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A Research Preview of Codex

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Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…

Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhe…

The place where I work at hires an ungodly amount of juniors and fresh-grads (because a lot of them drop out and quit before they do any meaningful work). We're talking people that are completely unproductive and unusable for any sort of commercial project. We then spend at-least a year or two giving them a salary whilst they do toy projects and get trained. Literally doing what I remember doing in 1st/2nd year college with group projects and pet-assignments, complete with grades and feedback etc. Even after all of that, we still have to "train" them with hand-holding on an actual project work before they are a net-positive. Sooner or later someone will realize that they can just forego all that wasted training effort and just hire someone that is already productive. There is always a small percentage that are amazing and they get pushed through to projects very quickly. Which is a shame, because they then watch their fellow cohort sit around doing pet-projects and receive a salary, whilst they slog through a real project with deadlines, stress and the risk of failing.

This is entirely a combination of two things: The quality of grads coming out of college/university, and pressures coming from the market. Colleges have been pushing through entirely unqualified students, some even language illiterate, into the market place and what we're seeing is a response to that. Now couple that with the pressures that companies are facing, and you can see why none of them want to even take on the risk of training and up-skilling someone just so they can find the actual good employees which are a small percentage.

Of course, in my company's particular country and context, government regulations make it impossible to fire someone and there is huge pressure to keep-up DEI quotas despite no actual good DEI candidates being available, and we have a mess. Day to day is glorified baby-sitting people not-knowing what to do, dealing with their "feelings" (usually feelings of inadequacy and sometimes snobbish entitlement) and still trying complete a project at the same time.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#372
post #62
post #40

I'm curious how many ICs are truly excited about these advancements in coding agents. It seems to me the general trend is we become more like PMs managing agents and reviewing PRs, all for the sake of productivity gains. I imagine many engineers are like myself in that they got into programming because they liked tinkering and hacking and implementation details, all of which are likely to be abstracted over in this n…

I think the death of our craft is around the corner. It doesn't fill me with joy.

How so? I see it as more bugs around the corner.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#373
post #369

So there's this thing called "Setup Scripts" but they don't explicitly say these are equivalent to AWS Metadata and configured inside of Codex web interface - not a setup.sh or a package.json preinstall declaration. I wasted several hours (and lots of compute where Codex was as confused as I was) trying to figure out how to convince codex to pnpm install.

Codex engineer here. Can you elaborate on what was confusing? I would love to make it more clear.

I didn't realize the setup script had to be done in the UI over in the environment tab. I assumed it would be reading something like setup.sh from the codebase.

Docs could make that more clear

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#374

I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but I just wasted several hours wrestling codex to make it behave. Here's my workflow that keeps failing: - it writes some code. It looks good a first glance - I push it to github - automated tests on github show that there's a problem - go back to codex and ask it to fix it - it does stuff. It looks good again. Now what do I do? If I ask it to push again to github, then it will oft…

I think you need to run the tests locally before you push the PR. I actually think you need to (somehow?) make this part of the generation process before Codex proposes the changes.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#375
post #127

In the preview video, I appreciated Katy Shi's comment on "I think this is a reflection of where engineering work has moved over the past where a lot of my time now is spent reviewing code rather than writing it." Preview video from Open AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhdpnbfH6NU&t=878s As I think about what "AI-native" or just the future of building software loos like, its interesting to me that - right now - d…

> I think this is a reflection of where engineering work has moved over the past where a lot of my time now is spent reviewing code rather than writing it.

This was always true. Front-End code is not really code. Most of the back-end code is just convert and moving data around. For most functionality where you need "real code" like crypto, compression, math, etc.. you use a library used by another 100k developers.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…

Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhe…

Hmm, I thought Matz had a story like this but AI tells me it's probably apocryphal. Ruby developer applies for ruby job where they want more years of experience than existed since he wrote ruby.

Oh well, I know that it happens, saw it in 2010 with "cloud" when it was basically still just EC2,S3,RDS, and whatever the not-haproxy-but-haproxy load balancer was called, ELB. Job poatings asking for half a decade or more of experience. I always get the feeling there's some requirement they post jobs public but only hire internal, but I have no way to prove that; I have heard others say this, though.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#377

I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but I just wasted several hours wrestling codex to make it behave. Here's my workflow that keeps failing: - it writes some code. It looks good a first glance - I push it to github - automated tests on github show that there's a problem - go back to codex and ask it to fix it - it does stuff. It looks good again. Now what do I do? If I ask it to push again to github, then it will oft…

I have this issue with Devin. Given my limited knowledge of how these work, I believe there is simply too much context for it to take a holistic view of the task and finish accordingly.

If both OpenAI and Devin are falling into the same pattern then that’s a good indication there’s a fundamental problem to be solved here.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…

Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhe…

Bottom of the barrel consultancy shops will hire as cheap as possible. E.g. some liberal arts major whose only coding experience is a 2 week 'bootcamp'.

They will sell them as 'junior SE' on the first 2 projects, 'medior SE' on the next and then they'll be 'senior SE' within 18 months tops of leaving bootcamp.

The projects by these shops are nearly always troubled, requiring many (customer paid in change requests) reworks before (if ever) getting in production.

They seldom are hired to do projects for a client twice, but it's a lemom's market and there's plenty of fish in the sea.

So what happens with these shops is that their SE's will rely even more than average on AI assistants, and deliver a v0.1 faster, but with 10x more code and holes than before, taking even longer to get in production but given lemons and fish have not changed they'll still hire, now even cheaper out of 'prompt engineering bootcamp'

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#379
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's been dead for 10 years. I'd place it at maybe 3? I teach at a mid-ranked university and the majority of my fresh out of college students were getting good-to-great entry level offers just a few years ago. The top 5-10% were getting well into six figure offers from FAANG or similar companies. But the entry level job market really tanked in mid 2022 when all the big tech companies did rounds of layof…

It started with the end of ZIRP and LLMs finished the job.

"Money isn't free anymore, let's set ours on fire / give it to NVDA"

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we think we will get the senior engineers? Yet c…

It's happening to Hollywood right now. In the past three years, since roughly 2022, the majority of IATSE folks (film crew, grips, etc.) have seen their jobs disappear to Eastern Europe where the labor costs one tenth of what it does here. And there are no rules for maximum number of consecutive hours worked.

There was a pull quote about adding a 100% tariff to films made outside of the US.

I wonder if that's related

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