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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#381

Post by codeflo »

josephg wrote: post #278
x86x87 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grind you have to go through in a "google style" interview has nothing to do with the actual work you normally do. It's done to show 1) you will do large amounts of boring work without questioning the need for it 2) you got the fundamentals and you know what's there / when using something you can grok what's going on under the covers. Nobody needs to implement a sorting algorithm until they do - the risk of NIH a…

Nobody at Google wants you to do boring work without questioning the need for it. That would be a waste of money and time. Hard interview questions are asked for the same reason hard questions are asked in SAT tests. The assumption is that if you can do a hard thing in the interview (implement a mutex using a semaphore or whatever) then you can probably write simple code too. A few years ago I was working somewhere t…

I’ve seen many instances where a low-skill programming place either lives with a bug, or alternatively, adopts a solution that involves meticulously copy&pasting a workaround into 300 places.

Having said that, I know great, intelligent programmers, sone of who worked on compilers, who are simply bad in a whiteboard setting. Having a filter is necessary, I’m just not convinced a Google-style interview filters exactly the right thing.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#382

Post by morelisp »

julian37 wrote: post #300
morelisp wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero is gracefully handled; the mean of a zero-sized set is best represented by NaN, and this would be idiomatic in most languages' IEEE754-style handling. Saturation is not. This is what really bugs me: If I'm going to drag in a billion GPUs of external computation (or a dependency, which is basically the same thing but with human brains), I want it to provide the hard algorithm I can't write, not the easy one I can…

Agreed about saturation and the choice of variable name, but the code would trigger a division by zero and not result in NaN: https://go.dev/play/p/vYm4tSNEJ7M (Also, in--say--Ruby and JavaScript 1.0/0.0 is Infinity and not NaN.)

Your playground link shows a build error. 0.0/0.0 at runtime will be NaN. And in basically every language, 1.0/0.0 is Infinity. But we're talking about 0.0/0.0.

Both good examples of coding where you should be thinking instead, though.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#383

Post by morelisp »

bbor wrote: post #286
morelisp wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aspects of a MSc are easily accessible to any motivated undergraduate as well.

Would you agree that all of the most important aspects of a bachelors in CS are easily accessible to a motivated non-student?

Yes, and I hire lots of people without CS degrees. But I do see guided study accelerating the process. People who come in with no CS background do need some years to backfill missing knowledge, or they've some years in self-study on top of a 4y degree.

I don't see an MSc accelerating anything; in general one year of MSc seems worse than one year of work experience or one year of motivated self-study, and the students who do it were not the top tier of BSc students.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#384

Post by morelisp »

Miraste wrote: post #281
morelisp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's a…

Graduate degrees aren’t meant to simulate work experience or take more classes, they’re intended for research. If your MSc lists no research and is applying for some sort of boilerplate frontend job, then I understand the hesitation, but normally one would take that experience into a cutting-edge field which focuses on innovation rather than making web apps as fast as possible. In jobs with an element of R&D, univers…

I mean that's the theory, and it still seems true for PhD programs. (So I guess I'd include "ABD" as another possible exception if the program also granted an MSc but it feels like this is much less common than it was when I graduated - the many problems of grad school are now better communicated to undergrads.)

But for MScs, nah. The more focused coursework is directly accessible to undergraduates, and the projects are often like "port this 20yo tool to a new kernel version" or "build me a DB schema" or a few other things you'll have also done but 3x over in your first year of a real job.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#385

Post by morelisp »

beej71 wrote: post #275
morelisp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's a…

I got my MS directly after my BS without looking for work. In my case, your claim is that experience was actually detrimental to my knowledge, somehow erasing part of the value of my BS. Maybe that's why you're getting downvoted. (Not by me, for the record.)

But my options aren't ever "candidate A with BSc" and "candidate A with MSc", it's "candidate A with BSc" and "candidate B with MSc". I don't assign negative value to the MSc per se.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#386

Post by sideshowb »

dvh1990 wrote: post #208

It is not the lecturers job to police their students. People that cheat only end up cheating themselves, and nobody but the cheater should do anything about it.

Wrong. They undermine the reputation of the qualification their honest course mates are working for.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#387

Post by anonymousDan »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #323
throwaway675309 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A masters program is generally going to cover deeper theoretical subjects and will also give you stronger mathematical underpinnings in those areas. If you're just looking for a code monkey to do your e-commerce react website then obviously work experience will always trump academia.

This comment reeks of elitism.

Boohoo

Re: Coping with Copilot

#388

Post by morelisp »

kortilla wrote: post #287
morelisp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll generally rate an MSc lower than BA/BSc. (The exceptions would be if you needed the MSc to meet some visa requirement, or if you had an BSc in some weakly-related field beforehand.) From downvoters: I would genuinely love to hear a defense of an MSc per se. What university has their shit together enough to actually accelerate/compress 2-4y of work experience into 1-2y years of academic project, which is what's a…

This just sounds like you’re punishing candidates because you have an inferiority complex. Many master’s holders started out thinking they might have been interested in research and decided industry was a better fit after seeing how the sausage is made. You’re “rule of thumb” punishes undergrads who were inspired to push the boundaries of knowledge in the field.

Cool personal insult - who has the inferiority complex here?

Your explanation can be reframed as "many MSc holders did not invest any attention to how the academy works during their BSc years" - why should I prefer them? My rule of thumb punishes such people compared to those with a broader view and better self-knowledge, yes.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#389

Post by jeffbr13 »

I’m not sure I have much sympathy for the problem. Copilot is going to force everyone to move up the abstraction stack.

I absolutely disagree with how Copilot has been trained on the intellectual property of others, and I think Microsoft/GitHub should be taken to court over it (and I say that as an IP cynic, but if you play that game, you should stick by the rules), but this technological cat is out of the bag.

Students (and everyone else) should be thinking much harder about how they test and verify the behaviour of any given piece of code and how they design systems to stick together. This class of technology is going to automate away many of the jobs where you just pump out code. This is fine. It’s no different to someone inventing a burger-flipping machine, and I’m sure many here would agree it’s better if humans didn’t have to flip burgers for a living (modulo solving employment being necessary for a decent/tolerable existence). It may turn out that the next step in software productivity is not a new generation of cool and highly-abstract declarative programming languages (4GL) but simply automating away the drudgery of writing code in the extant kinda advanced languages (3GL) which are ‘good enough’.

Arguably Copilot doesn’t change much about the software development process. You can already get software developed pretty cheap if you farm it out to low-quality contractors or a lot of juniors straight out of school. There’s a whole branch of the industry that will hire anyone straight out of university to manage and front development teams in South Asia. But as we say, quantity has a quality all of its own. And the only way to manage software (not code) quality with this method is to verify and test that the deliverables actually meet your criteria and expectations.

It’s currently a great time to focus on TDD/BDD and code specification because our time spent on the D is about to get a lot shorter. There is still a place for artisanal hand-crafted code. But the mechanical loom has arrived.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#390

Post by argiope »

codeflo wrote: post #381
josephg wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody at Google wants you to do boring work without questioning the need for it. That would be a waste of money and time. Hard interview questions are asked for the same reason hard questions are asked in SAT tests. The assumption is that if you can do a hard thing in the interview (implement a mutex using a semaphore or whatever) then you can probably write simple code too. A few years ago I was working somewhere t…

I’ve seen many instances where a low-skill programming place either lives with a bug, or alternatively, adopts a solution that involves meticulously copy&pasting a workaround into 300 places. Having said that, I know great, intelligent programmers, sone of who worked on compilers, who are simply bad in a whiteboard setting. Having a filter is necessary, I’m just not convinced a Google-style interview filters exactly…

The google-style interviews are certainly filtering for something though. An unfounded theory of mine is that the unfortunate eagerness of Google to sunset their products [1] might be a side effect of hiring for people that rather want to solve exciting coding problems and furthering their career by using X new language/framework, than maintaining legacy systems and keeping backwards compatibility, which might not sound so exciting.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

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