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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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191–200 of 317 posts

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#191

Post by gr4vityWall »

greymalik wrote: post #27

> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

> Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself. > That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value

I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but those statements are subjective, not an objective truth. Lots of people fundamentally enjoy the process of coding, and would keep doing it even in a hypothetical world with no problems left to solve, or if they had UBI.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#192

Post by travisgriggs »

> I would love to read a study on why people so readily believe and trust in AI chatbots.

We associate authority experts with a) quick and b) broad answers. It's like when we're listening to a radio show and they patch in "Dr So N. So" an expert in Whatever from Academia Forever U. They seem to know their stuff because a) they don't see "I don't know, let me get back to you after I've looked into that" and they can share a breadth of associated validations.

LLMs simulate this experience, by giving broadish, confident, answers very quickly. We have been trained by life's many experiences to trust these types of answers.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#193

Post by skydhash »

travisgriggs wrote: post #190
Etheryte wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager. Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're responsible.

I largely agree with sibling responses. BUT... How do have code review be an educational experience for onboarding/teaching if any bad submission is cut down with due prejudice? I am happy to work with a junior engineer and is trying, and we have to loop on some silly mistakes, and pick and choose which battles to balance building confidence with developing good skills. But I am not happy to have a junior engineer th…

To mentor requires a mentee. If a junior is not willing to learn (reasoning, coming up, with an hypothesis, implementing the concept, and verifying it), then why should a senior bother to teach. As a philosopher has once said, a teacher is not meant to give you the solution, but to help you come up with your own.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#194

Post by zamalek »

strix_varius wrote: post #57

To me, the most salient point was this: > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who cl…

> LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive

I have noticed Claude's extreme and obtuse reluctance to delete code, even code that it just wrote that I told it is wrong. For example, it might produce a fn:

   fn foo(bar)
And then I say, no, I actually wanted you to "foo with a frobnitz", so now we get:

   fn foo(bar) // Never called
   fn foo_with_frobnitz(bar)

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#195

Post by skydhash »

carlosjobim wrote: post #147
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion. I would claim that I love coding quite a lot. The problem is rather that my bosses and colleagues don't care about what I love about it. It is rather appreciated if you…

Very level-headed comment. I'm one of those who sees programming as a means to an end and nothing else. If I order something to be delivered, I don't care what model of car the delivery company uses. Much less what kind of settings they have for the carburetor needles or what kind of oil they're using. Sure, somebody somewhere might have to care about this. That's also how people like me see programming. If the code…

The things is most times, you are indeed buying the car that is going to make the delivery. And it's going to live in your garage. And if you're not careful, one day it will drive itself off a cliff, stall in the middle of a 10 hour drive, or you'll get robbed by individuals hiding in the trunk.

People that realize this care about their oil type and what tire they put on. People that do not, pay it forward when that crash does happen and they don't know how to recover, so queue up the war room, etc...

Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#196

Post by 000ooo000 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #179
strix_varius wrote: post #57

To me, the most salient point was this: > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who cl…

> All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.” After you made your colleagues upset submitting crappy code for review, you start to pay attention. > LLM-written ones are almost entirely additive, Unless you noticed that code has to be removed, and you instruct the LLM to do so. I don't think LLMs really change the dyn…

>After you made your colleagues upset submitting crappy code for review, you start to pay attention.

If the only thing keeping you from submitting crappy code is an emotional response from coworkers, you are not a "good programmer", no matter what you instruct your LLM.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#197

Post by scruple »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #94
JKCalhoun wrote: post #45

Full disclosure: I am old. When I started programming for Corporate™ back 1995, it was a wildly different career than what it has become. Say what you want about the lunatics running the asylum, but we liked it that way. Engineering knew their audience, knew the tech stack, knew what was going on in "the industry", ultimately called the shots. Your code was your private sandbox. Want to rewrite it every other release…

Try game dev. It's still like that today.

Depends. I see the teams around me slowly being corralled like cattle, no longer doing the corralling. My own team is still chiefly cowboys but the writing is on the wall and as we grow younger we lose more and more footing in this battle.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#198

Post by fuzzzerd »

interroboink wrote: post #127
cardanome wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing for me is that I am actually good at LLM-based coding My coworkers that are in love with this new world are producing complete AI slop and still take ages to complete tasks. Meanwhile I can finally play my strength as I actually know software architecture, can ask the LLM to consider important corner case and so on. Plus, I am naturally good at context management. Being neurodivergent has given me dec…

It seems to me that someone like you, seen from the outside (e.g. from a code-reviewing colleague), simply appears to be getting more productive, with no drop in quality. Maybe some stylistic shifts. I don't think anyone is complaining about that too much. I wonder how many people there are like you, where we don't get much data. If people don't complain about it, we generally don't hear about it, because they're jus…

I think I also fit into this category. Minor to medium productivity boost and maybe some stylistic evolving, but largely no complaints because it's just another tool I use sometimes.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#199

Post by carlosjobim »

skydhash wrote: post #195
carlosjobim wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very level-headed comment. I'm one of those who sees programming as a means to an end and nothing else. If I order something to be delivered, I don't care what model of car the delivery company uses. Much less what kind of settings they have for the carburetor needles or what kind of oil they're using. Sure, somebody somewhere might have to care about this. That's also how people like me see programming. If the code…

The things is most times, you are indeed buying the car that is going to make the delivery. And it's going to live in your garage. And if you're not careful, one day it will drive itself off a cliff, stall in the middle of a 10 hour drive, or you'll get robbed by individuals hiding in the trunk. People that realize this care about their oil type and what tire they put on. People that do not, pay it forward when that…

> Even if you're not dogfooding your own software, if you do not take care of it properly, the cost of changes will climb up.

How do you mean? If the software works, then it's done. There is no maintenance and it will continue working like that for decades. It doesn't have corrosion and moving parts like a car. Businesses make sure not to touch it or the systems it is depending on.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#200

Post by smoody07 »

strix_varius wrote: post #57

To me, the most salient point was this: > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who cl…

This is a broader issue about how where we place blame when LLMs are involved. Humans seem to want to parrot the work and take credit when it’s correct while deflecting blame when it’s wrong. With a few well placed lawsuits this paradigm will shift imho
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