I always wanted to pursue CS as my majors but due to the recent news of SWE getting fired changed my mind
Now I’m confused about what to opt for my bachelors. Should I take CS or a Management degree?
Just take whatever calls to you. AI isnt going to affect anything long term, but if you dont actually like software engineering you have no chance when you are competing with applicants for jobs who wholeheartedly love the craft.
If you are planning to use AI at any point in your education, save yourself the time and money and just take management. There is no future for your AI-mangled lack of ability in our industry.
What makes you happy to do? It may be neither.
I’m an Ops and HR manager (weird combo I know) because I love the #s game and clean processes and also get a kick out of helping people develop and succeed.
I love computers but didn’t want to kill my joy in tinkering so I didn’t pursue them in higher education. I’m self taught in that regard.
If you’ve always wanted to pursue CS, do CS.
Honestly, there’s a lot of hype around AI. Companies are trying to figure out how to incorporate LLMs into their workflows, but no one has meaningfully succeeded yet past using it as an automated StackOverflow (which is usually wrong or outdated, just like StackOverflow). Yeah, startups will claim that things like cursor have saved them hundreds or thousands of working hours, but then they get burned their AIs leave in their API keys and code security flaws into their services. In the best case, they’ve created a nightmare codebase that will raise the turnover rates for their software developers significantly.
If you are actually passionate about CS, get a CS degree and don’t use AI for problem solving. Maybe debugging/concept explanations if it gets better, but don’t let it solve problems for you. Designing solutions, to problems, critically thinking about their strengths/weaknesses, and working through them is exactly what a CS degree is supposed to teach you how to do, so don’t throw that away by having AI do your work for you.
If your goal is money, become an investment banker. I kind of wish I knew about this option when I was young. Those people are all millionaires at age 30.
Your life will suck for 10 years but you’ll have enough of a nest egg you can retire at 35 if you want.
A degree in management is useless. “Management” isn’t a job, it’s a title. You still need to be skilled at something useful to manage other people. These kinds of degrees are for football players that have to have a degree and the party crowd that needs training on how to be a functioning human. This is a perfect degree if you want a soul-sucking job in megacorp HR or banal white collar office management leading a team of minimum wage temps. IMO, learn a productive skill instead.
The CS market is very saturated (at least in the US). I’m a lead software dev responsible for hiring and probably 90% of the resumes I get are from people needing H1B sponsorship; this is where the saturation is coming from. Most of the candidates are pretty weak with an increasing over reliance on AI assistance, so if you have a knack for programming using your own brain, you should go for it. Just be prepared for a long and draining job hunt.
Management is managing people and/or processes. If you don’t think it’s a productive skill, it’s because you’ve never done it or understand the value it brings.
Good luck completing a product or being profitable without any.
You’re missing a key point here: Management is a secondary function, in the sense that management doesn’t in itself produce anything of value. When done correctly, it enhances the productivity of those actually producing something.
In order to be effective at management, you need to have a good idea of what the people you are managing do. Otherwise, you won’t be able to appropriately manage resources and help people be effective by moving support to the right places. “Management” as a degree aims to teach people how to manage resources they don’t understand, and more often than not ends up producing managers that have no idea what the engineers and technicians they’re managing actually do. These managers are usually more of a burden on the people they’re managing than anything else. Every good or decent manager or leader I’ve come across has a background from the field of the people they’re managing.
