Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity It wasn't great before, but I've only seen one very specific slice of the tech world. I've encountered developers using technology they didn't understand. I've received too many *screenshots of stack traces* from developers on other teams, and they expected me to solve their problem for them. (Stack traces will, conveniently, show you exactly where the error is. And also it's your code.) I don't have super powers, I just know how to read and... program computers.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity A handful, maybe two or three over the span of 10 years.
I've been extremely lucky, but I also made sure to work for organizations with good hiring practices and/or appeal to competent people. -
@ludicity It wasn't great before, but I've only seen one very specific slice of the tech world. I've encountered developers using technology they didn't understand. I've received too many *screenshots of stack traces* from developers on other teams, and they expected me to solve their problem for them. (Stack traces will, conveniently, show you exactly where the error is. And also it's your code.) I don't have super powers, I just know how to read and... program computers.
@ludicity After, it's hard to say, because I haven't moved much during the LLM "revolution", and I already work at a company with learned helplessness. But there's no way it's gotten better, not at all.
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@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.
Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.
After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.
It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.
"they claim they can't do any work at all." Saying something like I can't do this terrifies me, as it says Im incompetent and should not be filling that position. Besides that this doesn't provide any information for others to give me help which I desperately need.
That's why I try to say what I want to acomplish, what I hove done, and what's the issue, and thanks to that half the time I get new ideas to check and maybe even I get to solve my problem.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity asking this question speaks inexperience loudly. Incompetence is widespread in all areas of life. Even before LLMs. Especially in enterprise.
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@ludicity asking this question speaks inexperience loudly. Incompetence is widespread in all areas of life. Even before LLMs. Especially in enterprise.
@bagder I think it's the old Gel-Mann thing, where he has assumed that people in areas that aren't his own are probably real adults, because how else would the world keep working
My sweet summer Ed
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity A lot in corporate world, more rare in startups. In general, a lot of people unable to do basic things like fizzbuzz during interview.
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@bagder I think it's the old Gel-Mann thing, where he has assumed that people in areas that aren't his own are probably real adults, because how else would the world keep working
My sweet summer Ed
@ludicity makes perfect sense. You could of course easily be mislead into believing this based on the fact that most of the world keeps working
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@ludicity
pre LLM: rarely in open source, often in corporate.Now: likely in open source, mainly as security reporters who play copy&paste monkey with our project and their LLM. Cant say anything about corporate as I no longer experience that (thank the heavens).
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I don't think it's happened in my professional life. At each company I've worked at there are some programmers who seem to be a bit behind the curve, and occasionally a few who don't do very good work, but nobody I would consider completely useless.
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@ludicity I worked mostly at (pen)testing and have always been astonished how basics of basics were unclear for many people (e.g. "does this code run on the client or the server?"). My opinion in summary is that the general quality of sw engineering/ers declined since managers figured out they can bill by the hour instead of fulfillment under the guise of "agile" (see "I'm gonna write myself a new minivan this afternoon").
@buherator @ludicity I have run into security engineers a couple of times matching that description.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I would say for GCC, the difference is NOT pre-LLM vs post-LLM when it comes to software engineers that seems completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge.
In fact I would say the difference for GCC bug reports it would be when it became more common knowledge that there is undefined behavior in C/C++.
Since there is so much more things written about how signed integer overflow is undefined behavior and much more written about C/C++ aliasing rules; there have been much push back at their code having undefined behavior in it.
GCC seemly gets less and less bug reports that need to be closed as invalid for having undefined behavior in it. In the last 2 months, GCC has got around 3 or 4 that has had undefined behavior in it. Around 10 years ago, it would have been closer to 12 or so for a 2 month span.
These days my bug triaging is more about bug reports that have been already filed rather than invalid ones.
(been doing this for 20+ years now too so I have noticed trends like this). -
Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity oh boy. Pre, regulary, absolutely. LLM do not seem to have made that much of an inroads yet into our field, except Juniors getting led astray and eventually coming back very confused.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I worked for most of my career at a place that had a very good interview process, and pretty much everyone was competent on all the right axes. But at one point we started using some contractors from an agency and quickly realised we had to do our own screening of them. I usually asked them to code FizzBuzz in their choice of language and explain what they were doing as they did it. 20% couldn't do it at all. 30% struggled to explain their reasoning or listen to hints.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity you can spot club members because they wear a badge with "IBM" written on it.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity i'm a bit worried about confirmation bias here, though of course incompetence has existed and will continue to exist. the difference between a competent and incompetent engineer isn't decided by the tools that they have access to but the time they choose / are afforded to develop competency and how well they have learned-to-learn.
that said, while there isn't a quantitative difference in incompetence engineers, there is a qualitative difference in incompetent engineering. expensive AI licenses move wealth from labour to capital and give management hacks a license to demand specific things from engineers at a specific rate. some of the heaviest AI users ive seen are the junior enggs and interns, and while they werent able to answer questions about what they wrote pre-LLMs either, now it's buried in an amount of noise and unaccountability that makes it hard to catch these pitfalls during code reviews.
LLMs dont make people incompetent the moment you touch them. they change the amount of code, plausibly functional code mind you, that you can create in a given amount of time. this reduces the amount of time seniors can spend in design, reviewing, and talent building, and hinders the processes that (sometimes) build competence out of incompetence. i'm not a full-time-hater of LLMs, but i do worry about the real damage they do to enterprise engineering processes moreso than the engineers themselves.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I can't think of any. A few who weren't very good; a couple who spammed the codebase with buggy code that took considerable effort to clean up; and one or two who were good at day-to-day programming but didn't know much computer science, so sometimes wrote code with terrible big-O. But nobody who was "completely lacking in basic knowledge". I've interviewed a few candidates who appeared not to be able to code, but maybe they just couldn't code *in interviews*?
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@buherator @ludicity I have run into security engineers a couple of times matching that description.
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