Month: November 2025

• There is plenty of fear about AI rendering an expensive Stanford degree obsolete.
• While most classes still ban AI, one of the most popular courses encourages students to use AI coding tools.
• A who’s who of AI software development engineers has guest lectured in the class.

In a dimly lit Stanford University basement classroom packed with anxious computer science students, lecturer Mihail Eric tells the class he’s going to teach them how to code without writing a single line of code.

Eric’s class, The Modern Software Developer, has quickly become one of the hottest Stanford CS courses this semester, which bills itself as the first attempt at a major university to embrace coding tools like Cursor and Claude.

It is an unsettling time to be a computer science major, even at a school as prestigious as Stanford, knowing you will be graduating into a world where AI is getting better at programming by the day.

“It can be scary because you think your job security is being compromised, and you might get replaced,” said Brent Ju, one of the class’s dozens of students. Ju is graduating this spring and so far has no job offers. “The market is a little tough. I am still interviewing.”

“If you can go through this entire class without writing a single line of code, more power to you,” said Eric, a Stanford alum who purposefully designed the course to be an antidote to the majority of classes that still ban the use of AI.

A who’s who of AI coding luminaries has stopped by the bucolic Palo Alto campus to guest lecture, including Boris Cherney, creator of Claude Code, and Gaspar Garcia, head of AI research at Vercel. Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will address the final class next week.

On a recent morning inside the classroom, Silas Alberti, head of research at Cognition, delivered a lecture called “The Opinionated Guide to AI Coding in 2025.”

“I think what you learn in school has always been a little bit behind, so I’m glad that this course exists to teach the newest stuff,” Alberti said after his lecture, surrounded by students lined up to greet him like a celebrity. “If you learn with yesterday’s methods, you are not going to be super competitive, but if you really lean into the tools, you can be a super engineer.”

Excitement and fear

The mood of the students in the class reflects the current zeitgeist of Silicon Valley, with excitement about what many consider one of the most significant technological advancements of our lifetime. But there is plenty of fear about AI rendering an expensive Stanford degree obsolete.

When Eric graduated in 2016, getting a Stanford CS degree was the golden ticket.

“People thought ‘I’m going to go to an elite university, and then I’m just going to be set for life and have a cushy six-figure job for as long as I want at a FAANG company,'” he said.

The number of CS students surged as tech companies embarked on a massive hiring spree.

“Meanwhile, a lot of companies that hired a lot during COVID saw that they overhired,” Eric said. “Now you have a surplus of young talent and also a surplus of newly laid-off, quite experienced talent.”

Making matters worse, AI is already proficient in coding and continues to improve rapidly. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said up to 30 percent of the company’s code is being written by AI, while Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei predicted in March that AI had the potential to write “essentially all” of the company’s code within a year.

Ju, who says his dream job would be to work at Anthropic, says he is trying to stay positive.

“It’s exciting because if the tools aren’t going to replace you, but act as an assistant, it can really supercharge your productivity and make you a more effective developer,” Ju said. “I’m more of an optimist who leans toward that direction.”

Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp, a developer tool for agentic workflows, delivered a guest lecture last month and maintains he is still very interested in hiring CS students.

“The idea that people from a place like Stanford with a CS education won’t be able to get jobs as engineers is a little overblown,” he said, adding that knowing the fundamentals of programming is still vital to effectively using Warp or Claude. “These tools are accelerators but not replacements yet, and the actual people who will be best at wielding them are those who have a solid foundation.”

Eric plans to teach the course again next year, though he says AI is advancing so fast that the class will likely look very different.

“People were asking me if I was concerned that by week seven, things are going to be obsolete that I talked about in week one?” he said. “Yes, it is a concern. So far it hasn’t happened yet.”

• Some workers are getting remote exceptions from their managers — others are finding workarounds.
• Childcare needs and long commutes are pushing some workers to seek more work-from-home flexibility.
• Some managers may be willing to accommodate top performers to maintain team performance.

After months of battling LA traffic, Leslie Snipes decided it was time to talk to her manager.

For the first few months of her job as a director of marketing at a Los Angeles-based creative agency, she drove 60 to 90 minutes to the office a few days a week — but the commute eventually began to take a toll.

“I was wasting hours just sitting in traffic,” said the 34-year-old.

In April of last year, Snipes decided to ask her manager whether she could work remotely almost exclusively. She explained that she’d be more productive working from home and that her team’s strongest bonding often happened during business trips and off-site projects.

Snipes said she received verbal approval in less than a day — and that she now typically works from the office once or twice a month to “show face” and connect with colleagues.

“I feel less stressed, since I’m not spending hours sitting in traffic,” she said. “It’s a setup I wouldn’t have unless I asked.”

While some workers are more than happy to return to the office for camaraderie and a change of scenery, Business Insider spoke to seven people who have found ways to secure flexible work arrangements — whether or not they’re officially sanctioned.

Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies remote work, said work-from-home rates have remained fairly stable in recent years, despite companies’ implementing stricter return-to-office mandates. He believes that’s offset by other employers — many of them smaller companies and startups — offering more flexibility. He also hypothesizes that employees are securing exceptions that allow them to work from home more frequently than their company’s official policy permits.

Bloom pointed out a possible motivating factor for allowing these exceptions: Managers are generally judged on how their teams perform, and they don’t want to risk their best talent quitting or becoming less productive if they’re forced back to the office. For this reason, some managers may choose not to enforce office attendance policies too strictly.

“Managers ultimately care about their team performance,” he said.

Securing flexibility to meet childcare demands

Childcare responsibilities are a common factor pushing workers to secure work-from-home flexibility. In November 2024, Georg Loewen began working as a senior director of digital marketing at a public relations agency with a three-day-a-week in-office policy, which required him to make a roughly one-hour commute from New Jersey to Manhattan.

But that commute proved challenging. Loewen was responsible for dropping off his one-year-old daughter at day care most mornings, and the 8 a.m. drop-off often made it difficult to catch the ideal 8:20 train that would get him to the office just before 9 — the next one wouldn’t get him in until after 10. Even when he was on time, finding a parking spot at the station wasn’t guaranteed.

Early this year, Loewen’s manager initiated a conversation about his challenges getting into the office. Eventually, they came to an agreement.

“If drop-off ran long or parking didn’t work out, I’d just work from home,” said the 34-year-old.

Loewen said he typically works from the office once or twice a week. His current routine involves dropping off his daughter, heading home to park his car, and then riding a foldable bike 1.5 miles to the station, which allows him to avoid the hassle of finding a parking spot.

He said he sometimes worries about how his arrangement might be perceived by coworkers who don’t have the same flexibility, but added that he’s consistently felt supported. He may need to work from the office more frequently as his team grows, he said, but for now, he’s grateful for the leeway he’s been given.

A Wisconsin-based mother of three is similarly thankful for the flexible understanding she came to with her manager. In 2023, she’d considered leaving her corporate manufacturing role after the company announced a five-day-a-week office policy. She worried she couldn’t meet her childcare responsibilities with a two-hour round-trip commute.

Instead, she had an “off the record” conversation with her manager about how much remote work she could get away with. She said they told her to “be here as much as you can.” As long as she was in the office a few days a week — especially on days with key in-person meetings — they wouldn’t stand in her way.

“If I need to work from home for whatever reason, whether it’s work or personal reasons, then that’s OK,” she said.

Leaving early and having a remote backup plan

Some workers have found creative ways to spend less time at the office.

When Elysa Ellis began looking for a new role last year, she was hesitant to give up the remote work flexibility she’d grown used to. After landing an interview with a local nonprofit that required employees to work from the office five days a week, she came with a prepared request: a 9-to-3 schedule, instead of the typical 9-to-5.

Ellis said it was important for her to be able to pick up her two children from school around 3 p.m. and spend time with them until her husband finished work.

“My children are young, so I knew that stepping into an in-office role would impact them a lot,” she said, adding, “I felt like I had nothing to lose.”

By the time Ellis was offered the job, her request had been granted. She would work from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. — and still receive her full salary.

In 2022, when a millennial IT professional heard rumors that his employer might implement a stricter return-to-office policy, he began searching for a new role. Shortly after, he landed an offer for a remote position similar to his current role.

However, he was hesitant to resign while his company’s official policy still allowed remote work, so he decided to secretly juggle both roles — earning $250,000 annually, roughly double his previous income. And if his initial employer ever adopted a stricter in-office policy, he figured he had a backup plan.

“I ultimately decided to try it since I could easily just drop one if it was too much,” he said.

For a millennial finance manager at Amazon, maximizing his work-from-home time meant doing the bare minimum at the office.

When Amazon announced in 2023 that it would require corporate employees to work from the office three days a week, he began going in the required number of days — but only worked between nine and 12 hours total across all three days. He said it was feasible because he was the only member of his team based at that office.

“I would go into the office for a few hours, avoid rush hour, and fulfill my badging requirement,” he said.

Work-from-home flexibility sometimes comes down to your choice of employer

For some, the simplest way to secure work-from-home flexibility is to find a job that offers it from day one.

After being laid off from a remote job, a New Jersey-based e-commerce professional landed an offer last year for a role at JPMorgan — one that would require him to commute to a Manhattan office three days a week.

As he considered the offer, he estimated that commuting would take nine hours a week and cost him more than $7,000 a year. Around the same time, he received another offer — this one for a remote role with a salary about $5,000 lower than the JPMorgan position.

When he compared the two jobs in terms of what he’d earn for every hour he’d have to “invest” in them — factoring in both commuting time and related costs — he said the decision was easy.

“JPMorgan just could not compete,” he said, adding: “A 40-hour week plus nine commute hours is basically a 50-hour week for the salary that they were offering.”