“I honestly don't know if I would tell somebody to go into CS today. Because there's also most companies at the moment are just not hiring junior engineers, too, which also feels short-sighted. At some point, everybody's going to retire out of the workforce, and who are they going to have left?”
The InfoQ Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Michael Stiefel asked what advice senior engineers should give children heading to college now that AI writes so much code. Ebertz, an engineering leader, says she isn't sure computer science is still the right bet, and that the industry's freeze on junior hiring stores up a problem for later.
Transcript
Yeah.
Or do you tell them, and I've had this conversation with many people who are senior engineers and have children going into college, and what advice do they give them? There's more to it than just telling the AI what to do.
Yeah, I honestly don't know if I would tell somebody to go into CS today. Because there's also like most companies at the moment are just not hiring junior engineers, too, which also feels short-sighted. Like at some point, everybody's going to retire out of the workforce, and who are they going to have left? But yeah,
where are all the COBOL programmers? I mean, I mean, yeah. Somebody once said to me, I mean, we have a discussion. Some companies are still hiring junior engineers because they're cheaper than all the tokens they need to produce the cup. Yeah. But at some point, that won't be the case. So, you…
Yeah.
This is something that somebody's going to have to figure out. And neither you nor I seem to have the answer to that. I'm not surprised, but it's going to have to emerge. I think what's going to happen is people could just have to bite the bullet and not assign certain problems to AI to just train…
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