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AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

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Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#461

Post by dns_snek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #458
dns_snek wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they take them because they get high. Believing in things that are unsupported by empirical evidence is in the domain of religion, not science.

You can't really get high much on prescription-level dosages - that quickly gets tricky logistically and prohibitively expensive. People who look for highs go to the street for a reason.

You pointed out that students abuse stimulants for finals in spite of the evidence, were you just expanding on what I originally said, or is that meant to serve as counter-evidence implying that the research is wrong?

Regardless, I'm not saying it's a cheap or practical to get high this way, especially over the long term. People probably try stimulants because folk wisdom tells them that they'll get better grades. Then they get high and they feel like a superman from the dopamine rush, so they keep using them because they think it's materially improving their grades but really they're just getting high.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#462

Post by WalterSear »

yeasku wrote: post #453
WalterSear wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I don't entirely understand it either, but I think people are just impatient. AI coding has only hit it's stride in the last ~6 months. And there's a huge part of the business process that isn't coding, isn't necessarily amenable to being sped up. All I can tell you is that it's happening right now, every day, on my desk. I am part of that software explosion that you can't see.

You are telling me I have been reading about AI coding only for 6 months? I feel I have been reading for years.

No, I'm saying the AI coding tools only started bearing serious fruit recently.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#463

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

realisticfoo wrote: post #428
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the AI writes the coding route is slower, though the developer percieves it as faster. I have this pattern while driving. Using the main roads, when there is little to no traffic, the commute is objectively, measurably the fastest. However, during peak hours, I find myself in traffic jams, so I divert to squiggly country roads which are both slower and longer, but at least I’m moving all the time. The thing is, whe…

the best use of LLM is to help you program a digispark USB dongle with Arduino to make it emulate mouse movement and scrolling to appease the idi0tic spyware retarded boomers monitor like it was relevant somehow on their corporate spy box. Meanwhile we adults can do real work on a separate real computer. Never use their laptop more than absolutely minimum possible.

Well, you might have several obstacles here:

1) the bossware might take screenshots too

2) the bosses pay for the whole LLM so they expect you to use the whole LLM

3) you may not want to contaminate your spare computer with whatever shit you're working on on job, and indeed it may be considered a breach of security (as if feeding OpenAI/Anthropic isn't, lol, but that's beside the point.

So you continue to feel miserable, but you get your paycheck, and it's better than unemployment, and your kids are fed and clothed, so there's that.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#464

Post by grayhatter »

reactordev wrote: post #423
grayhatter wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you didn’t go that route, you were still looked at as a junior. Your ego clouds your view. your ego clouds your response. He wasn't talking about if he was hired into a jr role, he was talking about the competency, experience, and skills acquired from the years of writing code for passion. If he could write better code, or debug problems faster than your average jr level employee. Not everyone fits into the tiny…

If you’re employed, you’re in a bucket. It’s a cell on a spreadsheet somewhere. I’ve yet to find a junior dev that had more skills than a junior dev. I’ve seen them try… but they are still a junior dev. If you aren’t a junior dev, then you aren’t. Mentorship has nothing to do with what bucket you’re in. However, there are specific job duties of senior and higher that are beyond just writing code. One of them is makin…

> I’ve yet to find a junior dev that had more skills than a junior dev. I’ve seen them try… [...] If you aren’t a junior dev, then you aren’t.

Funny, I've met plenty of jr devs that were way more competent than some of their peers who've been at the exact same company/division for 4+ years. Which was my point. The world is bigger than you can imagine. There are people with experiences that you couldn't describe, but you write in a way that feels like you want to dismiss them outright as impossible, which does a disservice to everyone involved.

> And while you can go read a manual on how to put a Ferrari together, wouldn’t you want to work with a mechanic who has already made dozens of them?

> Why do we reject help?

I feel like you and I are arguing past each other. To reuse your example: There are plenty of people who have never spent time with a mechanic, but have been spent so much time pouring over every technical manual for the car, that they can out perform guys with years working for Ferrari, while that guy working for Farrari has mentors, he still has to ask for help with most things, and needs to look up a number of the specs. But the person who exclusively taught himself, can do many of the same tasks blindfolded.

No one has said they don't want mentorship, but many were never in a position to have that advantage. But you said that if they think aquired their skills on their own, they need to seek therapy. WTF?

I'm sure you've met plenty of narcissists who have had mentors, but claim they haven't. But it's wrong, insulting and pretty toxic to lump everyone into that same group.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#465

Post by IggleSniggle »

reactordev wrote: post #422
IggleSniggle wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is looked at as a young person when they are young. I've definitely had "junior" colleagues that "got it" better than my 50yo colleagues. It's possible I shouldn't say that outloud, because skilled youngsters have a tendency to misidentify themselves as being part of that set while the wise youngsters have a tendency to *underestimate* their own capability or insight. But I don't think you can make that same…

You see, the issue is you’re framing your mentorship (or lack thereof) on a very specific topic, that you are already well versed in. Why would someone give you advice in your field? You probably already know… Mentorship is about more than just “don’t use strings directly in your squeal”, it’s about navigating the organization. Filing proper TPS reports. Encouraging refactoring. Having empathy when shit goes south. C…

Of course. And I thought I acknowledged that mentorship is many things and there are many things that we need to grow as individuals. I've had a lot of great mentors in my life.

I still think you've missed the point. You can be grateful for the many gifts you've received and still wish to have had engineering guidance from a trusted mentor. There is not enough time in a life to go down every single rabbit hole; it's nice to have experienced people accurately point out where the rabbit holes are. Non-engineers are not equipped to help spot engineering rabbit holes; they might even tell you that engineering itself is ultimately a pointless rabbit hole.

But even then...that's just my own experience and my own wishes for my past self. I try to give what I wish I had had, of course.. think that's what drives most mentorship, and maybe that's the point you're trying to make, that mentorship is given out of that wistful feeling of wishing you had received advice/help and passing along the lessons that took you too long to find.

But still, if your role is getting stuck alone in the server room or whatever with a team of people who don't understand or respect what you do, good luck.

The point I was trying to make (and maybe failed because I got too focused on my own experience) is that really, not everyone gets mentors, even of the broader sort that you're referring to (which I might say are more accurately called friends or peers). But even if we widen the scope of what mentorship is, it's also perfectly reasonable for field-specific mentorship to be a cultural expectation for software engineering. I think it's a good thing to expect this of each other, and to encourage explicitly making space for the practice.

But again, however you want to widen the scope of what mentorship is, not everyone is getting it. The reason people look under rocks is because they don't know where to look. Or they do know where to look but also know they have blind spots and don't know how to get them addressed. "Look up" is nice and all, but it's a bit rude and distracting when you're trying to build something and need help understanding the foundation below your feet. Sometimes you don't need someone telling you to look up, you need help seeing where to look closer.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#466

Post by Den_VR »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #460
Den_VR wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the free market is any indication, because it’s more effective than what passes for a search engine these days.

It's not, but there's sure a lot of money and pride riding on getting people to believe it is

16.4 billion google searches per day vs 2.6 billion consumer chatgpt prompts and another 2.6 billion claude prompts. Maybe it’s apples and oranges but google has been a verb for nearly twenty years (oxford added it as a verb for web search in 2006).

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#468

Post by codr7 »

tjansen wrote: post #436
codr7 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point it seems to me that they become a distraction, a filter between you and the software you're building. Surely it must be easier to tell the computer directly what to do then to route the entire design through that mess?

I wouldn't call it a filter, unless you use it for trivial tasks ("check that the input argument is not null, throw an exception otherwise"). Sometimes it is useful for trivial tasks though, because it may do things a human dev would be to lazy to do. It also tends to be faster at finding things (as in "change the color of the submit button on the address form to #f00"). But the real value is implementing known patte…

Yeah, I get it.

It's not a free lunch though, remove all friction and no learning takes place, which means finding better ways isn't happening much.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#469

Post by dingi »

kaydub wrote: post #233

Because juniors don't know when they're being taken down a rabbit hole. So they'll let the LLM go too deep in its hallucinations. I have a Jr that was supposed to deploy a terraform module I built. This task has been hanging out for a while so I went to check in on them. They told me the problem they're having and asked me to take a look. Their repo is a disaster, it's very obvious claude took them down a rabbit hole…

No amount of “own the code you generate” policies will prevent the rise of “I don’t know, the AI wrote it” excuses in the LLM era. What’s more likely is that reviewers will be flooded with unvetted, generated code. Over time, this can lead to reviewer fatigue and a gradual decline in rigor. If the trend continues, the impact could be significant once the most experienced engineers begin to retire.

Re: AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?

#470

Post by godelski »

thirdsun wrote: post #442
godelski wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of benefits you get by mentoring. When you have to teach you're forced to think more deeply about problems, see it from different angles, and revisit questions you had when learning but tabled at that time. That last one is pretty common. There's always questions you have when learning that you have to avoid because you don't have the knowledge to answer yet, because they would take you down too deep a…

I don't think you have to convince the parent poster or seniors developers in general. You have to convince their employers that this is a valuable use of time.

I interpreted the extrinsic benefits differently, but fair. Still, I think being vocal about this helps. We can put pressure on our managers
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