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New junior developers can’t code

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Re: New junior developers can’t code

#81

Post by begueradj »

dartos wrote: post #20
simonw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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…

I don’t think it’s a great analogy, and here’s why: When trying to get from point A to point B, there is a clear, well defined goal. Streets (paths) are also clear and well defined (within reason on most popular GPS direction software). An expert in city streets may get you there a little faster, but the end result of both GPS directions and city street experts is the same; getting you to B. What’s more, once you’re…

> When trying to get from point A to point B, there is a clear, well defined goal.

In programming, you also go from point A (requirements analysis phase) to point B (shipping the product). The only difference is that you may face multiple paths leading to point B.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#82

Post by [deleted] »

code-faster wrote: post #47

The reason why these articles appear every 5 years is because many engineers pride themselves on how they solve problems. And then when they see people solving those problems without putting in the hard work that they had to put in, it really bothers them. This is a timeless post. We'll see it today. We'll see it in five years. We'll see it in 10 years.

[deleted]

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#83

Post by hnfong »

bane wrote: post #45

I've been thinking about this for a few years, even before the advent of AI coding tools. New developers certainly couldn't code then either, but I think what "coding" is is changing, and it has to do with how our field is capturing solved problems, encoding that knowledge, and then resharing it out to the next generation of developers. - In the before times, writing software usually meant having a logical mindset, p…

This is great comment that offers great perspective.

Grumpy old devs often lament that their technology layer is being ignored by newer devs, but often forget that computing has a long history and many layers are built on top of each other. Nobody really understands all the layers from the top down to the semiconductor tech.

If your goal is to learn the tech at any layer, you can still do it; but most people just want to create products and technical knowledge is just a means to an end. Both are valid goals, and I think there's no reason for the former to be snobbish against the latter.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#84

Post by gpm »

andyferris wrote: post #56
namanyayg wrote: post #39

I 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 ri…

> A reliable system will need a relatively formal “proof” that what it does is correct.

One of my pet theories is that this is what programming evolves to in a few decades. Programmers write formal specifications for what should happen in some very high level language. AI + Compilers + ... take that specification, implement it, and prove that the implementation is correct and performant.

Think "SQL but not just for databases".

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#85

Post by mbreese »

tbrownaw wrote: post #70
addicted wrote: post #46

There’s a lot of “people have been complaining about the youth for a long time” in these comments. I get where that’s coming from. However, I don’t think these complaints are the same. Let’s not approach this from the youth, but from the technology that’s supposedly corrupting the youth. Stack Overflow, C compilers, Python are all mentioned as previous examples of technologies that were supposedly making people bad d…

> And why is AI hailed as a game changer? Precisely because AI takes the thinking out of the achieving. So, like WYSIWYG designers and RAD tools?

That’s not a bad analogy. WYSIWYG is great for almost all use cases. It let people without training in typesetting produce well formatted content quickly. It’s fast and easy. But, sometimes it doesn’t work. Or produces formatting that isn’t quite right. And when that happens, you learn about why things were done differently in the past. Or why markup syntaxes exist as opposed to just WYSIWYG formatted documents.

Or in RAD, you could make pretty good GUI programs quickly that did their job, and did it well. But they would all look very similar. And if you needed a complex interface that required an unsupported workflow, it might not work at all.

Coding with AI can be pretty similar. It will work a lot of the time and you can have something usable quickly. But, if you don’t understand why it works, and something is broken, or misfortunes, you’re stuck. You’ll be left trying to figure out a system without the benefits of knowledge of how or why it worked in the first place.

I’ve seen this with junior developers who don’t understand the languages and tools they use. If they just plug things into AI and hit a wall, they don’t understand the data flow to be able to fix the problem. On the other hand, I’ve also worked with junior devs who have a solid programming background who are able to work faster with AI and still understand/troubleshoot the system. At the end of the day, AI is still a tool (for now) that needs to be used. Some people will use it well…

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#86

Post by rixed »

chias wrote: post #16

When I was younger people derided us new junior developers who relied on compiling and running their code to see what it would do, instead of thinking deeply about it. Using a REPL is a sure sign of a weak mind. I feel like every 15 years or so you can just find-and-replace the name of the tech we decide is only for Not Real Programmers.

According to the legend, when Ken Thompson was shown vi, which was the first full screen code editor on Unix, he replied, in essence : "who needs to see other lines than the edited one?"

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#87

Post by MattGrommes »

I had a similar thought the other day when playing with Deepseek-coder. I asked it to do a problem I had just figured in a system I didn't know (opencv). The code deepseek gave was basically the same as what I had figured out, which I was pretty impressed by. But then I thought that if I had just used that code as is, it probably would have worked but I wouldn't have learned anything about opencv.

These new tools can be very valuable but I worry about people not using the tools to maximum effect long-term, in favor of short term success of a certain kind.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#88

Post by motorest »

ethanwillis wrote: post #80
deeg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old people have been complaining about the youth for 2000 years but THIS time they're right.

So the youth are always correct and always an improvement?

> So the youth are always correct and always an improvement?

I don't think this is an issue of "the youth", inasmuch it's an issue with "the old" struggling to understand a world where people don't play by their rules anymore.

Pay attention to the absurdity: a blogger complaining that today's junior devs don't do the hard work of... asking questions in stack overflow? That's their baseline of expertise and knowledge-seeking?

I'm old enough to remember "the old" complaining that junior devs can't code anymore because they just paste nonsense they copy from stack overflow.

How times have changed.

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#89

Post by rixed »

y1n0 wrote: post #29
computerthings wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Maybe it's true sometimes but not always ?

Even a broken clock etc

Re: New junior developers can’t code

#90

Post by motorest »

tbrownaw wrote: post #70
addicted wrote: post #46

There’s a lot of “people have been complaining about the youth for a long time” in these comments. I get where that’s coming from. However, I don’t think these complaints are the same. Let’s not approach this from the youth, but from the technology that’s supposedly corrupting the youth. Stack Overflow, C compilers, Python are all mentioned as previous examples of technologies that were supposedly making people bad d…

> And why is AI hailed as a game changer? Precisely because AI takes the thinking out of the achieving. So, like WYSIWYG designers and RAD tools?

> So, like WYSIWYG designers and RAD tools?

Exactly. One if the killer features of Copilot is even, of all things, tab completion.

Are template engines now bad?

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