New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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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.
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I let the GPTs do that for me, without worrying that I won’t learn to code YAML for Ansible.
And this is the perfect use case. There's a good chance someone has done exactly what you want, and AI can regurgitate that for you.
That's not true of any interesting software project though.
FAIL some code reviews on corner cases. Fail some reviews on ISO27002 and supply chain and role sep. Fail some deployments when they’re using dev tools in prod. And use them all as teachable moments.
Fortunately, I work at an org that does this. It turns out that if our product breaks in prod, our customers could lose millions, which means they could go to a competitor. We build software to satisfy regulators, regulators that have the power to shut down everything if the ts aren't crossed just so.
Maybe that's the problem, maybe the stakes are low enough that quality isn't important anymore. Idk, what I do know is that I go hard on reviews.
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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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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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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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Hell, I would copy the question sometimes
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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.
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Yeah, and copy-pasting SO answers with no thought is just as bad.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Well said. Some of the most talented devs I know use Stack Overflow. It depends on how you use it.
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Thanks for the reply, i've seen those patterns as well, kinda sad.
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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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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.
