551–560 of 713 posts
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Good code apparent doesn't matter. Most software doesn't have real repurcussions for being bad. You just get a shittier oncall which doesn't seem to matter to some people
The people who have to fix the mess and the people who created it are two different groups of people.
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>>doctors make mistakes that kill people all the time Yes, but they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. The standard is not perfection; the standard is as good as practical and better than if nothing were done. Medical licensing definitely meets both of those criteria. Unless you are arguing that anyone who takes a ten-week "Medical Bootcamp" is ready…
> they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. I don’t know if that’s true. More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors. And I suspect some negative trait selection. Milton Friedman wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic of medicine that I invite you to take a look at. > than if nothing were done. The alternative is not to invite people…
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This 100%. I just requested a hackathon for performance improvement (might be wasted effort). We are pushing tons of code and now our CPU usage has grown exponentially over the past year because the bad engineers just ship whatever Claude gives them and do not think about the consequences. Our biggest consumer of CPU right now is HTTP connection churn because engineers are creating new clients every request we handle…
This has less to do with bad engineers than bad policies and procedures. You don't performance test before shipping to prod? you get what you get.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
At my workplace, the earliest programmers were a combination of self-taught and people with real CS degrees. The CS people wrote the OS and languages for an in house minicomputer. The apps were written by people with app experience, mostly scientists. And there were a few odd characters like the secretary who learned programming because it was quicker to fix bugs herself than get clarification from the engineers.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
For a lot of people, they have no need to ship production grade software that scales to babel. But a custom script that solves an immediate business need is a common thing.
I think that aim is more important than the harm learn to code might have caused our profession. And for similar reasons, I feel the agency AI brings to individuals is something that shouldn't be discounted either. No idea what the total calculus on cost benefits turns out to be, but I would hope this benefit is not missed.
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> Such test filter out the obvious frauds. if you need garbage like leetcode to filter out "obvious frauds" you got a whole lot of problems in your company/team/...
I took an online technical interview recently where there was a check-box they made you click before every section, promising you would not use AI to solve the test for you. After they rejected me I had to point out that their test is selecting for the cheaters.
When you check in at the airport, the machine asks you to certify you are not carrying banned items. Of course, one wanting to break the law and carry banned items would certify it. The purpose is that if you get caught with the banned items, and you certified you did not, it's an extra charge they can paste you with.
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I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship p…
To me, the difficult parts of software engineering are in the design. That's where you're defining the problem you're trying to solve, picking what technology to build upon, what kind of architecture you're planning on implementing, ruling out what does/doesn't make sense, taking input from stakeholders, and finding the balance between price and performance. Once all that is covered I generally have a good high-level mental map of a system's structure, and actually writing the code to bring those ideas to life truly is the easier part.
That being said, I still believe writing good code is a skill that is only learned through experience/the practice of actually writing code. And that experience is necessary for reviewing code - regardless of whether the code you're reviewing was written by humans or AI.
Kind of like baking. Putting it in the oven was always the easy part. But combining the right ingredients in the right ratios is necessary, and much more difficult than the putting-it-in-the-oven part. And even then, it takes experience to know when something needs to be pulled early or left in longer. Because ovens are non-deterministic.
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I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. A board of peers to hold you accountable and a licence that can be revoked at any time. Additionally, legislation could be written to require such licensed indivi…
For instance, a lawyer spends most of their time reading and writing, but no one would ever say "you can read and write? Have a crack on our legal team". It's a particular type of writing, and the writing is really a means to an end. This is a distinction that is lost in software development. Every engineering discipline now learns programming, but the ability to write code shouldn't be a license to write software in the same way that knowing how to read and write doesn't just grant you the ability to join a legal team and start writing contracts.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
Tell me how to paradigm shift careers and I'll get out of your hair and stop shipping uninspired features. But, right now I'm paralyzed with fear in how to make a successful career switch without starting from literally "new grad level." I have wisdom, so it doesn't feel like I should have to start at the bottom rung again. Egotistically, I don't even mind, it's just the salary hit that would be the main issue. Maybe…
It just seems like there’s a reckoning coming for our field. I’m going to keep doing it, I don’t see any other choice right now.
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> The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I wouldn't be so quick to judge the long tenured engineers. They probably realized that moving business forward is more important than writing artisan code. You always have some young hotsh…
I agree. Why is everyone so hard on everyone else? Look at the outages Anthropic and OpenAI have had. They aren't hiring stupid people but they can't seem to go a week without major platform instability. And you can't even argue that it's because of high load because all of these engineers have worked at Facebook, Meta, etc. They are seasoned veterans that should be able to build resilient systems.