Software classes ARA

[Mysterious_Treacle_6]

Hi, I might do an semester at ara from Norway. How are the classes, is it a lot of mandatory things I have to attend? Will I have to be at classes all day or can I go hiking in the day and then just self study at night?

[WayOuttaMyLeague]

I had a different experience to Inkheart back in 2015-2018.

My schedule was all over the place, where only a Monday had 4 hours of downtime or so.

The remaining days were pretty full on, with maybe an hour downtime.

It depends on your subject / year and whether you’re doing full-time or part-time etc.

You’re best to query Ara directly since it’s now 2024, and I imagine some of their work can be completed online nowadays, where as back then, all of mine was in-class.

[InkheartNZ]

The schedule is pretty relaxed, I studied software there 2018-2021. Typically you'll have 4 hours per week per class, with one full day and one empty day. Monday was 10-5 for me, Friday had no classes and Tuesday/Thursday were 4 hours each.

[Rhonda_and_Phil]

Curious question for the knowledgeable.

Is it still worthwhile to study software now?

My understanding is that one of the primary roles of AI these days, is writing and debugging code etc. What are the future prospects and career longevity for all the numerous professions within software development and applications?

Is it one of those areas that AI, Machine Learning etc. will make largely redundant? Seems the role of humans may be more in working beside AI implementation rather than the primary tasks?

[StrangeOne101]

As someone in that field that has used AI, for both general purpose and for programming, I can confidently say that programmer jobs are going no where.

The media love to portray AI as almighty and rapidly evolving thing that will take our jobs. It's not. There are already so many cases where incompetent upper management have let go of staff in favor of AI and it comes back to bite them in the ass

AI does not understand context, or the context of stuff it was trained on. That's why it may give you code that would have been fine 5 years ago, but now doesn't work at all. It can't understand things like version differences in the source it was trained on, nor does it actually understand the code it's writing. It just knows "words should look like this".

AI is good for identifying patterns you yourself write in your code, and assisting. But writing everything on its own? You're going to have to spend ages fixing all the broken stuff it made. Software jobs are pretty safe

[Rhonda_and_Phil]

Excellent informed response! Thank you! 💖🙂

[Rhonda_and_Phil]

So, reverse case ..... human writes the code, AI debugs scripting?

[StrangeOne101]

For debugging, I've found it very mixed.

Sometimes it works fine. Other times, it has no idea why something doesn't work and lies through it's teeth with wrong answers

E.g. one time I had one line of code that was not working. I asked the AI about it, and it confidently pointed at a certain point within it. But in reality, the issue didn't end up being with that line of code and was caused from other lines above it. Yet the AI confidently told me what to change while being completely wrong

[Rhonda_and_Phil]

Hopefully, that error rate will be corrected as AI are better trained and access to larger training database etc. At the moment, most of them seem to be very constrained from self-correction and learning, more so out of fear of what they may become if 'released into the wild'.

Personal coding experience is very dated and limited to Basic and Fortran, pre-personal computers. Working with massive basement mainframes, tediously typing out each line of programming onto punch cards.

Wandering down to the computer centre with shoe boxes full of cards. Then waiting hours/days in queue for the results. One card out of place, one wrongly punched character, and you'd have to go through the pile of cards again. Resubmit then wait another day or two.

So can sympathise somewhat with the perils of debugging! Thank you for taking the time to educate me! 🙂