the hopes of appeasing "the market". What "the market" wanted, and still wants, is an excess of qualified people, so they can more easily pick, choose and abuse the workers. This has been the case for ages.

The government pushed propaganda to oversaturate STEM to drive down the cost of skilled labor.

It worked as intended.

It didn’t backfire for employers. I’m sure newly-minted coding boot campers depressed wages for everyone.

AI propaganda

The claim in the video that ChatGPT is better at coding than CS grads really bothers me. ChatGPT is not good at writing code. None of the LLMs are. They are at best fancy (and exhorbitantly expensive) predictive autocomplete machines.

LLMs aren't replacing programmers or other "low skill" jobs. Clueless managers are attempting to replace these jobs with a poor excuse for automation to cut costs and tick their "we adopted AI!" PR checkbox. The fact that 95% of generative AI pilot projects in businesses are failing really speaks volumes to this.

Classic. Liberal arts trying to justify itself assuming technical people cannot communicate, think, or understand context. Good luck with that. To make good money you have to have a specialty. Preferably a masters or a technical degree and I mean that in the broadest way.

Sure you can start with liberal arts but you should expect to then get that specialty. So 6 years. For a technical education 2 to 4 years might do it but 6 might still be good. Counter balance, every year is costly both in terms of expenses, missed earnings, and time value of money. 6 years is a big barrier to entry.

Edit: I do share the concern about any hot fields. Boom and bust. Coding and now data science have been really popular so one wonders. Similarly about things that can be automated and off shored.