New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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Yeah those job hoppers are the worst. You can always tell right away what kind of person those are. I've had to work with a "senior" dev who had 15 years of experience and to be honest he sucked at his job. He couldn't do simple tasks, didn't think before he started writing code and often got stuck asking other people for help. But he got paid big bucks, because all he did his entire career was work somewhere for 2-3 years and then job hop and trade up. By the time the company figured out the dude was useless, he went on to the next company.
Such a shitty attitude, which is a shame because he was a good dude otherwise. I got along with him on a personal level. And honestly good on him for making the most he can, fuck the company. But I personally couldn't do that, I take pride in my work.
Maybe if people were paid more it wouldn't be such an issue.
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I'm a little defeatist about it. I saw with my own 3 eyes how a junior asked ChatGPT how to insert something into an
std::unordered_map. I tell them about cppreference. The little shit tells me "Sorry unc, ChatGPT is objectively more efficient". I almost blew a fucking gasket, mainly cuz I'm not that god damn old. I don't care how much you try to convince me that LLMs are efficient, there is no shot they are more efficient than opening a static page with all the info you would ever need. Not even considering energy efficiency. Utility aside, the damage we have dealt to developing minds is irreversible. We have convinced them that thought is optional. This is gonna bite us in the ass. Hard.Make the junior put it to the test John Henry style. You code something while they use gpt and see who comes up with a working version first
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To me, I feel like this is a problem perpetuated by management. I see it on the system administration side as well -- they don't care if people understand why a tool works; they just want someone who can run it. If there's no free thought the people are interchangeable and easily replaced.
I often see it farmed out to vendors when actual thought is required, and it's maddening.
i always found this to be upsetting as an IT tech at a former company - when a network or server had an issue and i was sent to resolve it, it was a "just reboot it" fix, which never kept the problem from recurring and bringing the server down at 07:00 the next Monday.
the limitations on the questions i could ask hurt that SLA more than any network switch's memory leak ever did, and i felt as if my expertise meant nothing as a result.
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Of course they don't. Hiring junior devs for their hard skills is a dumb proposition. Hire for their soft skills, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to work hard and learn. There is no substitute for good training and experience.
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Not that this is very unique to the field, junior anything usually needs at least 6 months to get to a productive level.
Kind of wish we went with more tradesmen-like titles. Apprentice, journeyman, master. Master software developer sounds like we have honed our craft. Junior/senior just seems like a length of time.
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I could barely code when I landed my job and now I’m a senior dev. It’s saying a plumber’s apprentice can’t plumb - you learn on the job.
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Kind of wish we went with more tradesmen-like titles. Apprentice, journeyman, master. Master software developer sounds like we have honed our craft. Junior/senior just seems like a length of time.
It generally is a length of time. Your title depends on the years on the job.
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The problem is not only the coding but the thinking. The AI revolution will give birth to a lot more people without critical thinking and problem solving capabilities.
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As someone who has interviewed candidates for developer jobs for over a decade: this sounds like “in my day everything was better”.
Yes, there are plenty of candidates who can’t explain the piece of code they copied from Copilot. But guess what? A few years ago there were plenty of candidates who couldn’t explain the code they copied from StackOverflow. And before that, there were those who failed at the basic programming test we gave them.
We don’t hire those people. We hire the ones who use the tools at their disposal and also show they understand what they’re doing. The tools change, the requirements do not.
But how do you find those people solely based on a short interview, where they can use AI tools to perform better if the interview is not held in person?
And mind you the SO was better because you needed to read a lot of answers there and try to understand what would work in your particular case. Learn how to ask smartly. Do your homework and explain the question properly so as not to get gaslit, etc. this is all now gone.
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The problem is not only the coding but the thinking. The AI revolution will give birth to a lot more people without critical thinking and problem solving capabilities.
That's the point.
Along with censorship.
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But how do you find those people solely based on a short interview, where they can use AI tools to perform better if the interview is not held in person?
And mind you the SO was better because you needed to read a lot of answers there and try to understand what would work in your particular case. Learn how to ask smartly. Do your homework and explain the question properly so as not to get gaslit, etc. this is all now gone.
Evil me: Ask questions to which there is no solution but ChatGPT will happily give incorrect solutions to and will run itself in circles trying to answer correctly as you feed it error messages.
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All I hear is "I'm bad at mentoring"
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that s the point of being junior. Then problems show up and they are forcing them to learn to solve them
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This post is literally an ad for AI tools.
No, thanks. Call me when they actually get good. As it stands, they only offer marginally better autocomplete.
I should probably start collecting dumb AI suggestions and gaslighting answers to show the next time I encounter this topic...
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I could barely code when I landed my job and now I’m a senior dev. It’s saying a plumber’s apprentice can’t plumb - you learn on the job.
You're not learning anything if Copilot is doing it for you. That's the point.
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This post is literally an ad for AI tools.
No, thanks. Call me when they actually get good. As it stands, they only offer marginally better autocomplete.
I should probably start collecting dumb AI suggestions and gaslighting answers to show the next time I encounter this topic...
It's actually complaining about AI, tho.
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It's actually complaining about AI, tho.
There are at least four links leading to AI tools in this page. Why would you link something when you complain about it?
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You're not learning anything if Copilot is doing it for you. That's the point.
100% agree.
I dont think there is no place for AI as an aid to help you find the solution, but i dont think it's going to help you learn if you just ask it for the answers.
For example, yesterday, i was trying to find out why a policy map on a cisco switch wasn't re-activating after my radius server came back up. Instead of throwing my map at the AI and asking whats wrong l, i asked it details about how a policy map is activated, and about what mechanism the switch uses to determine the status of the radius server and how a policy map can leverage that to kick into gear again.
Ultimately, AI didn't have the answer, but it put me on the right track, and i believe i solved the issue. It seems that the switch didnt count me adding the radius server to the running config as a server coming back alive but if i put in a fake server and instead altered the IP to a real server then the switch saw this as the server coming back alive and authentication started again.
In fact, some of the info, it gave me along the way was wrong. Like when it tried to give me cli commands that i already knew wouldn't work because i was using the newer C3PL AAA commands, but it was mixing them up with the legacy commands and combining them together. Even after i told it that was a made-up command and why it wouldn't work, it still tried to give me the command again later.
So, i dont think it's a good tool for producing actual work, but it can be a good tool to help us learn things if it is used that way. To ask "why" and "how" instead of "what".
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There are at least four links leading to AI tools in this page. Why would you link something when you complain about it?
Oh lol I thought it was a text post, I didn't even click the link and just read the post description.
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It's like useful information grows as fruit from trees in a digital forest we call the Internet. However, the fruit spoils over time (becomes less relevant) and requires fertile soil (educated people being online) that can be eroded away (not investing in education or infrastructure) or paved over (intellectual property law). LLMs are like processed food created in factories that lack key characteristics of more nutritious fresh ingredients you can find at a farmer's market. Sure, you can feed more people (provide faster answers to questions) by growing a monocrop (training your LLM on a handful of generous people who publish under Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-SA on Stack Overflow), but you also risk a plague destroying your industry like how the Panama disease fungus destroyed nearly all Gros Michel banana farming (companies firing those generous software developers who “waste time” by volunteering to communities like Stack Overflow and replacing them with LLMs).
There's some solar punk ethical fusion of LLMs and sustainable cultivation of high quality information, but we're definitely not there yet.
To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.
