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By default do you mean "for people who want to go into software"? Because CS + data even rolled together are regularly below health programs, business and social sci in # of degrees per year

im exaggerating on the internet but my point is that a lot of kids in the last 15 years went into CS not because they had a deep passion for juggling pointers but because it (is/was) seen as safe and lucrative

it's the new finance

during my cs degree i took an intermediate project courses late in my degree between internships, ~2016 at UBC the 300-level course was a few hundred people instead of its historical few dozen and all anyone in that class wanted to talk about was the CS major grade cutoff, it got competitive fast

Something like 400,000 business degrees were awarded in 2025 compared to 100,000 CS degrees. In no way did computer science become the default major. It is like 5% of degrees in total.

exactly! Many many *many* of people who've gone into tech did so in the same way many people went into Law or Medicine: not because they had any particular love of that field, but because their parents raised them "to get a good job" but plug-and-chug "coding" is *dead*, so hope they're adaptable!

This is a good example of the realization I've had (and I'm not blaming you, I say stuff like this too): this isn't fun to say, it's bordering on morbid, and no one that "needs" to hear it is listening, so why are we saying it and what psychological damage are we doing to ourselves by stewing in it?

So it's not fun to say, and it is morbid, but if you had foreknowledge of an impending 75% sell-off in the stock market, and the subsequent fallout, would you not think it's important to talk about it? On the less morbid side: IMO it won't *just* be devastation. There are new opportunities!

also CS is a *miserable* career to pursue if you aren’t into it, maybe more so than law or medicine

i finished my cs degree like 3 months before claude code released, and so so many of my peers seemed to just hate it or find it incredibly boring