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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#311

Post by tyleo »

pklausler wrote: post #277
tyleo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and I’m surprised more people don’t get this. Bad behaviors aren’t suddenly okay because AI makes them easy. If you are wasting time you may be value negative to a business. If you are value negative over the long run you should be let go. We’re ultimately here to make money, not just pump out characters into text files.

> We’re ultimately here to make money, not just pump out characters into text files. Different projects have other incentives. Dealing with AI slop from internet randos is a very real problem in open-source codebases. I've pretty much just stopped reviewing code from people that I don't know on one project that I work on when it's obviously going to take way more time than it would have done to do the patch myself. T…

Yeah, fair enough. This applies to both business cases and OSS and the OSS incentive often isn’t money.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#312

Post by int_19h »

whynotminot wrote: post #310
int_19h wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hacker news, supposedly. And vibe coding is pretty much diametrically opposite to the hacker ethos.

Many of you don't seem to grasp that AI isn't a binary "don't use at all" or "all-in on pure slop" proposition. AI assisted development is not automatically vibe-coding. Believe it or not, you can actually use these tools to level up your skills and understanding faster and then ship better code! Like with any powerful tool, it requires some care to use it correctly.

I'm well aware of this, and I do use AI.

Nevertheless the point remains that the net effect of industry-wide forced adoption of AI is not a "level up" but rather "more slop".

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#313

Post by bagacrap »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #258
pirates wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the “self taught software engineers that made a great career for myself”, I think you are correct. Maybe not so much in the “better or worse” sense, but there are definitely moments in my “real job” where I can recognize that the thing we’re talking about or working on is something that my colleagues had formal instruction on and I didn’t, and usually in cases like this they’re better suited to talk about a…

Well... most people who get degrees, get CS degrees, which is not the same as Software Engineering. Think about chemistry and chemical engineering. Chemistry is "where do the outer shell electrons go, how strong are the bonds between the atoms". Chemical engineering is "how do we make the stuff in multi-ton quantities without blowing up downtown". Those are not the same discipline. I mean, sure, a software engineer h…

Unfortunately there is absolutely no incentive structure in place anywhere to reward someone for writing code that lasts a decade or more without major maintenance. How would you do that? Send a check a decade later?

Even setting aside the impossibility of knowing whether the choices you're making will stand the test of time, how do you convince your boss, PM, director etc that it's worth spending extra time now rather than accepting some tech debt?

When I look back at the code I've written which has lasted the longest --- was not yet made obsolete by some product or technical redesign --- it is generally not the code that I was proudest of at the time I wrote it.

And to the original point, yeah, my CS degree is fairly useless at this point but it did prepare me for constantly wrapping my head around new abstract concepts I guess.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#314

Post by bagacrap »

int_19h wrote: post #299
yuye wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's a difference between a "coder" and a software engineer. Someone who finished a bootcamp might be able to write a simple program in Python, but that doesn't make them a software engineer. I've said this out loud before and have gotten told I'm an elitist, that my degree doesn't make me better at software than those without one. That majoring in computer science teaches you only esoteric knowledge that…

You don't need a degree to learn CS theory, though. Many of us who are self-taught, have learned about that as well (yes, there are people reading SCIP as a hobby). And conversely, a CS degree doesn't necessarily mean that the person has actually learned what they were taught.

If you can get through MIT with a CS diploma and not knowing any CS then that's almost more impressive than doing it the standard way.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#315

Post by bagacrap »

csomar wrote: post #290
spicymaki wrote: post #242

I feel that for long time people coming into the industry did not really care about code as a craft, but more of code as easy money. This was first salient to me when I saw posts about opensource developers who make critical infrastructure living hand to mouth. Then the day in the life of a software engineer working in a coffee shop. Then the bootcamps or just learn to code movement. Then the leetcode grinders. Then…

Professions that have "associations" are limited by physical geography. The "association" is a political power play although I concede that it offers certain guarantees about the people working in the profession. Programming can't be constrained in that fashion. Having a "Software Developer" association will 1. not solve the problem; and maybe make it worse and 2. move all of the industry outside of the US.

Simple, the offshore engineers don't have a license to write code that runs in the US. That is what lawyers have done.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#316

Post by dkersten »

int_19h wrote: post #307
dkersten wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter. Before LLM's, they were relatively rarely seen, after LLM's, they are commonly seen in AI-written text. Its not unreasonable for people to associate them with being AI-written.

They weren't "relatively rarely seen". If you have seen a Word document, chances are good that it had em-dashes in it simply because it would often autocorrect to that. In the Apple ecosystem, this sort of autocorrect is provided by the OS itself, so it extends to a lot more content produced. I'm pretty sure that all the comments about how it was "rarely seen" are because people weren't paying attention to them befor…

Its how they're used though, not just that they are used. For example, hyphenating words is common enough, but what wasn't all that common prior to LLM's is people using them to combine sentences -- like this.

In general while reading blogs, Reddit, HN, youtube comments, X posts and so forth, I rarely never saw run-on sentences like that combined with em-dashes. Sure, they existed, but it was pretty uncommon up until about two years ago and now I see them all the time. So anecdotally, there is absolutely a shift in usage right around the time that LLM's took off. I wouldn't judge a professional article or book by its use of em-dashes, but I absolutely judge user generated text on the web.

Its not the only thing I judge on, though. Its just one of a number of red flags. Frequent uses of lists (of usually three items) and of bullet points too -- and run on sentences, not just the em-dashes. Yes, I did that on purpose.

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