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New junior developers can’t code

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Re: New junior developers can’t code

#101

Post by dartos »

hnfong wrote: post #76
dartos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard this comparison between C compilers and LLMs and I don’t think it’s similar. there’s a direct relationship to C code and the resulting assembly. The C language was specifically designed so that language constructs were converted into the intended assembly anyway. C didn’t obfuscate the problem of writing code, just allowed us to operate at a higher, but still sound, level. LLMs are not an abstraction like…

While C compilers are technically not "black boxes", if you looked at lawyerly discussions about UB I don't think you can in full conscience say that `gcc -O2` is much better than a LLM.

They’re not black boxes at all. The code is all there and is deterministic.

Sorry, but the peculiarities of one optimization level on one implementation of C do not affect my point at all.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#102

Post by abrookewood »

code-faster wrote: post #47

The reason why these articles appear every 5 years is because many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems. And then when they see people solving those problems without putting in the hard work that they had to put in, it really bothers them. This is a timeless post. We'll see it today. We'll see it in five years. We'll see it in 10 years.

You're absolutely right, but I'd add that there is still an element of truth to the article - someone who struggles through a manual will retain more than someone who re-implements an answer from Stack Overflow, who will retain more than someone who gets the working code handed to them by an LLM.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#104

Post by sandruso »

in similar vein gui tools for git killed the need of remembering commands. it is so painful watching somebody struggling with git when something "advanced" as rebase needs to done and they only know how to use git via vscode integration

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#105

Post by renegat0x0 »

ahofmann wrote: post #93
code-faster wrote: post #47

The reason why these articles appear every 5 years is because many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems. And then when they see people solving those problems without putting in the hard work that they had to put in, it really bothers them. This is a timeless post. We'll see it today. We'll see it in five years. We'll see it in 10 years.

Yes. Ten years ago some friends asked me to teach PHP to them, I showed them the book I learned from 20 years ago. It had 1200 pages and you could learn web development and MySQL without using the Internet. No one used that book. They searched for easy ingestable tutorials and went from there. After a year, some of them actually wrote software in production. I can't know if more or less of them would be able to write…

Method of acquiring is not necessarily equal to knowledge.

I never liked learning from books. I often played with code myself. In the long term I think this had some negative effect, where I did not learn all the things but used more common solutions over and over.

I like writing with LLMs, as it sometimes show a pattern I never could think of. This also teaches me new ways to solve a problem / write a code.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#106

Post by y1n0 »

computerthings wrote: post #54
y1n0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it's true.

It's also true that for every thing that turned out to be horrible, there were people saying "this is gonna be great". Do you then also also dismiss all optimism? Why is this fallacy only employed in one direction? It's not an argument either way, it's just spam, but I wonder why it only ever gets deployed in one direction.

Look, when you get to my age, you've literally seen it happen through multiple generations. As a kid growing up, parents thought we were the lost generation. Then I started growing up and I thought the next generation was the lost one. Then they grew up and they think the next one is doomed. It's so absurd to see it happening over and over. And everybody always thinks they have the unique and correct perspective.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#107

Post by dantraztrev »

As one of the new devs , I feel like AI tools have pushed the bottom line higher , you can learn to do things and you can dive deep into technical aspect or in this case the basic implementation. But the velocity or expected velocity has increased , we expect more out of the junior devs then what we used to years ago , As if you don't use AI you're already behind.

There will always be people who know how to do things better , who can understand what will be the most optimal code style for fastest and/or smallest assembly instruction , and in future this bottom line will get moved much further.

We are probably coming close to something similar of 1980s game industry crash for engineers or we can avoid it.

New devs may not care for deep tech knowledge they optimize for opportunities, and you give them tools for their disposal to optimize for opportunities and they grab it.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#108

Post by computerthings »

y1n0 wrote: post #106
computerthings wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also true that for every thing that turned out to be horrible, there were people saying "this is gonna be great". Do you then also also dismiss all optimism? Why is this fallacy only employed in one direction? It's not an argument either way, it's just spam, but I wonder why it only ever gets deployed in one direction.

Look, when you get to my age, you've literally seen it happen through multiple generations. As a kid growing up, parents thought we were the lost generation. Then I started growing up and I thought the next generation was the lost one. Then they grew up and they think the next one is doomed. It's so absurd to see it happening over and over. And everybody always thinks they have the unique and correct perspective.

I've seen it happen even as a young person, and still saw the fallacy of this "argument". I've been arguing with people twice my age who used it to silence any criticism of trends.

And it's totally an online thing, too. It's usually used to dismiss a thing without looking at the thing. Because if you could dismiss the thing by looking at it, you wouldn't need that old chestnut.

I don't blame young people for having less to look forward to than previous generations. I don't blame them for being unable to code, and so on. Blaming them for their lot is totally orthogonal to even having a honest look at what that lot is.

I never thought of a new generation failing the one's before it, being "lost" -- rather the other way around. We failed them. And by the same token, I also never dismissed people as being old and knowing nothing even when I was 20. I simply never once rolled that way, and I see nothing interesting, much less truthful, coming from it.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#109

Post by bad_username »

> Can you imagine that some dude just wrote an answer with this level of detail? Raw, without any AI? And for free?

I once got Raymond Chen himself to answer My Stack Overflow question. I do not think my programming career will reach that height ever again.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#110

Post by Jensson »

motorest wrote: post #88
ethanwillis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the youth are always correct and always an improvement?

> So the youth are always correct and always an improvement? I don't think this is an issue of "the youth", inasmuch it's an issue with "the old" struggling to understand a world where people don't play by their rules anymore. Pay attention to the absurdity: a blogger complaining that today's junior devs don't do the hard work of... asking questions in stack overflow? That's their baseline of expertise and knowledge-…

Flynn effect is reversing for this generation, so it doesn't seem to be the same, previously the next generation was always smarter, but now its dumber.
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