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Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

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Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#31

Post by mschuster91 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #18
cheema33 wrote: post #6

AI is just another tool. A pretty good one. And there is a skill to using it efficiently. If you ask it dumb questions, you will get dumb answers. Garbage in, garbage out. I am a software developer and I hire devs as well. If somebody is ignorant of AI or refuses to use it, that is hard pass for me. It is not all that different from an accountant not wanting to use computers. Sure, you could still do some work. But,…

Exactly. I expect people to know, be proficient with, and use all relevant tools available to them. Including AI; but not just AI. There are a lot of people trying to argue why they don't want/need to use certain tools. A job interview would be the wrong place to have that argument. A good, open interview question these days would be asking candidates how they are using AI in their work and what challenges they are f…

> Bonus points for generating most/all of the endpoints.

Swagger has solved that one for years now. In any case I think it's foolish to have multiple competing "sources of truth"... in the worst case you have stuff written on your website/Confluence/wiki, some manually written docs on Dockerhub, a README in the repository, an examples folder in the repository, Javadoc-based comments on classes and functions, Swagger docs (semi-)autogenerated from these, inline documentation in the code, years worth of shit on StackOverflow and finally whatever garbage ChatGPT made out of ingesting all of that.

And (especially in the Javascript world) there's so much movement and breakage that all these "sources of truth" are outdated - especially StackOverflow and ChatGPT - which leaves you as the potential user of a library/API often enough with no other choice than to delve deep into the code, made even messier by the intricacies of build systems, bundlers and include/module systems (looking at you Maven/Gradle/Java Modules and webpack/rollup/npm/yarn/AMD/CommonJS/ESM). The worst nightmare is "examples" that clearly haven't been run in years, otherwise the example would have reflected a breaking API change whose commit is five years ago. That's a sure way of sending your users into rage fits.

IMHO, there is only one way: your "examples" should be proper unit/integration/e2e tests (that way you can show your users how you intend for subscribers to use your interface, and you'll notice when your examples are broken because they are literally your tests!), and your documentation (no matter the format, be it HTML, Markdown or Swagger) should all be auto-generated from in-code Javadoc/whatever. Inline code should be reserved for stuff that's only needed to be known for someone intending to work on the actual library, to describe why you took a certain way of implementing a Thing (say, to work around some sort of deficiency) - think of the infamous "total hours wasted here" joke [1].

My to-go example, even if it is not perfect (the website is manually maintained, but the maintainers are doing a fucking good job at that!) is the Symfony PHP framework. With the exception of the security stack (that one is an utter, utter nightmare to keep up with), their documentation is excellent, legible, and easy to understand, and the examples they provide on usage are clear to the point. Even if you haven't worked with it for a year or two, it's so easy to get up to speed again.

[1] https://nickyreinert.medium.com/ne-13-total-hours-wasted-her...

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#32

Post by shakna »

lordnacho wrote: post #24
charlieyu1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember people said fusion energy will be available in a few decades, in a few decades ago.

On the other hand, we actually do have a computer, with access to all knowledge, in our pockets, right now. EDIT. The point of the comment is not to say that you will in fact have all knowledge available. There's guidelines about how you're supposed to read here on HN. The point was that this device that people could only dream of a few decades ago actually became available. Maybe it's worth reminding people that you…

All knowledge? Hardly. A ton of the things I research just aren't available except in hard copy - and even then, there may be only three or four copies in the entire country.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#33

Post by eru »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #26

Its not really useful unless you're a highschool student or something. And even that's bad enough. There are definitely use cases but it will probably take like a decade or so to integrate it properly into industrial processes, and even then it will probably be limited and used in very strange ways you couldn't possibly imagine today. Like, someone is going to come up with something really fucking weird that saves a…

> (I already know some people who got in trouble for using AI to write important emails and were then threatened with lawsuits for language in those emails that they themselves, of course, did not read).

Of course, the solution to that is to have an AI that scans your email for problematic language.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#34

Post by amelius »

nicce wrote: post #27
phkahler wrote: post #13

Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.

They need to learn the material at first . Then, AI is just a tool and you lose if you don’t use it.

The nice thing about OpenAI is that they are so open about their technology. They even have programs that teach students how to build their own LLMs so they never become dependent on something they cannot control.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#35

Post by lm28469 »

danielbln wrote: post #28
phkahler wrote: post #13

Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.

"They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not muck around with computers." "They need to learn the material and to do their job, not search the Internet."

If my school focused on teaching me how to use stackoverflow instead of teaching me how to think and solve problems I'd be in deep shit now.

Same thing for AI, it's a crutch at best, not a way of doing things, and especially not something you need to focus on while teaching

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#36

Post by eru »

amonith wrote: post #16
Almondsetat wrote: post #5

Perhaps AI will achieve what Excel, scripting or programming failed at? Education is slow, people still don't know how to use a spreadsheet software or scripting language to enhance their lives/work. Students don't use Excel or python to cheat on their homework or exams, so they don't really have reasons to learn those tools. Meanwhile, user-facing AI tools are often extremely intuitive and feel quite natural to inte…

There’s a high possibility that AI will have exactly the opposite effect on work productivity for young people, at least for this generation, because technology in companies around the world lags years or even decades behind for simple economic reasons. In a similar way, the overuse of simplified touchscreen-based devices makes them unprepared for working with computers and other “old tech” permeating the modern offi…

I suspect the average tech skill is about the same as in earlier generations.

It's just that for older folks amount of time spent with computing devices was a decent proxy for tech skills. That correlation has probably broken down.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#37

Post by eqvinox »

nicce wrote: post #27
phkahler wrote: post #13

Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.

They need to learn the material at first . Then, AI is just a tool and you lose if you don’t use it.

No, they need to learn the material at first, and then, if it is beneficial for the situation, they need to learn the shortcomings and pitfalls of AI (both generically and specifically to their use case) before using it.

You're right in that AI is a tool that might be necessary to use, but just like with a heavy industry machine tool that can chop your arm off if you use it wrong, there need to be operator training requirements.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#38

Post by DiscourseFan »

eru wrote: post #33
DiscourseFan wrote: post #26

Its not really useful unless you're a highschool student or something. And even that's bad enough. There are definitely use cases but it will probably take like a decade or so to integrate it properly into industrial processes, and even then it will probably be limited and used in very strange ways you couldn't possibly imagine today. Like, someone is going to come up with something really fucking weird that saves a…

> (I already know some people who got in trouble for using AI to write important emails and were then threatened with lawsuits for language in those emails that they themselves, of course, did not read). Of course, the solution to that is to have an AI that scans your email for problematic language.

Its not that the language was "problematical," its just that the contents were more sensitive then I think they realized, and so they were held to account for the specificities of the language they used.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#39

Post by rsynnott »

Oh, ffs. What are “ai skills”?

I’m reminded that the big thing when I was in college was XML databases. XML databases, we were assured (though not particularly convincingly) were the future. I didn’t opt for the course covering XML databases, and somehow survive 20 years later; meanwhile no-one really remembers what an XML database even was.

(It was, all told, a rather boring time for tech fads. The 90s AI bubble had imploded with such finality that people barely dared utter the term 'AI', the dot-com crash had just happened, and the gloss was off CORBA, so weird XML-y stuff got pressed into service for a few years until the next thing came along.)

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#40

Post by danielbln »

lm28469 wrote: post #35
danielbln wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not muck around with computers." "They need to learn the material and to do their job, not search the Internet."

If my school focused on teaching me how to use stackoverflow instead of teaching me how to think and solve problems I'd be in deep shit now. Same thing for AI, it's a crutch at best, not a way of doing things, and especially not something you need to focus on while teaching

These are not at odds with one another. Schools should be teaching how to research information and which tools to use and how.

That can be literary research, Internet research and yes, ultimately if will have to be how to query language model expert system to solve various problems.

You can copy and paste a solution from a book/SO/LLM or you can use it to understand, improve, research and solve various tasks.

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