A former student visited the office last week. He studied in our business + data science bachelors program and has worked as a data analyst focusing on finance since he graduated. He complained that his worked gave him a lot of ad-hoc analysis tasks and he was working weekends and holidays to handle the extra load.
I was totally shocked. I asked him if he was allowed to use AI tools like Codex or Claude Code. He said, “Do you mean ChatGPT?” Queue my head exploding. He was still stuck copy pasting code from ChatGPT into his IDE to get work done.
I then proceeded to show him Codex, how to direct an agent to accomplish a task, how skills worked, etc. He was totally floored. He truly had no idea. He was so heads down working for the past two years that he didn’t know about any of these things. No one at his company was using agentic coding tools at all, but his company did pay for ChatGPT subscriptions for technical employees.
Two reactions:
- We are so early.
- You must be a lifelong learner to do well in the next 10 years.
Throughout my time teaching this student I told them they must always learn, because data science (and now AI) doesn’t stand still. In his defense he was learning every day, just not the latest developer tooling. Instead he was deepening his knowledge of finance so he could be an asset to his company, a laudable goal. Unfortunately for him, he was still being buried under ad hoc requests and wasn’t learning the skills to get himself unburied.
FOMO isn’t great, but neither is suffering at work when it could be easier. We need to keep learning and improving without becoming obsessed with it. Always be learning.
