The bigger problem in my experience isn't even junior devs using it. It's senior people who haven't been individual contributors in many years who love that AI means they can just hop in and patch whatever problem comes up. It's not too hard to tell a junior dev that adding an if statement right before the error happened to make a separate codepath for that one case is not the right answer. It can be MUCH harder to tell a Senior Director that you don't want to merge that pull request because that's not the right way to solve the problem.
New junior developers can’t code
51–60 of 138 posts
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#52> Reading discussions by experienced developers about your topic is the best way to learn. No it isn't. Stack Overflow consists of people saying "I don't know what you are trying to do" and then answering anyway without waiting for additional information or scolding people for not asking their question correctly. If you post your real code, you get told to provide a minimal reproducible example. If you just post the…
Closed, marked as a duplicate: [link to completely different issue]
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't forget to tell us about them in great detail, Socrates and all that. After all that supposed counter-argument to anything and everything only gets brought up every single time when anyone suggests something got worse.
That's because it's true.
It's only true if you are bickering about aesthetics of an argument versus its content.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't forget to tell us about them in great detail, Socrates and all that. After all that supposed counter-argument to anything and everything only gets brought up every single time when anyone suggests something got worse.
That's because it's true.
It's also true that for every thing that turned out to be horrible, there were people saying "this is gonna be great". Do you then also also dismiss all optimism?
Why is this fallacy only employed in one direction? It's not an argument either way, it's just spam, but I wonder why it only ever gets deployed in one direction.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
While a trope, it is also statistically proven that the youth of this generation are doing worse, by almost every metric, than prior generations; including but not limited to achieving adult milestones years later than normal, record high percentages of medication distribution, and (for what it’s worth) a historically low percentage of young people that could even enter the military if they wanted to, at just 1 in 7.
Gen Z also has a lower crime rate, less teen birth rates, and less illegal drugs and alcohol consumption when compared to previous generations at the same age.
Yes; but are we silly enough here to believe that it’s because they have some newfound sense of morality that is guiding their actions?
No.
They are so deep into other things that the old vices have lost their appeal.
I argue that what’s really happening is that this is the most introverted generation (lockdowns playing a part). Home is comfortable, safe, entertaining, free of judgement, and has never been less boring; the basement dweller stereotype has never been more real.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#56I wrote this article! Thanks for sharing. Love the discussion on HN as always, great to see various perspectives on the issue. Do you think that in the future, new programmers will not ever need to learn syntax/algorithms and will just be able to rely on AI?
A reliable system will need a relatively formal “proof” that what it does is correct.
Code is currently the easiest and most convenient encoding for lots of folks to express such logic. So they’ll need to learn to read the syntax even if they write less of it.
So I think people will be able to put together lots of code with AI and not much programming experience, but there will be a need to ensure that it does the right thing. Now eventually the AI will create fewer bugs, infer intent better, automatically write tests, etc but even then someone needs to eg check the testset is correct.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
While a trope, it is also statistically proven that the youth of this generation are doing worse, by almost every metric, than prior generations; including but not limited to achieving adult milestones years later than normal, record high percentages of medication distribution, and (for what it’s worth) a historically low percentage of young people that could even enter the military if they wanted to, at just 1 in 7.
This. Just because things are always getting worse does not mean things are not literally at their worst
Yes. A point can be both a local and global maximum.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#58Stack overflow also has a ton of misleading answers too. Yes, the popular ones are exemplary ones with depth. The "struggle" is where the most knowledge is gained. While one struggle, they look inside, outside and around the problem and over time dots starts connect to each other.
I don't think it's all junior engineer's laziness to get things quick out the door. I recently worked with several, and many prefers to "do the right way". However, there are bad managers who wants to get things done quick so they can climb up the ladder. One junior told me his 1-on-1 with manager told him "don't think too much and get it done". The current market is tough for junior devs so they'll do whatever to please their manager. What choice do they have? Rather prefer getting PIP'ed?
And it's funny how the current market is considered "bad" because software companies earnings are clearly not that bad. Perhaps our greed has peaked and the only way to pocket more money is to squeeze every drop of juice out of employees to get the product out ASAP
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#59The implication that Stack Overflow was somehow the only way you'd ever find a solution to a gnarly problem (back in the day) seems weird to me. I mean before that (even during that) there was the alternative problem solving technique of, well, rolling up your sleeves getting stuck in and figuring out the problem yourself without asking anybody. By doing some reading. Or by reading source code. Or disassembling code…
Before StackOverflow there was ExpertSexChange.com and before that there was DejaNews and posting to comp.lang.*.
Re: New junior developers can’t code
#60It's like relying on a GPS to go everywhere you need. You will quickly find out you don't know to go anywhere by yourself.
... and maybe that's OK? I've been reliant on GPS on my phone for probably over a decade now. I'm probably lost without it. But... I explore way more of the world now! I'll quite happily bounce around to random parts of a city that's completely foreign to me, safe in the knowledge that I'll always be able to find my way back again. (I don't know if this analogy will hold up for AI-assisted programming - I still think…
What i said is -somehow- the scenario described in the article: a craftsman who relies on something to do his craft but can't actually do the craft by himself. I'd est, he's no longer a craftsman.
The author didn't say stop using AI. He offered his solutions.