DENVER — For many computer science students, artificial intelligence (AI) makes it easier to take care of tedious tasks, but it can also make it harder to land a job.
Denver7 | Your Voice sat down with three Metropolitan State University Denver students studying computer science to hear their thoughts and concerns about AI growing in their field.
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They held similar reasons for entering the field.
“I initially majored in computer science because I was pretty into coding from middle school throughout high school,” said Emma Tran, sophomore at MSU Denver.
“I like the idea of building scalable, iterative solutions,” added senior Monica Ball. “If you think really hard about one problem and solve it, well, you can spread it.”
Senior Angela Fleenor said computer science satisfies “a little mathy, problem-solving part” of her brain, but she also acknowledged the field has traditionally been a stable one.
“Part of the reason I wanted to try computer science was because it seemed to be, like, everyone needs technology,” she told Denver7. “It's a good career to go into. There's a need for developers.”
MSU Denver computer science associate professor Dan Pittman said software “has traditionally been a stable job.”
“You get your six-figure salary when you get the degree,” he explained. “There's always been this kind of automatic guarantee. And maybe (I) feel like people are a little worried that's not there anymore.”
Artificial intelligence is changing things. AI programming tools can write thousands of lines of computer code at lightning speed.
“A good engineer is now a great engineer,” Pittman said. “They can do what three people had to do on their own, because AI is now their assistant.”
“It's a little scary because it could cost some jobs,” Ball said. “But it's also kind of cool, because it changes the problems that you're solving when you do have a job.”
AI has also made it faster and easier to apply to those jobs, leaving hiring teams inundated with applications.
“Which then they're going to turn to automation to help them review their resumes,” Pittman explained. “You're not going to get human eyes on your application until you're multiple steps into the process sometimes… So, then it's just gaming the system of, 'I have the right keywords to make it past the right automated filters.'"
“Not just entry-level jobs, it's even before that,” Fleenor said. “I applied to some internships, and for several of them, I applied in October last year, and heard in April, and they said, 'We didn't even get to your resume to review it, because we had so many.'"
Combined with tech industry layoffs, those factors have made the job market much more competitive.
A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows a roughly 6% unemployment rate for recent computer science grads — double the unemployment rate for recent grads in fields like art history.
Now, computer science professors like Pittman are changing how they teach their classes.
“The busy work, the stuff that was important but not specific to the task at hand, that we thought people needed to know as fundamentals, maybe we need to be talking at a higher level now,” he considered.
Pittman said students now will need to know how to use, but not abuse, AI tools.
“Some of my classmates, I've seen them — they use AI to find an error in their code,” Tran said. “They'll find, you know, some sort of syntax thing, like a missing semicolon… which I think is fine.”
But she said she’s concerned about seeing some of her peers become over-reliant on AI.
“A lot of them (are) asking it to write their essays or read a document for them fully, or even asking AI to write their code for them completely for an assignment,” she recalled. “And it's like, you’re not learning anything from that.”
Ball compared AI to a calculator.
“If you know what you're putting in, you can have a pretty good idea what you should get back out, and then you can implement it and see if it's actually helpful,” she said.
“I think learning how to use AI and how to ask it questions and how to have a meaningful back and forth with it, almost as though it was a person, I think that is something that's helped me a lot,” Fleenor said. “I’ve also started to learn some data science, which I don't think I would have otherwise... I think you still need to know what this line of code does, even if you don't have to write it yourself.”
Pittman does not see a world in which new software engineers are completely replaced by AI.
“We need those engineers — maybe in newer, rethought roles, maybe more narrowly scoped that they don't have to do some of the busy work of the past. But there will always be that need for humans in the loop on these things and to have that critical evaluation of what's being done,” he said.
“To these CEOs that say 'I don't need to hire software engineers anymore,' I say that's a short-sighted vision," he said. "You're robbing tomorrow to pay for today."
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