I have seen this too much. My current gripe isn't fresh devs, as long as they are teachable and care.

My main pain over the last several years has been the bulk of 'give-no-shit' perms/contractors who don't want to think or try when they can avoid it.

They run a web of lies until it is no longer sustainable (or the project is done for contractors) and then again its someone else's problem.

There are plenty of 10/20 year plus and devs who don't know what they are doing and don't care whose problem it will be as long as it isnt theirs.

I'm sick of writing coding 101 standards for 1k+ a day 'experts'. More sick of PR feedback where it's a battle to get things done in a maintainable manner from said 'experts'.

No one wants mentors. The way to move up in IT is to switch jobs every 24 months. So when you're paying mentors huge salaries to train juniors who are velocity drags into velocity boosters, you do it knowing they are going to leave and take all that investment with them for a higher paycheck.

I don't say this is right, but that's the reality from the paycheck side of things and I think there needs to be radical change for both sides. Like a trade union or something. Union takes responsibility for certifying skills and suitability, companies can be more confident of hires, juniors have mentors to learn from, mentors ensure juniors have aptitude and intellectual curiosity necessary to do the job well, and I guess pay is more skill/experience based so developers don't have to hop jobs to get paid what they are worth.

Fixed typos due to my iPhone hating me.

I'm forced to use Copilot at work and as far as code completion goes, it gets it right 10-15% of the times... the rest of the time it just suggests random — credible-looking — noise or hallucinates variables and shit.

Agreed. I wanted to test a new config in my router yesterday, which is configured using scripts. So I thought it would be a good idea for ChatGPT to figure it out for me, instead of 3 hours of me reading documentation and trying tutorials. It was a test scenario, so I thought it might do well.

It did not do well at all. The scripts were mostly correct but often in the wrong order (referencing a thing before actually defining it). Sometimes the syntax would be totally wrong and it kept mixing version 6 syntax with version 7 syntax (I'm on 7). It will also make mistakes and when I point out the mistake it says Oh you are totally right, I made a mistake. Then goes on to explain what mistake it did and output new code. However more often than not the new code contained the exact same mistake. This is probably because of a lack of training data, where it is referencing only one example and that example just had a mistake in it.

In the end I gave up on ChatGPT, searched for my testscenario and it turned out a friendly dude on a forum put together a tutorial. So I followed that and it almost worked right away. A couple of minutes of tweaking and testing and I got it working.

I'm afraid for a future where forums and such don't exist and sources like Reddit get fucked and nuked. In an AI driven world the incentive for creating new original content is way lower. So when AI doesn't know the answer, you are just hooped and have to re-invent the wheel yourself. In the long run this will destroy productivity and not give the gains people are hoping for at the moment.

When I had to get up to speed on a new language, it was very helpful. It's also great to write low to medium complexity scripts in python, powershell, bash, and making ansible tasks. That said I've been programming for ~30 years, and could have done those things myself if I needed, but it would take some time (a lot of it being looking up documentation and writing boilerplate code).

It's also nice for writing C# unit tests.

However, the times I've been stuck on my main languages, it's been utterly useless.

I've been using (mostly) Claude to help me write an application in a language I'm not experienced with (Rust). Mostly with helping me see what I did wrong with syntax or with the borrow checker. Coming from Java, Python, and C/C++, it's very easy to mismanage memory the exact way Rust requires it.

That being said, any new code that generates for me I end up having to fix 9 times out of 10. So in a weird way I've been learning more about Rust from having to correct code that's been generated by an LLM.

I still think LLMs for the next while will be mostly useful as a hyper-spell checker for code, and not for generating new code. I often find that I would have saved time if I just tackled the problem myself and not tried to reply on an LLM. Although sometimes an LLM can give me an idea on how to solve a problem.

Same. It can generate credible-looking code, but I don't find it very useful. Here's what I've tried:

• describe a function - takes longer to read the explanation than grok the code
• generate tests - hallucinates arguments, doesn't do proper boundary checks, etc
• looking up docs - mostly useful to find search terms for the real docs

The second was kind of useful since it provided the structure, but I still replaced 90% of it.

I'm still messing with it, but beyond solving "blank page syndrome," it's not that great. And for that, I mostly just copy something from elsewhere in the project anyway, which is often faster than going to the LLM.

I'm really bad at explaining what I want, because by the time I can do that, it's faster to just build it. That said, I'm a senior dev, so I've been around the block a bit.

I think that LLMs just made it easier for people who want to know but not learn to know. Reading all those posts all over the internet required you to understand what you pasted together if you wanted it to work (not always but the barr was higher). With ChatGPT, you can just throw errors at it until you have the code you want.

While the requirements never changed, the tools sure did and they made it a lot easier to not understand.

We do two "code challenges":

1. Very simple, many are done in 5 min; this just weeds out the incompetent applicants, and 90% of the code is written (i.e. simulate working in an existing codebase)
2. Ambiguous requirements, the point is to ask questions, and we actually have different branches depending on assumptions they made (to challenge their assumptions); i.e. simulate building a solution with product team

The first is in the first round, the second is in the technical interview. Neither are difficult, and we provide any equations they'll need.

It's much more important that they can reason about requirements than code something quick, because life won't give you firm requirements, and we don't want a ton of back and forth with product team if we can avoid it, so we need to catch most of that at the start.

In short, we're looking for actual software engineers, not code monkeys.

I work in a small company that doesn't hire hardly at all... Stories like this scare me because I have no way to personally quantify how common that kind of attitude might be.

Agreed. A few year back the devs looking for quick fixes would go over to StackOverflow and just copy answers without reading explanations. This caused the same type of problems that OP is talking about. That said, the ease of AI might be making things even worse.

Yeah, and copy-pasting SO answers with no thought is just as bad.

You're not learning anything if Copilot is doing it for you. That's the point.

Exactly, the jr dev that could write anything useful is a rare gem. Boot camps cranking out jr dev by the dozens every couple of months didn’t help the issue. Talent needs cultivation, and since every tech company has been cutting back lately, they stopped cultivating and started sniping talent from each other. Not hard given the amount of layoffs lately. So now we have jr devs either unable to find a place to refine them, or getting hired by people who just want to save money and don’t know that you need a senior or two to wrangle them. Then chat gpt comes along and gives the illusion of sr dev advice, telling them how to write the wrong thing better, no one to teach them which tool is the right one for the job.

Our industry is in kind of a fucked state and will be for a while. Get good at cleaning up the messes that will be left behind and that will keep you fed for the next decade.

"Prompt Engineer" makes a little vomit appear in the back of my mouth.