Will AI Take Our Jobs?
I had the opportunity to meet with several gamedev:hq students in Tashkent, Uzbekistan while organizing GameFest 2025 — and one of the most common topics that came up was the future of software engineers and game developers in a world increasingly shaped by AI.
As the Dean for the American School of Engineering at Tashkent Metropolitan University, I hold a deep conviction: a rigorous computer science education is more important today than ever before.
With AI evolving at the speed it is and the rise of “vibe coding” — the belief that anyone can ship code without fully understanding it — we risk producing a generation of developers who no longer grasp how technology truly works.
Relying entirely on tools like ChatGPT without understanding the foundations of computing leads to complacency, and worse — erosion of critical knowledge.
To illustrate the importance of this, let’s look at a simple example:
If you’re familiar with C# and Unity, you’ll recognize this line as a basic collision check against the “Player” tag.
For a beginner, they might just ask ChatGPT, “How do I check for Player collisions?” — and this is likely the exact code they’ll be given.
At first glance, it’s functional. In most production environments, it won’t cause issues. But experienced developers — especially those with a computer science background — can immediately identify that memory allocation is happening during the string comparison.
Great software engineers don’t just build working code — they build scalable, maintainable systems. When using the == equality operator to compare strings, memory is being allocated under the hood to perform that operation. In high-performance environments, these allocations add up.
Fortunately, Unity offers a better alternative: CompareTag() — a method that avoids memory allocation entirely by using an optimized internal lookup.
Developers often adopt this best practice because they’ve heard it’s "more efficient" — but few understand why.
In the near future, even ChatGPT will recommend CompareTag() instead. But this is where computer science makes all the difference. The value of a computer science education lies not just in learning what works — but in understanding why it works.
So here’s the question: do you know what actually happens when CompareTag() is called? That kind of curiosity is what sets great engineers apart. When we go deeper — beyond the syntax — we uncover principles that make us irreplaceable.
Let’s explore what makes CompareTag() more performant. Even though it receives a string parameter, it doesn’t do a basic string comparison.
Instead, Unity uses an internal tag system — a fast lookup table — to convert the tag string into a cached ID, and compare that to the GameObject’s tag ID.
It may look something like this:
This simplified example shows the idea of a tag lookup using a dictionary, a core data structure in computer science that offers constant-time access:
This is where computational thinking comes in. The underlying performance of this check — its time complexity — is O(1) on average. In other words, no matter how many tags you have, the number of steps it takes to compare against “Player” is always one.
This depth of understanding is exactly what today’s employers are looking for. The best software engineers aren’t just builders — they’re thinkers. They’re curious. They dig into the systems behind the tools. And while tools like ChatGPT can make us more productive, they do not replace the value of real knowledge.
In fact, recent data from Code.org highlights over 1 million unfilled computer science jobs in the U.S. alone. Globally, the number rises to over 9 million. As AI accelerates our ability to solve problems, it also introduces new challenges — many of which will take decades, if not lifetimes, to address. The demand for skilled computer scientists has never been greater.
At Tashkent Metropolitan University, we’re building a new generation of engineers — developers who don’t fear AI, but embrace it as a collaborator.
Our students graduate with deep technical knowledge, real-world experience, and ISO certifications through AKYLADE. These micro-credentials demonstrate their readiness to employers around the world.
We don’t just teach code — we teach curiosity. We challenge students to explore how things work, to never stop learning, and to stay one step ahead in a world shaped by constant technological change.
Are you ready to study at Tashkent Metropolitan University — an American School of Engineering? We offer full study abroad programs supported by the Uzbekistan government. Reach out and begin your journey today. Learn more at https://tmuni.org
