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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#291

Post by kjksf »

Supermancho wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.

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 is your expectation, exactly?

In US you go to college for 4-5 years and pay $50k per year. Or more.

You pay to learn. A lot of money, a lot of time.

Then you get a job, where the idea is that you get paid for doing work and you expect the employer to do what?

You seem to expect that not only you won't be doing the things you're being paid to do but the employer will pay for your education on company's time.

How many weeks per year of time off do you expect to get from a company?

You'll either say a reasonable number, like 1 or 2, which is insignificant to the time you supposedly spent learnings (5 years). You just spend 250 weeks supposedly learning but 1 or 2 weeks a year is supposed to make a difference?

Or you'll say unreasonable number (anything above 2 weeks) because employment is not free education.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#292

Post by Bridged7756 »

I just don't see it. What's truly sad is that a field allegedly filled with technically proficient people is filled with trend chasing and FOTM trends. To this day, people with nuanced takes are far and between and most people either go full force into LLM evangelism or LLM denial, the first more annoying, by far.

I'm really getting tired of the programming obituaries. As if LLMs didn't fail at any complex task, as if they didn't vomit shit code and as if they didn't just copy patterns surrounding the new code, and as if they didn't hallucinate and downright write wrong code or made up libraries. Yet for some reason, every time you bring it up, someone will come along and say "You're not using it right then.", Is it that, or is it just that they're only doing toy projects? I'm led to believe the latter.

At this point I don't know what's organic and what's not. Reddit is filled with astroturfing for big LLM. Maybe this place is too? Even if that was not the case, I'm led to believe that it isn't uncommon for people to swallow up all of the big LLM propaganda and fall into despair, or fall into unrealistic expectations, and just parrot it everywhere else. One thing is for certain, LLM evangelism has all the money of the world, and LLM denial doesn't. It's only natural to think that the balance is tilted in terms of media presence.

Even at the best, or worst, LLMs can't do anything you couldn't do yourself better with a scaffolding prompt + manual editing, and at the end of the day, you still need the cognitive energy to review, veto, come up with, the implementation. What does this exactly do anyways other than saving you a bunch of keypresses? I wonder if the people touting it to be all that really didn't think before LLMs, of just switched their brain off on them.

I used to really like this site, but I think that just consuming the RSS feed is enough for me. I think that lobster.rs has less "trend chasing" point of views these days, and I do wonder if it might be on here there's larger amounts of non technical people jumpy to call for the funeral of things.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#294

Post by ndriscoll »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #261
ndriscoll wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For foundational knowledge, there's been high quality information for free from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. out there for years. Just look there first. If you're beyond that, you're beyond the canon that you can "learn" and closer to needing to follow/participate in SOTA R&D. And if you need a more structured environment, that's why people go to school. Engineering jobs expect you're at the level of someone who's completed undergrad, minimum. Part of an undergrad degree is getting used to seeking out resources yourself and learning from them instead of having a teacher spoon-feed it.

Again I just don't have any idea of what training people expect. The entire job is basically "we might have some idea of what we want to do, but no one here knows the details. Go figure it out."

What kind of guided learning would you want? How to solve problems? That's what 16 years of school was for!

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#295

Post by colechristensen »

tpdly wrote: post #138
colechristensen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper... It's not perpetual motion, it's very…

You're fooling yourself. People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.

I also did a native implementation of git so I could use an S3 compatible data store, your rails guru can't do that.

Objectively, my GitHub clone is still shitty, BUT it got several ways github is shitty out of my way and allowed me to add several features I wanted, no small one of which was GitHub not owning my data.

I don't know the shit out of Rails and I don't want to, I know the shit out of other things and I want the tools I'm using to be better and Claude is making that happen.

It's a little odd the skepticism to the level that people keep telling me I'm delusional for being satisfied that I've created something useful for myself. The opposition to AI/LLMs seems to be growing into a weird morality cult trying to convince everybody else that they're leading unhappy immoral lives. I'm exaggerating but it's looking like things are going in that direction... and in my house, so to speak, here on HN there are factions. Like programming language zealots but worse.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#296

Post by prewett »

circlefavshape wrote: post #242
jnovek wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's necessary for devs right now, no matter how good they are, and it's those devs' code the models are trained on

Even worse, the training set probably includes a lot of code that needed review but didn't get it...

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#297

Post by kjksf »

ojbyrne wrote: post #235
tasuki wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

Perhaps the lack of investment in their skills was the cause for the commenter’s job hopping, not the effect.

It's all so vague. "lack of investment in their skill".

You just spent $250k and 5 years in college learning stuff.

You get hired to do a job for money.

What "investment" do you expect company to do?

Give me number of weeks and amount of dollars per year and tell me how it stacks against $250k and 5 years that you just spent?

If you want to learn on the job, shouldn't YOU be paying the company for teaching you, like you pay college to teach you?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#298

Post by stevepotter »

falkensmaize wrote: post #270
jnovek wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

I keep hearing “they aren’t intelligent” and spit out “crap code”. That’s not been my experience. LLMs prevented and also caught intricate concurrency issues that would have taken me a long time.

I just went “hmmm, nice” and went on. The problem there is that I didn’t get that sense of accomplishment I crave and I really didn’t learn anything. Those are “me” problems but I think programmers are collectively grappling with this.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#299

Post by toofy »

kstenerud wrote: post #65

> The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all? Yes, code is cheap now. That's the new reality. Your value lies elsewhere. You can lament the loss of your usefulness as a horse buggy mechanic, or you can adapt your knowledge and experience and use it towards those newfa…

i can say with a pretty high confidence level that few people in the free software movement want the closed off black boxes these companies are locking away.

they’re not free in any sense of the word. from price to openness of the models. would openai cry if every bit of their models were wide open for us to use however we see fit? if so, then it’s not free, again, in any definition of the word.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#300

Post by simianwords »

This person gives me the vibe that they are so attached to their craft that they can't seem to do anything about LLM's ubiquity rising but scold and vaguely sloganeer.

Was this how other professionals dealt with their grief? Like a translator in the advent of ML based translations? Like a lift man?

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