New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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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.
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What are you guys working on where chatgpt can figure it out? Honestly, I haven't been able to get a scrap of working code beyond a trivial example out of that thing or any other LLM.
Lately I have been using it for react code. It seems to be fairly decent at that. As a consequence when it does not work I get completely lost but despite this I think I have learned more with it then I would have without.
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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.
We stay away from riddles, and instead focus on CS concepts. We'll rephrase to avoid jargon if you don't have a formal education, or it has been a while. Here are a few categories:
- OOP concepts like SOLID
- concurrency vs parallelism, approaches for each (generators, threads, async,' etc), and tradeoffs
- typing (e.g. is a Python strongly or weakly typed? Java? JavaScript?), and practical implications
- functional programming concepts like closures, partial application, etc
- SQL knowledge
- types of tests, and approaches/goals for each
And some practical details like:
- major implementation details of our stack (Python's GIL, browser features like service workers, etc)
- git and docker experience
- build systems and other dev tools
That covers most of it. We don't expect every candidate to know everything, we just want to get an idea of the breadth and depth of their knowledge.
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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.
On the bright side, you might be able to cash in on some bug bounties.
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I have seen this too much. My current gripe isn't fresh devs, as long as they are teachable and care.
My main pain over the last several years has been the bulk of 'give-no-shit' perms/contractors who don't want to think or try when they can avoid it.
They run a web of lies until it is no longer sustainable (or the project is done for contractors) and then again its someone else's problem.
There are plenty of 10/20 year plus and devs who don't know what they are doing and don't care whose problem it will be as long as it isnt theirs.
I'm sick of writing coding 101 standards for 1k+ a day 'experts'. More sick of PR feedback where it's a battle to get things done in a maintainable manner from said 'experts'.
that is your leaderships fault
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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.
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.
The one example could be flawless, but the output of an LLM is influenced by all of its input. 99.999% of that input is irrelevant to your situation, so of course it's going to degenerate the output.
What you (and everyone else) needs is a good search engine to find the needle in the haystack of human knowledge, you don't need that haystack ground down to dust to give you a needle-shaped piece of crap with slightly more iron than average.
