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A Research Preview of Codex

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Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#401

Post by TeMPOraL »

genewitch wrote: post #379
baq wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

More like, "Money isn't free anymore, so let's try and automate away some more labor". It's very much not setting the money on fire from business POV - it's the opposite actually. It's also a constant in history - the more expensive human labor gets, the more effort is put into eliminating the need for it (whether by automating jobs away or redesigning the product or the entire business to not need them in the first place).

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#402

Post by TeMPOraL »

criddell wrote: post #112
johnjwang wrote: post #80

Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…

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…

> 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?

Cynical answer for the immediate future: maybe from the pool of existing seniors and principals that have all been stuck doing a faux-management job onboarding, mentoring and managing the juniors who were the only ones actually writing any code in many tech companies? It's a reversal of a trend, for sure: my feeling about the market until the last year or two, was that there's hardly any job for seniors or above, that isn't just management without the title and its privileges.

Past the immediate future, if we end up replacing juniors with LLMs, then the next cohort of "seniors" will need to come from some kind of vocational training.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#403

Post by ori_b »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #325
thomasahle wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier task in the early 00s The best junior I've hired was a big contributor to an open source library we were starting to use. I think there's still lots of opportunity for honing your skill, and showing it off, outside of schools.

> The best junior I've hired was a big contributor to an open source library we were starting to use. From my experience no one cares. You're lucky if recruiter even looks at your CV, not to mention your GitHub profile.

This is why I've managed to help startups I have worked at make better hires; I look at the code candidates have written, and poke through the commits on GitHub.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#404

Post by sbarre »

_delirium wrote: post #335
sam0x17 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

We should factor in the hiring sprees that really distorted the market from 2020-2022..

2020-2022 was not "normal hiring", it was much higher than normal.

Even the large, conservative, boring enterprise where I work was hiring about 5 new developers a week in those years.. I know because I did the "Welcome to our department" technical onboarding workshop and I saw everyone coming in the door every week.

Before 2020 I ran that workshop once a month or so? Probably 10 times a year at most.

So of course then the layoffs came when ZIRP ended, as everyone had to adjust back to real world conditions and grapple with the fact that the team sizes they had now were not sustainable (or necessary?) when free money ended.

Couple that with "efficiencies" from AI and generally more conservative scope and ambition by a lot of companies in these uncertain times, and the market looks drastically worse than it did in 2020-2022.

But if you compare the market today to 2018 (for example) instead, it's still worse but definitely not as worse.

Lastly, hiring is also very broken today due to AI, with candidates using it to flood companies with applications and then companies using AI to auto-filter that incoming flood (and likely losing out on good candidates in the process) simply because they can't handle the volume.

I have a lot of sympathy for folks coming right out of university trying to land their first good job. I'm sure it's the toughest it's been in a generation...

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#405

Post by sbarre »

lemontheme wrote: post #367
andrewmutz wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this relates to a culture of job-hopping. It seems uncommon these days to stick around at a company for many years. If your next hire is only going to stay for 1-2 years, it doesn’t make sense to hire a junior team member and invest in their growth.

That sadly makes sense. I’m in a position lately to influence hiring decisions and I’m noticing a similar bias in myself. As a job hopper myself, I can’t fault others for doing it though. I never hopped for the money. I just got bored or felt isolated in my role. But a nice consequence is that my salary actually appreciably increased, as opposed to colleagues/friends who stuck with the same company.

I've often given developers I mentor the advice they should "zig-zag" to grow their career and get varied experiences rather than stay in one place too long, but my advice was 2-3 years at each place at minimum.

I think anything less than that, and you haven't had time to really learn an ecosystem, and more importantly you might not have had a chance to live with the consequences of your technical decisions (i.e. supporting something in prod that you built).

I know plenty of people who started somewhere, left for a while, and then came back and ended up in a position higher than they would have gotten if they had stayed put and tried to climb internally.

And yes agreed that moving around will 100% grow your comp faster than staying put (in most cases).

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#406

Post by occz »

andrewmutz wrote: post #300
sam0x17 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some of this relates to a culture of job-hopping. It seems uncommon these days to stick around at a company for many years. If your next hire is only going to stay for 1-2 years, it doesn’t make sense to hire a junior team member and invest in their growth.

That's a self-inflicted wound on the part of the companies though, with them offering relatively shit pay for people who stick around compared to people who switch jobs.

You get what you optimize for, really.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#407

Post by spookie »

LPisGood wrote: post #294
oytis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the industry leaders think we'll not need senior engineers either as capabilities evolve. But also, I think this underestimates significantly what junior engineers do. Junior engineers are people who have spent 4 to 6 years receiving a specialised education in a university - and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are pr…

> and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and mostly smart. Without being overly pessimistic, this interpretation is extremely generous.

Hardly.

What I've mostly seen when it isn't the case is an employer who hasn't let them fly, but simply bombarded them with work nobody wants to do. They become cynical, and it is understandable.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#408

Post by api »

criddell wrote: post #112
johnjwang wrote: post #80

Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…

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…

Our company predates AI and still doesn’t make much use of it. It’s not that useful for what we do. We have never had a junior engineering position open. Nothing we do is junior enough. There are literally no jobs in the company doable by someone with less than 5-10 years experience minimum.

This is a very valid concern that predates AI by decades. AI just makes it worse. How will we raise the next generation of experts when there is no entry level of anything? We have either outsourced or automated everything below mid career level.

This is an area that I agree with some on the nationalist right — at least about the diagnosis, but not about the cure. If we continue down this road we end up with abandoned generations struggling to pay bills beneath an entrenched gerontocracy. If we do crack any kind of real age reversing life extension this could get really dystopian, like bad cyberpunk movie stuff, where you have generations of the impoverished beneath a pickled elite that never dies and owns everything.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#409

Post by api »

sam0x17 wrote: post #171
criddell wrote: post #112

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…

One problem I’ve seen is that junior now means “hustler who is faking it” or “code boot camp grad who doesn’t really understand anything.” If I ask for a “junior” I get someone who googles and asks ChatGPT.

High salaries in programming has attracted a lot of people who have no passion for the craft. To get good you have to have that and it takes years of either school or passionate autodidactic learning or both.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#410

Post by fcoury »

solresol wrote: post #357

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 upgraded to Pro just because of Codex and I am really not impressed. Granted, I am using rust so that may be the issue (or skill issue on my end too).

One of the things I am constantly struggling with is that the containers they use are having issues to fetch anything from the internet:

  error: failed to get `anyhow` as a dependency of package `yawl-core v0.1.0 (/wor
  kspace/yawl/core)`

  Caused by:
    download of config.json failed

  Caused by:
    failed to download from `https://index.crates.io/config.json`

  Caused by:
    [7] Could not connect to server (Failed to connect to proxy port 8080 after 30 65 ms: Could not connect to server)
Hopefully they fix this and it gets better with time, but I am not going to renew past this month otherwise.
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