New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.
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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.
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Most hiring managers are looking for unicorns
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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
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As someone who can't code (not a developer) but occasionally needs to dip my toes in it. I've learned quite a bit from using chatgpt and then picking apart whatever it shat out to figure out why it's not working. It's still better than me starting from scratch on whatever it is I'm working on because usually I don't even know where to begin.
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Holy shit just like an LLM
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I work at a software development school, and ChatGPT does a lot of damage here too. We try to teach that using it as a tool to help learning is different from using it as a "full project code generator", but the speed advantages it provides makes it irresistible from many students' perspective. I've lost many students last year because they couldn't pass a simple code exam (think FizzBuzz difficulty level) because they had no access to internet, and had to code in Emacs. We also can't block access to it because it starts an endless game where they always find a way to access it.
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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.
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Even before LLMs I saw junior developers w/o parent supervision do things which were so wrong, anybody self taught with just a few weeks of experience wouldn't do them. LLMs made all of this so much worse, and by now I see people with senior titles which I wouldn't hire as student assistants, which are unable to pull of a fucking CRUD service w/o totally blowing it.
By now, I am convinced it is a race to the bottom. Most software companies don't understand shit about software development. The whole corporate system is strongly incentivized for churning out lots of trivial code (SCRUM, MicroServices, etc.) and most people in the system profit:
- Your manager? More juniors and more code means higher headcount e.g. more importance/power for the manager
- Your company? Higher headcount for projects and so called architects means more billable hours
- Juniors which couldn't code if their life depended on it? Nice relaxed jobs for the intellectual lazy with mostly above average working conditions
- Overall for companies: Juniors are easy to replace/fire and control, another win for them.
- Hiring all the time juniors is actually one of the signs for startups, that they are making progress/growing, which will be part of their evaluation
- Don't get me started on SCRUM and just creating tickets, so that tickets can be processed and we get traction/our burn down chart shows progress.
It goes on and on.
Worst thing is, having a small team of really good developers is actually BAD for companies/managers/start ups. A lot of times governments/big companies will not deal with small companies, because they might be out of business soon etc.
I would be very happy for hints/tips of companies which have hard problems, appreciate seniors/good technical knowledge and pay decently.
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Damn, I forgot about the teaching aspect of programming. Must be hard. I can't blame students for taking shortcuts when they're almost assuredly swamped with other classwork and sleep-deprived, but still. This is where my defeatist comment comes in, because I genuinely think LLMs are here to stay. Like autocomplete, but dumber. Just gotta have students recognize when ChatGPT hallucinates solutions, I guess.
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All the devs I know use SO…
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Not that this is very unique to the field, junior anything usually needs at least 6 months to get to a productive level.
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Forced to use copilot? Wtf?
I would quit, immediately.
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Sounds nice? What type of place you work at? I'm guess not a big corp
