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…
Exactly. For most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran. And it would take them a long time to implement something poorly. So the blast radius from their incompetence would be limited. Today, a bad engineer can churn out ten thousand lines of garbage that actually compiles and runs, before my first cup of coffee. If not o…
> or most of my career, bad engineers (or juniors who were earnestly learning) would struggle to even create output that compiled, let alone ran
Really? I have never seen that. The expectation was that you could create the code that compiled on day one.
I hate that framing because it glosses over what makes AI distinct from other technology. Pretty much anything can be used as a tool, that’s not an interesting aspect of AI. However standard tools do not take decisions on behalf of the user, they do not apply judgement. They come with assumptions and constraints that make some decisions more likely to be made. But the whole thing about LLMs is that they apply judgeme…
If you go back in time and imagine yourself in 1950, would you have said that about computers in general? Yes their decisions are the result of pre programmed heuristics, but to the operator that can feel as opaque as AI. In fact in the early days of computing AI was used to refer to a broader swath of what we now call heuristics and machine learning. Is a very sophisticated computer driven adaptive control system ma…
The difference is that with software before the rise of giant machine-learning models, the software is derived entirely from human-understandable source, and often a full software stack can be built on a single computer, as anyone who ever ran Gentoo knows. While the source of any non-trivial software stack is too large for any single human to understand in full, a single human can understand any part of it. That's not true of model weights. And my understanding is that even the smallest open-weights models that are remotely in the same class as LLMs require large computing clusters with powerful GPUs to train. That puts training a model, or retraining one from its true source materials (the training data and processes), in an entirely different class than rebuilding Gentoo, even with GNOME, Firefox, LibreOffice, etc., even if the training data and processes are available, which they're usually not. So, we should treat these models as a different kind of thing than the tools that we developers have worked with until now.
> The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Why? While the rest of your comment explains why the plan failed, it seems like it should be pretty obvious why business would try to attract an increased supply. Hint: It puts downward pressure on price. Same reason they are trying again with AI. > every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements ' Yes, the a…
> Hint: It puts downward pressure on price. Same reason they are trying again with AI. You say it like it's a bad thing. About occupational licensing for software: it's also a uniquely global market, so I'm not sure how any one economy moving ahead with occupational licensing would work, unless they also restricted what software you can import or use in the cloud.
> About occupational licensing for software: it's also a uniquely global market, so I'm not sure how any one economy moving ahead with occupational licensing would work, unless they also restricted what software you can import or use in the cloud.
Relatively easily, tbh. Just create a regulation that requires either the country's standards or equivalent ones to be used in the creation of any software sold to people/businesses in the country/region.
> 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…
The issue was that it was "learn to code" and not "learn to program", as if the only thing you needed was a month of training and then you were just as good as someone with 20 years of experience.
It's similar to why there's hundreds of books about learning the basics of a language, but comparatively few books about good software architecture/design
I hear you, but just to pedantic.. prostitution is certainly not a long term career either.. never has been. After 35, you're not going to find work as a sex worker..
Can't believe I'm correcting you on HN, but MILFs and DILFs are a thing. (Granted you'll need the appropriate genes and gym fitness.)
> gym fitness
Not necessarily, there's a growing and somewhat untapped market for BBWs
What would credentialing software engineers do to curtail leadership incentive problems? The same as in other regulated professions. It would give the people on the front line who can see the consequences of the corner cutting an effective right to say "No, we're not doing this user hostile thing". This would be a significant barrier because it wouldn't be legal to ship software without the required professional appr…
That’s not how these systems work in reality. I’m actually an extreme pessimist. What actually happens is that you as an engineer become paid to frame the desired leadership goals in compliant terms. It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation. This skill among engineers is highly sought after in…
> It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation.
This is true, and basically what tends to happen is that if the Head of some compliance function (e.g. internal audit) is causing problems for the business, then they are replaced with someone who won't cause such problems.
It's still better than nothing. Like, software basically runs our society now, so either software professionals get together on this, or regulations will be imposed on us, and they will be much worse than what we'd get in the first option.
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…
A large amount of programmers are hired just building crud apps. Display data from a database and write it back with a validation. Etc. There is very little innovation going on. And most companies do everything they can to stick to standard patterns, technologies etc where all the risk is removed and known in advance. Often "good" programmers are worse - they over complicate the architecture, go off on tangents, try…
> they over complicate the architecture, go off on tangents, try to solve problems the business didn't ask for either etc.
because they've been bitten plenty times before by business telling them that certain requirements are not needed, just to be told 2 weeks later that they are...
My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.
I'm not sure how happy is a recruiter to see an ai photo in cv. Although they don't read cv themselves these days
I am not sure what you are referring to?
A photo with adjusted cropping, background blurring, and contrast etc?
That’s not how these systems work in reality. I’m actually an extreme pessimist. What actually happens is that you as an engineer become paid to frame the desired leadership goals in compliant terms. It’s similar to how lawyers and regulatory compliance rarely change the product. They change how the product is talked about and framed for the purpose of regulation. This skill among engineers is highly sought after in…
In the physical engineering teams I've worked with the culture you just described is not what happens at all. There are always some people who seemingly live to circumvent the intention of rules lurking around the edges of regulated industries. But my own experience has been that real engineers very much value real engineering - it's often why they got into the field in the first place - and will push back hard again…
> They won't be impressed at all by someone's big title and even bigger budget while they're exercising that professional judgement either. Some of these people have had pretty stellar careers so I think it's safe to say their professional conduct hasn't damaged them with their employers or clients.
It really depends on the status of the profession in society and the company. I'd expect lots of software organisations to fire a bunch of people looking for people pleasers until this becomes an accepted part of the business approach.
> 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.
> 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/...
Honestly this is purely because time is money. Its a blunt instrument that is surprisingly effective. Unfortunately, it also removes a fair amount of competent people too, that simply don't think/operate in a leetcode mindset.