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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#261

Post by PurpleRamen »

ndriscoll wrote: post #135
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from sp…

> For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free.

Guided learning with instant feedback can be much more efficient than just consuming and tinkering on your own. Depends on the topic, the teacher and situation of course. The quality of available material is also all over the place, and not every topic has enough material, or anything at all.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#262

Post by pc86 »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #248
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

Care to explain a bit more? With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.

I mean the comment says "contract" right there; you can easily be on a contract with multiple companies simultaneously. When I was freelancing full-time ca. 2010-2013 or so I often had 5-6 active contracts running simultaneously. I probably worked for 15-20 different companies total in that 3-4 year span.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#263

Post by chromacity »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #249
niek_pas wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

Dog in the Manger. I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share". There's hardly any other…

Conversely, some people feel entitled to 100% of the value created by others. Oh, you wrote a book? Too bad, it's a part of my training data set now.

Downloading public stuff off the internet with no regard for the creator's wishes or license is bad enough, but we have many people here who defended AI companies seeding models with pirated content.

The internet is a social contract. AI is not the first thing to try and erode it for profit, but it's by far the most aggressive one.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#264

Post by KronisLV »

Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem.

Doesn't credentialism kinda throw a spanner in that - where it's not enough to have people with a good track record of solving issues, but then someone along the way says "Yeah, we'd also like the devs who'll work on the project to have Java certs." (I've done those certs, they're orthogonal to one's ability to produce good software)

Might just be govt. projects or particular orgs where such requirements are drawn up by dinosaurs, go figure (as much as I'd love software development to be "real" engineering with best practices spanning decades, it's still the Wild West in many respects). Then again, the same thing more or less applies to security, a lot of it seems like posturing and checklists (how some years back the status quo was that you'll change your password every 30-90 days because IT said so) instead of the stuff that actually matters.

Not to detract from the point too much, but I've very much seen people not care about solving problems and shipping fast as stuff like that, or covering their own asses by paying for Oracle support or whatever (even when it gets in the way of actually shipping, like ADF and WebLogic and the horror that is JDeveloper).

But yeah, I think many companies out there don't care that much about the individual growth of their employees that much, unless they have the ability to actually look further into the future - which most don't, given how they prefer not to train junior devs into mid/senior ones over years.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#265

Post by lioeters »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #117
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

Maybe I’m just getting extremely lucky, but I don’t use AI to code at work and I’m still keeping up with my peers who are all Clauded up. I do a lot of green field network appliance design and implementation and have not felt really felt the pressure in that space. I do use Claude code at home maybe a couple hours a week, mostly for code base exploration. Still haven’t figured out how to fully vibe code: the generate…

We're witnessing a divergence between Coders and Clauders, with the latter dominating the market at a lower cost of labor + subscription fee to the almighty AI providers. Coders may be called in, hopefully with better renumeration, to review and debug the massive amount of code being generated. Either that or they will also be replaced by specially trained/prompted language models doing the review.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#266

Post by nicksergeant »

agentultra wrote: post #216
nicksergeant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past. I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know…

> Anyone not learning things via LLM coding right now either doesn't care at all about the underlying code/systems How many bytes is a pointer in C? How many bytes is a shared pointer in C++? What does sysctl do? What about fsync? What is a mutex lock? How is it different from a spin lock? You want to find the n nearest points to a given point on a 2-D Cartesian plane. Could you write the code to solve that on your o…

Agree with pretty much everything you wrote here, I guess with the addendum that LLMs can be a part of the learning experience you're describing. It's as easy as telling the LLM "don't write a single line of code nor command, I want to do everything, your goal is to help me understand what we're doing here."

There are always going to be people who just want the end result. The only difference now is that LLM tools allow them to get much closer to the end result than they previously were able to. And on the other side, there are always going to be people who want to _understand_ what's happening, and LLMs can help accelerate that. I use LLMs as a personalized guide to learning new things.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#267

Post by qsera »

WarmWash wrote: post #226
qsera wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying that it cannot do what you say now. What I am saying is that once the high quality training data runs out, it will drop in its capabilities pretty fast. That is how I compare it to perpetual motion mechanism scams. In the case of a perpetual motion machine, it appear that it will continue to run indefinitely. That is analogous to the impression that you have now. You feel that this will go on and on…

>What I am saying is that once the high quality training data runs out, it will drop in its capabilities pretty fast. That's more a misunderstood study that over time turned into a confidently stated fact. Yes, the model collapses if you loop the output to the input. But no, that's not how it's done. The reality is that all the labs are already using synthetic training data, and have been for at least a year now. It…

>using synthetic training data

yea, look up how it is done.

It is exactly how a perpetual motion machine scam would project an appearance of working like using a generator to drive a motor, and the motor driving the generator..something that would obscure the fact that there is energy loss happening along the way....

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#268

Post by code_for_monkey »

rglover wrote: post #237
code_for_monkey wrote: post #230

I work for a bank and Im basically just an ai user now. Honestly its like pulling teeth to get anyone to look at your code here. Im just on hackernews lol

Major or regional? This is alarming beyond words.

Major, big big major, not just me either. How is it alarming beyond words? If I said "Im an emt and I just ask the AI everything" now that would be alarming beyond words.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#269

Post by trollbridge »

rekrsiv wrote: post #219
pfisherman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won”…

The endgame in programming is reducing complexity before the codebase becomes impossible to reason about. This is not a solved problem, and most codebases the LLMs were trained on are either just before that phase transition or well past it. Complexity is not just a matter of reducing the complexity of the code, it's also a matter of reducing the complexity of the problem. A programmer can do the former alone with th…

No kidding. So far the complexity introduced by LLM-generated code in my current codebase has taken far more time to deal with than the hand-written code.

Overall, we are trying to "silo" LLM-generated code into its own services with a well-defined interface so that the code can just be thrown away and regenerated (or rewritten by hand) because maintaining it is so difficult.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#270

Post by falkensmaize »

jnovek wrote: post #229
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel . What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one: - Able to review the ou…

> Able to review the code output of coding agents That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.

They will still be turning out the same problematic code in a few years that they do now, because they aren’t intelligent and won’t be intelligent unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift in how an LLM works.

I use LLMs with best practices to program professionally in an enterprise every day, and even Opus 4.6 still consistently makes some of the dumbest architectural decisions, even with full context, complete access to the codebase and me asking very specific questions that should point it in the right direction.

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