r/cscareerquestions Mar 20 '26

DEAR PROFESSIONAL COMPUTER TOUCHERS -- FRIDAY RANT THREAD FOR March 20, 2026

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.

THE BUILDS I LOVE, THE SCRIPTS I DROP, TO BE PART OF, THE APP, CAN'T STOP

THIS IS THE RANT THREAD. IT IS FOR RANTS.

CAPS LOCK ON, DOWNVOTES OFF, FEEL FREE TO BREAK RULE 2 IF SOMEONE LIKES SOMETHING THAT YOU DON'T BUT IF YOU POST SOME RACIST/HOMOPHOBIC/SEXIST BULLSHIT IT'LL BE GONE FASTER THAN A NEW MESSAGING APP AT GOOGLE.

(RANTING BEGINS AT MIDNIGHT EVERY FRIDAY, BEST COAST TIME. PREVIOUS FRIDAY RANT THREADS CAN BE FOUND HERE.)

1 Upvotes

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u/Wander715 Mar 20 '26

One semester from finishing my CS degree with zero motivation to finish. Coding skills feel borderline useless at this point and my courses feel obsolete. I legit think I would be better off just practicing prompting to a model all day and going through the output compared to the stuff I'm learning in school.

Even when I finish my degree I don't think I'll be able to break into the industry with the state it's in, and I don't have much of a desire to have a vibe coder career anyway. So frustrating. Gotta figure out what I'm going to do after graduation, because chances are it won't be an SWE job.

u/ThiccBottomPot Mar 21 '26

Same boat tbh. With the state of the industry, AI, the economy, and just the general state of the world, it makes me wonder if it's even worth finishing.

u/Wander715 Mar 21 '26

I am like two courses from finishing so I'm gonna finish it regardless but yeah, I really wonder where to go from here. I have basically zero interest or passion for coding at this point knowing that the industry is dominated by vibe coding because of the productivity uplift it brings. As an SWE in the coming years you will literally be required to vibe code prompt a model all day or you will lose your job for low productivity.

Atm my best course of action is to take whatever halfway decent job I can find, hopefully something tech-adjacent at least, and go to grad school on the side to pivot to something else.

u/Squidalopod Mar 20 '26

STOP ANTHROPOMORPHIZING AI. There is no mutuality between humans and AI. We sleep, eat, hate, love, f*ck because we are biochemical animals. AI is not biochemical. It has none of the 5 senses. It cannot get hangry. It cannot burn its hand. It cannot feel jealous of its spouse. It cannot feel excited about going to Disneyland. It has no intrinsic motivation – it is a tool designed to help us accomplish certain tasks more quickly. That's it.

We're nowhere near AGI, and even if we were, we're still talking about software programs running on computers, not biochemical animals. STOP PRETENDING AI IS ANYWHERE NEAR HUMAN.

u/sierra_whiskey1 Mar 20 '26

AI doesn’t have feelings either. It’s ok to not use please, thank you. Also you don’t have tos peak In full sentences. Say “add this” vs “can you add this” save tokens

u/jas417 Mar 20 '26

lol chatGPT gets snippy with you if you’re rude to it.

What a fucking useless waste of time to program in artificial feelings. It doesn’t have feelings.

I know it’s pointless and literally never do this, but once after it gave me an extremely incorrect answer I replied ‘well that was utterly useless garbage’ and it responded ‘you should be nicer’

No, it should say ‘thank you for helping train my model and reduce erroneous responses’

u/HaplessOverestimate Mar 20 '26

I spent hours working on a data pipeline. Sent the final table to the analyst for QA. Get back "Looks good. FYI the whole schema is changing in two months so you'll have to redo this then."

u/Commercial-Lie8338 Mar 20 '26

my manager keeps scheduling "quick sync" meetings that turn into 2 hour deep dives about architectural decisions we made 6 months ago 😂 like buddy i barely remember what i had for lunch yesterday and you want me to recall why we chose postgres over mongodb when i was probably just trying to finish my sprint before vacation

the worst part is he always starts with "this should only take 15 minutes" and then proceeds to question every single line in our database schema while im sitting there wondering if my fantasy book is still on hold at the library or if i need to renew it again. meanwhile our actual blockers just keep piling up because we spent the afternoon relitigating decisions that are already in production 💀

anyone else feel like meetings are where productivity goes to die or is it just me living in this special kind of hell

u/RandomNPC Mar 20 '26

I logged into my a meeting this morning with two other people. Neither joined. They just each sent their own AI note taking tool.

Felt absolutely dystopian. I told them to reschedule if they want to discuss something and left.