431–440 of 686 posts
I watched a video of some (unemployed) programmer lamenting over the current job situation market. He had been coding for a good while, but had recently been laid off. The vid was mainly concerning the searching and interview process, but it also did highlight something I find somewhat true and important: Right now we're in a gold rush. Companies, that be established ones or startups, are in a frenzy to transform or…
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If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me. Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds. Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality. The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about per…
Nothing you describe is recognisable to me. It just seems like you chose to work at bad places.
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> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays. A huge AI signal to me is not em dashes, not emoji, not even the "not X, it's Y" construction which oh god I'm falling into the trap right now aren't I. It's a combination of these factors plus a tendency to fluff out the piece with punchy but vague language, often recapitulating the same points in slightly re…
Another commenter above this proposed a pretty compelling theory for the source of this style: SEO-inflated prose online. If the models were trained on the internet, "higher quality" content needed to be indicated to them during RL somehow. Search engine ranking is an easy-to-obtain metric that's kind of like "quality" if you squint, turn around, and lobotomize yourself. So the AIs have a high likelihood of producing…
I watched a video of some (unemployed) programmer lamenting over the current job situation market. He had been coding for a good while, but had recently been laid off. The vid was mainly concerning the searching and interview process, but it also did highlight something I find somewhat true and important: Right now we're in a gold rush. Companies, that be established ones or startups, are in a frenzy to transform or…
Some of the interviews I were getting were at AI startups and all of them were either doing architectural questions or multiple rounds of architectural, behavioural and leetcode problems.
Only one of the orgs was hiring junior engineers and the director of technology mentioned to me he didn't want to as they were "incapable", but it was a quota given to him by the board.
I also got told by multiple recruitment agents that I wasn't experienced enough, and some hiring managers were demanding 15 YOE for a senior role.
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In my experience I'm pasting a lot more into AI to get the high level summary though.
And they are generating the longer version with AI, that you are then using AI to summarize. This is not adding value for anyone except people whose function is to look busy, and people trying to avoid their busy work.
What is described here closely resembles my experience too. My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When…
My boss told me enforcing code quality wasn’t important because in 6 months we won’t even read code anymore.
The entire article resonates, but that particular passage get at the core of a lot of my current frustrations around the use of these systems. Great article!
The OP has an amusing side point - LLMs have automated sucking up to management. There is a large market for that. His main point, though, is this: I have a colleague ... who spent two months earlier this year building a system that should have been designed by someone with formal training in data architecture. He used the tools well, by the standards by which use of the tools is currently measured. He produced a gre…
My friend built a construction management SaaS entirely via Claude. It looked damned impressive, and it kind of worked to demo, but he is in no way a programmer, though he understood the problem domain very well. I asked a few basic questions: - where is the data stored? - How would you recover from a database failure? - does it consume tokens at runtime? - what is the runtime used at the back end? - why are the web…
What the article's author seems to be hinting at is that the problem was described incorrectly from day one, and the LLM picked the wrong schema from day one. Because the person making it is not technically literate enough to describe the problem in a way an LLM interpreted correctly.
The hidden BA work a developer usually does was missing from the process.
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If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me. Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds. Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality. The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about per…
Nothing you describe is recognisable to me. It just seems like you chose to work at bad places.