631–640 of 669 posts
LLMs are an automated Indian dev-shop. That’s all. The code is poorly thought out, poorly implemented and doesn’t take performance into account. But the code works and you got it for cheap. That’s my mental model and I’m happy with it
Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.
People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's. I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.
A lot changed very fast in the last few years. It's not all nor even a major part due to outsourcing/immigration. It's a myriad of factors all colliding at the same time.
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Orrrrrr... it could be a complex combination of outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring, etc etc etc. I was very fortunate to get a job in a NOC a little bit after high school where I learned things one'd expect to learn in an entry level job. The team I worked on was all about mentorship, learning, and building people to the next level. Haven't seen that attitude elsewher…
I'd also throw in hiring practice. Whatever we're doing (across the board) to find candidates seems....less ideal.
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have you been inside any big tech company? lots of orgs are > 80% foreign.
That's not actually true; people have been complaining about this for decades, and it's never been the zero-sum game that they claim it is. I mean, I wrote this 12 years ago in response to similar discussions on this same site, and in the intervening years, we had a great market for software engineers: https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job... What has changed is 1) the zero interest rate enviro…
> 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 would expand this even further and say that the worst problem for people in the trenches isn't even just that this is happening, it's the it creates a situation where managers are held to some expectations (their team shipping product features) that incentivize not looking too carefully at what their team members are putting out. It makes it really hard to tell a boss "we need to stop and spend a few days reviewing and rewriting because one of my teammates likes to one-shot everything with poorly thought out Claude prompts making multithousand line PRs" when their own bosses are breathing down their neck.
It's the same struggle we face to get refactor work prioritized, just at a much more frequent cadence. "It's working so why do we need to spend another sprint on it?"
It’s difficult to have spent a long time learning something, only for that thing to suddenly become accessible to anyone; something that was once scarce and valuable is now abundant and cheap. There are still machinists doing things by hand, but for real production or prototyping, most will now use a 5-axis CNC machine. It still requires an operator of sorts, but much of the work that once required skilled manual mac…
Sure, just wait for the poors to stop rebelling. It will all be over soon.
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> 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." For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such sty…
> We never had any real body that could certify proficiency Good! > having to resort to leetcode and other such styles of interviewing Such test filter out the obvious frauds.
I know everyone says that, but I really don't think that they do a good job filtering out shitty engineers. I have worked with plenty of incompetent people who managed to get past the leetcode challenge but are wholly unable to do anything useful involving software.
I feel like what leetcode primarily tests is "does this person know how to use a hashmap in a way that you shouldn't actually use it because you lose cache locality", and that's literally all they test.
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"The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill, while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth"
AI gives the skilled more ability than ever before to create wealth; they can realize an idea by themselves and a few hundred dollars of LLM spending, that would previously have been out of reach for anyone lacking the capital to hire 5-10 people.
Now the question is - no one was born good or best engineer/programmer/scientist. Often it was a long path of sleepless nights, daily grinding, failing million times, doing dumb mistakes along the way, the usual package of suffering sometimes called "experience". What is the path now for the next generation of good or best engineers? There will be no opportunities/budget to do the same anymore.
That's not an interesting question, it'll be the same path as before but somewhat longer.