New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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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.
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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.
My rule of thumb: Use ChatGPT for questions whos answer I already know.
Otherwise it hallucinates and tries hard in convincing me of a wrong answer.
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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.
I find ChatGPT to sometimes be excellent at giving me a direction, if not outright solving the problem, when I paste errors I'm to lazy to look search. I say sometimes because othertimes it is just dead wrong.
All code I ask ChatGPT to write is usually along the lines for "I have these values that I need to verify, write code that verifies that nothing is empty and saves an error message for each that is" and then I work with the code it gives me from there. I never take it at face value.
Have you actually found that to be the case in anything complex though?
I think that using LLMs to create complex code is the wrong use of the tool. They are better at providing structure to work from rather than writing the code itself (unless it is something simple as above) in my opinion.
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.
I agree with you on that.
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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.
apart from that, learning programming went from something one does out of calling, to something one does to get a job. The percentage of programmers that actually like coding is going down, so on average they're going to be worse
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Forced to use copilot? Wtf?
I would quit, immediately.
I would quit, immediately.
Pay my bills. Thanks.
I've been dusting off the CV, for multiple other reasons. -
Oh lol I thought it was a text post, I didn't even click the link and just read the post description.
The "about" page indicates that the author is a freelance frontend UI/UX dev, that's recently switched to "helping developers get better with AI" (paraphrased). Nothing about credentials/education related to AI development, only some hobby projects using preexisting AI solutions from what I saw. The post itself doesn't have any sources/links to research about junior devs either, it's all anecdotes and personal opinion. Sure looks like an AI grifter trying to grab attention by ranting about AI, with some pretty lukewarm criticism.
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I could have been a junior dev that could code. I learned to do it before ChatGPT. I just never got the job.
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I would quit, immediately.
Pay my bills. Thanks.
I've been dusting off the CV, for multiple other reasons.how surprising! /s
but seriously, it's almost never one (1) thing that goes wrong when some idiotic mandate gets handed down from management.
a manager that mandates use of copilot (or any tool unfit for any given job), that's a manager that's going to mandate a bunch of other nonsensical shit that gets in the way of work. every time.
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how surprising! /s
but seriously, it's almost never one (1) thing that goes wrong when some idiotic mandate gets handed down from management.
a manager that mandates use of copilot (or any tool unfit for any given job), that's a manager that's going to mandate a bunch of other nonsensical shit that gets in the way of work. every time.
It's an at-scale company, orders came from way above. As did RTO after 2 years full-at-home, etc, etc.
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This isn't a new thing. Dilution of "programmer" and "computer" education has been going on for a long time. Everyone with an IT certificate is an engineer th se days.
For millennials, a "dev" was pretty much anyone with reasonable intelligence who wanted to write code - it is actually very easy to learn the basics and fake your way into it with no formal education. Now we are even moving on from that to where a "dev" is anyone who can use an AI. "Prompt Engineering."
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Im in uni learning to code right now but since I'm a boomer i only spin up oligarch bots every once in a while to check for an issue that I would have to ask the teacher.
It's far more important for me to understand fundies than it is to get a working program. But that is only because ive gotten good at many other skills and realize that fundies are fundamental for a reason. -
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.
You get out of education what you put into it.
You won't be an artist from the best art school if you do the bare minimum to pass.
You can end up as a legend of the industry coming from a noname school. -
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.
I’m just getting started on my third attempt at changing careers from sys-admining over to coding (starting with the Odin project this time). I’m not sure the questions you ask, while interesting, will be covered. Can you point to some resources or subject matter to research to get exposure to these questions? The non coding, coding questions are interesting to me and I’m curious if my experience will help or if it’s something I need to account for while learning.
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This isn't a new thing. Dilution of "programmer" and "computer" education has been going on for a long time. Everyone with an IT certificate is an engineer th se days.
For millennials, a "dev" was pretty much anyone with reasonable intelligence who wanted to write code - it is actually very easy to learn the basics and fake your way into it with no formal education. Now we are even moving on from that to where a "dev" is anyone who can use an AI. "Prompt Engineering."
"Prompt Engineer" makes a little vomit appear in the back of my mouth.
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Sounds nice? What type of place you work at? I'm guess not a big corp
We're a somewhat big player in a niche industry that manufactures for a large industry. Yearly profits are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, market cap is a few billion, so low end of mid cap stocks. I don't want to doxx myself, but think of something like producing drills for oil rigs and you won't be far off.
We have about 50 software developers across three time zones (7 or 8 scrum teams) and a pretty high requirement for correctness and very little emphasis on rapid delivery. It's okay if it takes more time, as long as can plan around it, so we end up with estimates like 2-3 months for things that could have an MVP in under a month (in fact, we often build an MVP during estimation), with the extra time spent testing.
So yeah, it's a nice place to work. I very rarely stay late, and it's never because a project is late, but because of a high severity bug in prod (e.g. a customer can't complete a task).
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You're not learning anything if Copilot is doing it for you. That's the point.
That’s true, it can only get you so far. I’m sure we all started by Frankenstein-ing stack overflow answers together until we had to actually learn the “why”
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I am not a professional coder, just a hobbyist, but I am increasingly digging into Cybersecurity concepts.
And even as an "amature Cybersecurity" person, everything about what you describe, and LLM coders, terrifies me, because that shit is never going to have any proper security methodology implemented.
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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?
to play the devil's advocate: this can be done to exemplify what you complain about as opposed to complaining about an abstract concept
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To be fair, most never could. I've been hiring junior devs for decades now, and all the ones straight out of university barely had any coding skills .
Its why I stopped looking at where they studied, I always first check their hobbies. if one of the hobbies is something nerdy and useless, tinkering with a raspberry or something, that indicates to me it's someone who loves coding and probably is already reasonably good at it
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To be fair, most never could. I've been hiring junior devs for decades now, and all the ones straight out of university barely had any coding skills .
Its why I stopped looking at where they studied, I always first check their hobbies. if one of the hobbies is something nerdy and useless, tinkering with a raspberry or something, that indicates to me it's someone who loves coding and probably is already reasonably good at it
Nevermind how cybersecurity is a niche field that can vary by use case and environment.
At some level, you'll need to learn the security system of your company (or the lack there of) and the tools used by your department.
There is no class you can take that's going to give you more than broad theory.
