AI is changing tech jobs: Replit CEO Amjad Masad says why computer science is no longer a good career choice without a real interest.
You shouldn’t study computer science just for the money, says Amjad Masad, Replit CEO. In an episode of the “20VC” podcast with host Harry Stebbings released Saturday, Masad says that young people who aren’t really interested in computer science shouldn’t study the subject.
“If you don’t feel drawn to it like a fly to a light, then don’t start it just because someone told you that you’ll make a lot of money at Google,” says the boss of the programming startup. “It’s pretty stupid to advise people to study computer science if they don’t really have an intrinsic interest in it.”
Masad co-founded startup Replit in 2016 – the company has since transformed into an AI agent-driven application developer and now competes with Microsoft’s GitHub, Cursor and “vibe coding” tools like Lovable and Emergent. It is backed by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Y Combinator.
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AI is changing who will be successful in tech
In the podcast, Masad adds that people became interested in this field in the early 2000s because they had a passion for understanding computers and programming. But after that, it became a “hyped” topic, and college computer science departments “exploded” because it became the easiest industry to make money in, he said. With AI, that is no longer the case.
“If you’re interested in it today, there are still ways to contribute. You could get into ML and AI and work in the big research labs or a company like ours,” says Masad, referring to machine learning.
He says that even with advances in AI models, fundamentals like data structures and algorithms won’t change and the tech industry will always need people who understand the “fundamentals” of computer science.
Why real programmers are still irreplaceable
Masad joins a group of tech executives who say a computer science education is still valuable. In an early podcast appearance by venture capitalist and Affirm CEO Max Levchin, he emphasized that writing good code is an art and AI cannot replace it: “I don’t think LLMs by their nature will always produce beautifully designed, elegant, yet scientifically correct code.”
He adds: “As a programmer, I wouldn’t be able to do this without a solid foundation in computer science.”
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In an interview with Business Insider published in December, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton said that while AI is replacing some programming tasks, that doesn’t mean a computer science degree isn’t valuable. “A lot of people think a computer science degree is just programming or something like that,” Hinton says. “Programming involves much more than just writing code. Computer science is a wonderful subject to learn systems thinking.”