Don’t pursue computer science just for the money, says Replit’s CEO.
On an episode of the “20VC” podcast released on Saturday, Amjad Masad said that young people who are not deeply interested in CS should not study it.
“If you don’t feel like you’re drawn to it like a fly drawn to a light, then don’t go into it because someone told you you’re going to make a boatload of money working for Google,” he said. “It’s pretty dumb to tell people to go into computer science if they’re not really intrinsically interested in it.”
Masad cofounded Replit, an integrated coding environment, in 2016. The company has since pivoted into an AI-agent-led application builder and now competes with Microsoft’s GitHub, Cursor, and vibe-coding tools like Lovable and Emergent. It’s backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, and Y Combinator.
On the podcast, Masad added that in the early 2000s, people went into the field because they were passionate about understanding computers and programming. But after that, it became a “hyped up” subject, and college CS departments “exploded” because it became the easiest industry to make money in, he said. With AI, that is no longer the case.
“Now, if you’re interested in it, there’s still ways to contribute. You could get into ML and AI and go work at the big labs or a company like ours,” he said, referring to machine learning.
He said that even as AI models progress, fundamentals like data structures and algorithms won’t change, and tech will always need people who understand the “underpinnings” of CS.
A ‘wonderful major’
Masad joins a group of tech leaders who say a CS education is still valuable.
On a podcast appearance earlier this month, venture capitalist and Affirm CEO Max Levchin said that writing good code is an art, and AI can’t take that away.
“I don’t think the LLMs are going to naturally always deliver beautifully crafted, elegant, and yet scientifically correct code,” Levchin said.
He added, “As a programmer, without having a solid foundation in computer science, I wouldn’t be able to have that.”
In an interview with Business Insider published in December, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton said that AI is replacing some coding tasks, but that doesn’t mean a CS degree isn’t valuable.
“Many people think a CS degree is just programming or something,” Hinton said.
“There’s a lot more to coding than writing the code,” he added. “Computer science is a wonderful major to learn systems thinking.”
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