New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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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.
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I think that LLMs just made it easier for people who want to know but not learn to know. Reading all those posts all over the internet required you to understand what you pasted together if you wanted it to work (not always but the barr was higher). With ChatGPT, you can just throw errors at it until you have the code you want.
While the requirements never changed, the tools sure did and they made it a lot easier to not understand.
Have you actually found that to be the case in anything complex though? I find it just forgets parts to generate something. Stuck in an infuriating loop of fucking up.
It took us around 2 hours to run our coding questions through chatgpt and see what it gives. And it gives complete shit for most of them. One or two questions we had to replace.
If a company cannot invest even a day to go through their hiring process and AI proof it, then they have a shitty hiring process. And with a shitty hiring process, you get shitty devs.
And then you get people like OP, blaming the generation while if anything its them and their company to blame... for falling behind. Got to keep up folks. Our field moves fast.
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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.
Pretty easy to come up with problems that chatGPT is useless at. You can test it pretty easily. Throw enough constraints at it and the transformer starts to loose attention and forget vital parts.
With a bit of effort you can make problems where chatGPT will actuallt give a misleading answer and candidates have to think critically.
Just like in the past it was pretty easy to come up with problems which werent easily found on SO.
Same landscape. If you put in the time and the effort to have a solid recruitment process, you get solid devs. If you have a lazy and shitty process, you get shitty devs.
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All I hear is "I'm bad at mentoring"
And some sort of "no one wants to work any more".
I know young brilliant people, maybe they have to be paid correctly?
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No wonder open source software becomes more efficient than proprietary one.
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All I hear is "I'm bad at mentoring"
There is only so much mentoring can do though. You can have the best math prof. You still need to put in the exercise to solve your differential equations to get good at it.
