Any Computer Science Majors up in here?

[x Tame Impala]

Hey all, after a long hiatus I'm back in college and getting my BS in CS with a Software Engineering concentration. Will be done 25 months from now. I was curious if we had any people in the CS field here and if you wanted to talk about some relevant topics.

1) What do you do for a living?
2) What's your day to day like?
3) What languages are you familiar with?
4) What do you think about the big leap in Artificial Intelligence we've seen from CGPT4?
5) How do you think the CS field will be impacted by AI in the next 5-10 years

Click to read more...

 

[beowulf]

You mean the jobs that could be taken over by AI? It's feels like a situation where software/computer engineers are training and building their replacement down the road. Hopefully we become smarter and not allow this kind of replacement. Some of the most dire predictions are the in less than a decade over 300M jobs could be taken over by AI.

 

[JMCx4]

You mean the jobs that could be taken over by AI? It's feels like a situation where software/computer engineers are training and building their replacement down the road. Hopefully we become smarter and not allow this kind of replacement. Some of the most dire predictions are the in less than a decade over 300M jobs could be taken over by AI.

I have a long list of TV meteorologists who I'd like to nominate for swap out with an AI forecaster. No more athletic shoes on the studio sets would be just one of many improvements.

 

[LadyStanley]

Hey all, after a long hiatus I'm back in college and getting my BS in CS with a Software Engineering concentration. Will be done 25 months from now. I was curious if we had any people in the CS field here and if you wanted to talk about some relevant topics.

1) What do you do for a living?
2) What's your day to day like?
3) What languages are you familiar with?
4) What do you think about the big leap in Artificial Intelligence we've seen from CGPT4?
5) How do you think the CS field will be impacted by AI in the next 5-10 years

Graduated BA mathematics with concentration in computer science in 1983.

Now semiretired; haven't had s/w job in decades. When I had a 8-5+ worked in software engineering/development, quality assurance, IT, etc. Mainly large, multiple CPU, real time systems (think millions of lines of code, team of tens). Worked in defense industry primarily, so lots if documentation including supporting documents and lots of comments in code.
Days changed based on season of development. Early on, design phase, reading/understanding documents describing scope of work. Coordinating with other hardware and software engineers to determine interactions between systems. Then advance to determine and document how things will work. Then coding, review, testing (from machine code level to black box), to system integration. And bug detection, fixes. Sometimes working solitary, sometimes having to coordinate activities of dozens.
QA - lots of visual code review. Line by line checking for misplaced punctuation to logic of module. To doing complilation and building of executables and version control.

C was main language, then C++. Also Ada, Fortran, BASIC, and to lesser extent Pascal, COBOL, various Unix shell programming tools like csh, perl.

Will think on your last 2 questions

 

[Fourier]

Graduated BA mathematics with concentration in computer science in 1983.

Now semiretired; haven't had s/w job in decades. When I had a 8-5+ worked in software engineering/development, quality assurance, IT, etc. Mainly large, multiple CPU, real time systems (think millions of lines of code, team of tens). Worked in defense industry primarily, so lots if documentation including supporting documents and lots of comments in code.
Days changed based on season of development. Early on, design phase, reading/understanding documents describing scope of work. Coordinating with other hardware and software engineers to determine interactions between systems. Then advance to determine and document how things will work. Then coding, review, testing (from machine code level to black box), to system integration. And bug detection, fixes. Sometimes working solitary, sometimes having to coordinate activities of dozens.
QA - lots of visual code review. Line by line checking for misplaced punctuation to logic of module. To doing complilation and building of executables and version control.

C was main language, then C++. Also Ada, Fortran, BASIC, and to lesser extent Pascal, COBOL, various Unix shell programming tools like csh, perl.

Will think on your last 2 questions

I didn't know you had a math background. Good to hear that there are a few of us on here to keep things honest!

 

[Kiith Nabaal]

What do you do for a living?

I am currently unemployed, but I am just coming off of a stint as a senior mobile engineer at TikTok. My background is in research engineering, innovation/new product development and am credited in a paper in a top CS journal/conference.

What's your day to day like?

It depends on where I am and what exact role I have. When I did product work at TikTok, I had to manage a Jira board for my tasks, estimate completion time for each task, write design documents (which had to be approved), biweekly scrum meetings, coordinating with QA and manual testing, any kind of mentoring for junior and mid-level engineers. This type of thing, from what I understand, isn't uncommon when you're on a product team. When the manager wasn't around, I would hold the scrum meetings myself.

In general, when you're in a big company, I have found people really want to see documentation and proof of work. It takes some time to do this but it makes people happy. Product managers may also hold regular meetings to keep track of progress (in addition to reporting to your engineering manager) on their individual projects.

When I have been in startups and universities doing research and new product development, the focus was much more on building something quickly. Documentation was only necessary on larger projects when you're working with multiple research teams. There's also no need for things like standups/Jira boards/sprints because you should be in frequent contact with the CEO or other senior leadership. You may also have non-engineering responsibilities at a startup. For example, I secured a contract for a pilot program, met with venture capitalists and helped to run demos.

What languages are you familiar with?

Java, Kotlin, C, Python, JavaScript, Typescript, PHP, Dart. I also fiddled around with Haskell years back.

I also am familiar with Smali, which is decompiled Android code (I have done reverse engineering on a project before).

What do you think about the big leap in Artificial Intelligence we've seen from CGPT4?

I don't think much about it. IBM Watson was answering arbitrary queries on Jeopardy back in 2011 (much better than people could), it is just that these new ML systems (called Large Language Models or LLMs) are better at working with the English language.

Personally I think self-driving cars within cities are a bigger accomplishment.

You have to understand that although ChatGPT may be new, the science underpinning it is not. The building blocks for neural networks (perceptrons) were invented in the 1940s. Banks have been using AI/ML for a long time in their fraud detection systems. Recommendation systems are also sometimes based on AI/ML. I have personally listened to computer generated music back in 2019.

How do you think the CS field will be impacted by AI in the next 5-10 years

It depends on what you are looking at when you say "CS field". I don't think research labs at universities are going to be disrupted. You may see some labs at top universities get a little extra funding from companies like Google or Microsoft, but that's about it. There may be an uptick in Human-Computer Interaction research, since those researchers will want to understand how people interact with these systems and how to improve on them. OpenAI has already been looking at regulatory and responsibility aspects of their tech.

When it comes to the corporate world, you will see (and are already) an increase in demand for Machine Learning engineers and scientists. A lot of corporates have a bad habit of chasing fads and hype, whether it makes sense or not. I have watched really big/known companies force themselves to use blockchain/crypto systems just so they can say "hey look at us we are doing what is popular we are cool too". That said, Machine Learning folks have been in demand for years as it is ChatGPT not withstanding.