New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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Unless AI dramatically improves from where LLMs are today (in ways that it so far hasn't), I'm looking forward to the drastic shortage of experienced senior devs in a few years time.
On the flipside, I'm discouraging people from entering CS. The passionate devs will ignore me anyway, and those that'll listen won't stand a chance against the hordes of professional BS "devs" that'll master AI and talk much prettier than them.
Don't get into CS unless you're passionate about the craft. If you're passionate, you'll succeed in pretty much regardless of the field.
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You're right in that the goal is problem solving, you're wrong that inability to code isn't a problem.
AI can make a for loop and do common tasks but the moment you have something halfway novel to do, it has a habit of shitting itself and pretending that the feces is good code. And if you can't read code, you can't tell the shit from the stuff you want.
It may be able to do it in the future but it can't yet
Source: data engineer who has fought his AI a time or two.
Of course I use as well on a daily basis for coding and AI is shit.
Again, I in no way support AI, I just think that the argument made in the article is also not good.
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Sweden of all places? What happened in the last decade that Sweden's slowly losing the fame of country to follow in social aspects?
Of course, there are different opinions, but here's my take (as a Swede, but not an expert in politics/history):
The issues didn't start during the last decade. In the 90's, it was politically decided that schools wouldn't be nearly as centrally managed by the state as they had been, instead municipalities would handle most school-related politics and administration locally. It was also decided that parents are allowed to choose more freely where to send their kids. This weakened public schools. Moreover, legislation was introduced (in the 00's I think but I'm not sure) that allows for-profit private schools, which historically AFAIK had been prohibited.
Parents usually don't have to pay anything extra to send their kids to private schools, and for each private school pupil more tax money flows into the private instead of public schools. The private schools are of course incentivized to attract children from families that are well off, since they tend to perform better (boosting the school's score and thus reputation), have parents that can e.g. drive them from a longer distance, and just generally have less issues and so cost and complain less. For instance, it's been reported that some private schools refuse (openly or through loopholes) e.g. special needs pupils since the tax money paid to the school for them isn't worth the cost (and "bad PR", no doubt) of actually giving them a proper education.
Sweden has also had a high rate of immigration the last decades. Immigrant parents understandably tend to not be as savvy about the school system and have less time/resources for getting their kids to "nicer" schools further away. Immigrant kids also tend to require more attention, both due to needing to learn Swedish and because psychological problems, e.g PTSD, are more common among many immigrant groups. Also I haven't seen any studies on this, but IMO the private schools' advertisements (on billboards etc) tend to be very geared towards "white" kids/parents with no immigrant background.
In 2007 a tax benefit for "homework help" among other things was introduced, halving the price parents have to pay for private tutors at home. This again benefits families that are well off and lets private companies in education siphon tax money.
All this means a cycle of segregation seen in so many countries. Public schools are burdened with students that require more resources, while private schools do everything they can to snatch up low-maintenance pupils. This makes private schools seem to perform better and gives public schools bad reputations. Racism and class discrimination also plays into all this of course.
It also doesn't help that teachers' salaries and social standing have decreased, partly due to the same general pattern.
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Agreed. A few year back the devs looking for quick fixes would go over to StackOverflow and just copy answers without reading explanations. This caused the same type of problems that OP is talking about. That said, the ease of AI might be making things even worse.
Hell, I would copy the question sometimes
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Agreed. I wanted to test a new config in my router yesterday, which is configured using scripts. So I thought it would be a good idea for ChatGPT to figure it out for me, instead of 3 hours of me reading documentation and trying tutorials. It was a test scenario, so I thought it might do well.
It did not do well at all. The scripts were mostly correct but often in the wrong order (referencing a thing before actually defining it). Sometimes the syntax would be totally wrong and it kept mixing version 6 syntax with version 7 syntax (I'm on 7). It will also make mistakes and when I point out the mistake it says Oh you are totally right, I made a mistake. Then goes on to explain what mistake it did and output new code. However more often than not the new code contained the exact same mistake. This is probably because of a lack of training data, where it is referencing only one example and that example just had a mistake in it.
In the end I gave up on ChatGPT, searched for my testscenario and it turned out a friendly dude on a forum put together a tutorial. So I followed that and it almost worked right away. A couple of minutes of tweaking and testing and I got it working.
I'm afraid for a future where forums and such don't exist and sources like Reddit get fucked and nuked. In an AI driven world the incentive for creating new original content is way lower. So when AI doesn't know the answer, you are just hooped and have to re-invent the wheel yourself. In the long run this will destroy productivity and not give the gains people are hoping for at the moment.
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.
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Stack Overflow and Google were once the "AI" of the previous generation. "These kids can't code, they just copy what others have done"
Yeah, and copy-pasting SO answers with no thought is just as bad.
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Yeah, and copy-pasting SO answers with no thought is just as bad.
And when copy-pasting didn't work, those who dared to rise above and understand it, became better. Same with AI, those of the new generation who see through the slop will learn. It's the same as it has always been. Software engineering is more accessible than ever, say what you will about the current landscape of software engineering but that fact remains undeniable.
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How is it more efficient than reading a static page? The kids can't read.
They weren't taught phonics, they were taught to guess the and with context clues. It's called "whole language" or "balanced reading"I don't think phonics are the most critical part of why the kids can't read.
It's proven that people who read primarily books and documents read thoroughly, line by line and with understanding, while those that primarily read from screens (such as social media) skip and skim to find certain keywords. This makes reading books (such as documentation) hard for those used to screens from a young age and some believe may be one of the driving forces behind the collapse in reading amongst young people.
If you're used to the skip & skim style of reading, you will often miss details, which makes finding a solution in a manual infinitely frustrating.
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Junior Dev's could never code, yes including us
Oddly enough, on my first development project I was paired with a "senior dev" who turned out just to be a guy in his 60s who had never actually coded before, so... just a senior.
I ended up doing 100% of the coding, but the guy managed to keep his job for a few months.
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They never could
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you know, the show Goblin Slayer had a scene where the older wizard was teaching the younger wizard about magic and the older one said something that stuck with me. Keep in mind I'm paraphrasing here.
young wizards often believe that they are magic casters because they can cast magic, and that's all they have to do. they don't realize that a wizard is supposed to be solving problems for their party with magic.
I think this is similar to the new and old devs of today. Old devs are solving problems with software, new devs are writing software to write software. it's pretty apparent with the current state of node and python package libraries in contrast to more matured ruby and java libraries.
doesn't matter IMO, software development is dying because the younger devs don't want to solve the problems anyway and just want to rewrite things in new languages or frameworks. they think they're solving the problems, but they're just trading them for different ones.
People who would have gone into finance or received an MBA have been going to tech for a decade now. Every one of them pushes out someone who would have been a real developer.
I've also had the pleasure of watching a lot of the generation who's now complaining as they grew through their journey as developers. I think a lot of them are sugar coating their own abilities. I struggled with many a now illustrious developer whole they banged their head against the wall for hours.
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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.
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They never could
Exactly, the jr dev that could write anything useful is a rare gem. Boot camps cranking out jr dev by the dozens every couple of months didn’t help the issue. Talent needs cultivation, and since every tech company has been cutting back lately, they stopped cultivating and started sniping talent from each other. Not hard given the amount of layoffs lately. So now we have jr devs either unable to find a place to refine them, or getting hired by people who just want to save money and don’t know that you need a senior or two to wrangle them. Then chat gpt comes along and gives the illusion of sr dev advice, telling them how to write the wrong thing better, no one to teach them which tool is the right one for the job.
Our industry is in kind of a fucked state and will be for a while. Get good at cleaning up the messes that will be left behind and that will keep you fed for the next decade.
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And when copy-pasting didn't work, those who dared to rise above and understand it, became better. Same with AI, those of the new generation who see through the slop will learn. It's the same as it has always been. Software engineering is more accessible than ever, say what you will about the current landscape of software engineering but that fact remains undeniable.
Well said. Some of the most talented devs I know use Stack Overflow. It depends on how you use it.
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Of course, there are different opinions, but here's my take (as a Swede, but not an expert in politics/history):
The issues didn't start during the last decade. In the 90's, it was politically decided that schools wouldn't be nearly as centrally managed by the state as they had been, instead municipalities would handle most school-related politics and administration locally. It was also decided that parents are allowed to choose more freely where to send their kids. This weakened public schools. Moreover, legislation was introduced (in the 00's I think but I'm not sure) that allows for-profit private schools, which historically AFAIK had been prohibited.
Parents usually don't have to pay anything extra to send their kids to private schools, and for each private school pupil more tax money flows into the private instead of public schools. The private schools are of course incentivized to attract children from families that are well off, since they tend to perform better (boosting the school's score and thus reputation), have parents that can e.g. drive them from a longer distance, and just generally have less issues and so cost and complain less. For instance, it's been reported that some private schools refuse (openly or through loopholes) e.g. special needs pupils since the tax money paid to the school for them isn't worth the cost (and "bad PR", no doubt) of actually giving them a proper education.
Sweden has also had a high rate of immigration the last decades. Immigrant parents understandably tend to not be as savvy about the school system and have less time/resources for getting their kids to "nicer" schools further away. Immigrant kids also tend to require more attention, both due to needing to learn Swedish and because psychological problems, e.g PTSD, are more common among many immigrant groups. Also I haven't seen any studies on this, but IMO the private schools' advertisements (on billboards etc) tend to be very geared towards "white" kids/parents with no immigrant background.
In 2007 a tax benefit for "homework help" among other things was introduced, halving the price parents have to pay for private tutors at home. This again benefits families that are well off and lets private companies in education siphon tax money.
All this means a cycle of segregation seen in so many countries. Public schools are burdened with students that require more resources, while private schools do everything they can to snatch up low-maintenance pupils. This makes private schools seem to perform better and gives public schools bad reputations. Racism and class discrimination also plays into all this of course.
It also doesn't help that teachers' salaries and social standing have decreased, partly due to the same general pattern.
Thanks for the reply, i've seen those patterns as well, kinda sad.
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I don't think phonics are the most critical part of why the kids can't read.
It's proven that people who read primarily books and documents read thoroughly, line by line and with understanding, while those that primarily read from screens (such as social media) skip and skim to find certain keywords. This makes reading books (such as documentation) hard for those used to screens from a young age and some believe may be one of the driving forces behind the collapse in reading amongst young people.
If you're used to the skip & skim style of reading, you will often miss details, which makes finding a solution in a manual infinitely frustrating.
Skip & skim could also stem from the fact that this how a mind used to everpresent ads reads. It's like an adblocker built into your brain.
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Has anyone else clicked the chat.com url in the article …
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Those are good approaches, I would note that the "90% is written" one is mostly about code comprehension, not writing (as in: Actually architect something), and the requirement thing is a thing that you should, IMO, learn as a junior, it's not a prerequisite. It needs a lot of experience, and often domain knowledge new candidates have no chance of having. But, then, throwing such stuff at them and then judging them by their approach, not end result, should be fair.
The main question I ask myself, in general, is "can this person look at code from different angles". Somewhat like rotating a cube in your mind's eye if you get what I mean. And it might even that they're no good at it, but they demonstrate the ability when talking about coffee making. People who don't get lost when you're talking about cash registers having a common queue having better overall latency than cash registers with individual queues. Just as a carpenter would ask someone "do you like working with your hands", the question is "do you like to rotate implication structures in your mind".
judging them by their approach, not end result, should be fair.
Yup, that's the approach. It's okay if they don't finish, I want to know how they approach the problem. We absolutely adjust our decision based on the role.
If they can extend existing code and design a new system (with minimal new code) and ask the right questions, we can work with them.
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We do two "code challenges":
- Very simple, many are done in 5 min; this just weeds out the incompetent applicants, and 90% of the code is written (i.e. simulate working in an existing codebase)
- Ambiguous requirements, the point is to ask questions, and we actually have different branches depending on assumptions they made (to challenge their assumptions); i.e. simulate building a solution with product team
The first is in the first round, the second is in the technical interview. Neither are difficult, and we provide any equations they'll need.
It's much more important that they can reason about requirements than code something quick, because life won't give you firm requirements, and we don't want a ton of back and forth with product team if we can avoid it, so we need to catch most of that at the start.
In short, we're looking for actual software engineers, not code monkeys.
Most hiring managers are looking for unicorns
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I don't think phonics are the most critical part of why the kids can't read.
It's proven that people who read primarily books and documents read thoroughly, line by line and with understanding, while those that primarily read from screens (such as social media) skip and skim to find certain keywords. This makes reading books (such as documentation) hard for those used to screens from a young age and some believe may be one of the driving forces behind the collapse in reading amongst young people.
If you're used to the skip & skim style of reading, you will often miss details, which makes finding a solution in a manual infinitely frustrating.
It's not that phonics is integral, but rather if reading is a guessing game that's just one more barrier to reading, and they read less, and what they do read they skim over and potentially ignore foreign words
