I just finished a PhD in stats, and before that, studied computer science. I had planned to go back to industry to do software engineering or be a data scientist afterwards.
However, it seems that in the meantime, vibe coding has taken over the software industry and swallowed most data scientist roles. Few open positions, and the ones that do exist are just pushing a button instead of thinking and solving problems. Is this a correct assessment? Should I try to get back in or just find a new career? I am not too keen on staying in academia either.
It is one of those things. LLM’s are brilliant at recombining old code/art/ideas into mixtures of these old things, but they cannot create anything genuinely new. Eventually we will need new idea and means of doing it.
Most of this slop-ware will probably be ditched in years to come as its tidal wave of technical debt becomes more of a burden than the gain.