'New Junior Developers Can't Actually Code' (nmn.gl) 220
Junior software developers' overreliance on AI coding assistants is creating knowledge gaps in fundamental programming concepts, developer Namanyay Goel argued in a post. While tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude enable faster code shipping, developers struggle to explain their code's underlying logic or handle edge cases, Goel wrote. Goel cites the decline of Stack Overflow, a technical forum where programmers historically found detailed explanations from experienced developers, as particularly concerning.
AI my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
I've interviewed plenty of junior devs over the last couple of decades and a shocking percentage of them didn't understand basic concepts (I have an interview question that should be almost insulting to the person being asked which is basically "what is an API and how would you use it" and I have lost count of the number of blank looks that question draws).
AI has nothing to do with it, it's the state of education--plenty of schools are turning out graduates that just do not understand their chosen field.
Re:AI my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally agree. In my college classes at a prestigious school, well over 15 years ago, only a tiny fraction of the students in class could actually code to any reasonable degree. Maybe 10% or less. The rest were there to do the bare minimum required, never developed a deeper understanding of any of it, and were just hoping to land a cushy job once outside of school.
Coding is more than just rote memorization of constructs. To do a good job with it you need to have a deep understanding of many related concepts at once (algorithmic complexity, memory usage, network latency, threading). Even the best AIs today cannot write novel code that does all these things well or even correctly.
Re:AI my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally agree. In my college classes at a prestigious school, well over 15 years ago, only a tiny fraction of the students in class could actually code to any reasonable degree.
I did a hack-a-thon about 2 years ago within the company I worked for. Of the 63 contestants only two delivered any actual code. Even then only mine was tested and working in the three days the contest ran for. I saw entry after entry deliver nothing but storyboards and wondered if I had mis-read the terms of the competition. I hadn't so I won
I scratch my head trying to figure out why these guys think they're so smart, yet unable to deliver anything.
Re:AI my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally agree. In my college classes at a prestigious school, well over 15 years ago, only a tiny fraction of the students in class could actually code to any reasonable degree.
I did a hack-a-thon about 2 years ago within the company I worked for. Of the 63 contestants only two delivered any actual code. Even then only mine was tested and working in the three days the contest ran for. I saw entry after entry deliver nothing but storyboards and wondered if I had mis-read the terms of the competition. I hadn't so I won
I scratch my head trying to figure out why these guys think they're so smart, yet unable to deliver anything.
Because their teachers and parent's told them they were all geniuses, and were going to change the world.
Re:AI my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
The net result being that a lot of my direct peers were turned off by the whole idea of the hackathon.
Re: (Score:3)
what I found is that the teams that won almost always had a shiny UI that they had already cobbled together prior to coming to the hackathon, and spent most of the time polishing their numbers for what they thought the benefits would be to the company.
I saw a similar thing, but they couldn't even produce a UI. In the terms of my entry I said I'd be building a CLI application with lots of options and low cyclomatic complexity to control technical debt. I presented a walk-through of the code whilst I had it running in another window.
The net result being that a lot of my direct peers were turned off by the whole idea of the hackathon.
I was too, not for the same reasons though. My peers, none of whom entered the competition, saw I was obviously capable and must have seen me as some sort of threat because after that some of them (all younger) started playi
Re: (Score:3)
I scratch my head trying to figure out why these guys think they're so smart
*Contrast this with my parents, who never told me I was smart - they told me that the counselors and shrinks thought I was smart... with the implication that the counselors and shrinks themselves must be abject morons.
In my experiences the younger guys who actually impressed me had much the same background because coding was an escape for them too.
Re: (Score:3)
>In my college classes at a prestigious school, well over 15 years ago, only a tiny fraction of the students in class could actually code to any reasonable degr
Back in 1983 at university, I saw the same. I tought one foreign how to solder. My dad had taught me ten years earlier.
Some people do engineering degrees because they love the subject, some just see it as a career path. Both were very obvious
Re: AI my ass (Score:3)
Re:AI my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
I've interviewed plenty of junior devs over the last couple of decades and a shocking percentage of them didn't understand basic concepts (I have an interview question that should be almost insulting to the person being asked which is basically "what is an API and how would you use it" and I have lost count of the number of blank looks that question draws).
AI has nothing to do with it, it's the state of education--plenty of schools are turning out graduates that just do not understand their chosen field.
Agreed, I feel like jumping straight into the latest language to learn to code from the first class just ends up training students to copy/paste code for particular solutions. I wish more schools would start with generic design philosophies, maybe using UML or some other general diagrams. Learn the flow of programming, then learn how to implement that flow in specific languages.
Re:AI my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
AI has nothing to do with it, it's the state of education--plenty of schools are turning out graduates that just do not understand their chosen field.
Within the last decade, a trend that has actually angered me in the past, is seeing so many students come to sites like reddit(one of the worst) and stack exchange, posting their homework and seeing dozens of people do it for them.
These same "helpful" people typically also blame the education system for pumping out students that don't know the basics, in between essentially helping those same people cheat and get passing grades they don't deserve under the guise of being helpful.
People used to at least try to be coy about their intent to cheat, but in the last decade you'll see blatant cell pictures of their class books being posted and many people answering the homework questions, all getting massive upvotes.
This new systemic stupidity in wanting to "prove" they know the right answer has enabled tons of people to earn completely invalid credentials meant to show understanding in the field.
AI has almost certainly aided in this problem but it has existed long before AI has
Re:AI my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
AI has nothing to do with it, it's the state of education--plenty of schools are turning out graduates that just do not understand their chosen field.
Within the last decade, a trend that has actually angered me in the past, is seeing so many students come to sites like reddit(one of the worst) and stack exchange, posting their homework and seeing dozens of people do it for them.
These same "helpful" people typically also blame the education system for pumping out students that don't know the basics, in between essentially helping those same people cheat and get passing grades they don't deserve under the guise of being helpful.
People used to at least try to be coy about their intent to cheat, but in the last decade you'll see blatant cell pictures of their class books being posted and many people answering the homework questions, all getting massive upvotes.
This new systemic stupidity in wanting to "prove" they know the right answer has enabled tons of people to earn completely invalid credentials meant to show understanding in the field.
AI has almost certainly aided in this problem but it has existed long before AI has
I think this is a pretty good take on these "AI cause massive problem" news reports. All of these problems have always existed, radio, followed by TV, followed by internet, followed by AI (probably with other things in between) exacerbated these problems, but never caused the problems. The problems are just human nature.
Re: (Score:3)
Humans are lazy by nature, we usually take the easiest route, its not a flaw but a feature. If we all had to build our own houses, derive our own maths formulas we would never attain the high level of knowledge we have now. The problem now its too easy, with some extent the internet people could cheat, but now with AI it is like you don't even need to try and as a result we are getting stupider. AI is just the next step to our road to idiotocrasy.
Re: (Score:3)
I've interviewed plenty of junior devs over the last couple of decades and a shocking percentage of them didn't understand basic concepts (I have an interview question that should be almost insulting to the person being asked which is basically "what is an API and how would you use it" and I have lost count of the number of blank looks that question draws).
AI has nothing to do with it, it's the state of education--plenty of schools are turning out graduates that just do not understand their chosen field.
Oh, it is the AI as well, like every crutch AI dulls the mind. You can AI generate code all you want but if what you do 98% of the time is AI generate code, tweak and ship and you never attempt to understand what the AI is spitting out you will be in trouble whenever the AI spits out garbage. Once the second AI you bring in fails to figure out what the first AI did wrong you'll be in truly deep shit because you now have a code base that has been run through two AIs and you still do not understand the code.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't doubt that "AI is a crutch that dulls the mind" but the trend I've seen includes the last two decades, and I promise that AI was not hallucinating bad code 15 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
I've interviewed plenty of junior devs over the last couple of decades and a shocking percentage of them didn't understand basic concepts (I have an interview question that should be almost insulting to the person being asked which is basically "what is an API and how would you use it" and I have lost count of the number of blank looks that question draws).
AI has nothing to do with it, it's the state of education--plenty of schools are turning out graduates that just do not understand their chosen field.
Root cause certainly sounds like “education”. Which is sad because these graduates are paying a shitload of money for that.
I used to recommend to anyone looking to get into IT to try and find an employer that would help sponsor that education. Now it seems even employers have to question the value of doing that.
A junior developer not knowing what an API is, is like a junior mechanic not knowing what a transmission is. Showing them the door, is the only viable solution to that problem. Tell t
Re: (Score:3)
Computer science is not the same as software engineering. Computer scientists write self-contained programs, and never have to consider an API. The issue seems to be whether computer science education prepares for software engineering jobs.
Re: (Score:3)
I agree that computer science isn't software development, but the candidates I am talking about that couldn't define an API didn't have a real CS education, either.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is API means different things to different people. To a C/C++ programmer it means the function signatures and usage of a library. To a webdev it means URL + GET/POST.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is API means different things to different people.
That was not the problem. If I got an answer in a different context, that would be one thing. Instead it was blank looks and an eventual "I don't know" or an attempt to bullshit past the question from a high percentage of candidates who were qualified on paper.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, this is the problem, of the definition, and something an interviewer could explore and build a conversation with the candidate over. When I've done interviews with candidates, I'd much prefer a conversation than just go through a checklist.
The fact that it means different things is good, I'd like to cover both points of view, or more if they have them. OP is baffled, it sounds, by how candidates don't have any view to explore.
Re: (Score:2)
OP is baffled, it sounds, by how candidates don't have any view to explore.
Yes, this exactly. No understanding whatsoever, no context at all, just a complete blank.
Re: AI my ass (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, this is a repost from 25 years ago. People have been complaining that graduates can't code for at least that long, probably longer.
Re: (Score:3)
AI has nothing to do with it, it's the state of education--plenty of schools are turning out graduates that just do not understand their chosen field.
Most good programmers I know already knew how to code before they started college. I don't see how a university can take someone with no skills whatsoever and turn them into software engineers. I'd been writing code in some form or another for a decade before I set foot in a college programming class.
My kids are interested in computers because they like video games and social media. I don't think they'll want to - or be able to - become programmers. And I wouldn't want them to anyways.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, I definitely agree with that. I tried a computer science degree at a public university and I just hated it. Most of the people in the classes were just trying to brute-force the learning with rote effort. Most of them would be easily replaced by AI coding tools because they can only regurgitate what they've already seen.
I couldn't stand being in the class with this environment so I gave up and found something else. I'm probably still a better programmer than most of them even if I have to reinvent a
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Shit thats not even a programming question. Anyone that does integration of any sort has dealt with an API of some fashion. At the very least used web suites that have an API key should you desire to integrate with webhooks or the like.
Re: AI my ass (Score:3)
Have you considered that modern programming is beyond a single person's understanding? An API at this point may be the same thing as air or gravity, it's always there, you don't think about it.
The person might be an excellent long distance runner but not think twice about oxygen's molecular weight.
Re: (Score:3)
I know what an API is, how and when to use it, and I'm not a programmer. I just supported clients who were integrating 'my' (our) platform and/or services to their systems, usually for payment applications. Never did I suffer a programmer from Tech who did not understand, even the summer interns. Well, right up to 2023.
Then again, my employer was discerning. Being hired way back to do app and web support I was asked if I understood DHCP. Yes, and why as an app support tech I would not be asking my callers t
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. This is nothing new: https://blog.codinghorror.com/... [codinghorror.com]
Unless and until we get liability and qualification requirements, too many coders will continue to suck. The market is obviously unable to fix things or that would have happened by now.
I do think that AI could be making things even worse though.
Re: (Score:3)
I keep lowering standards. I apologize for the simple questions I am about to ask, and then the interviewee can't answer them. How can you have 10+ years in embedded systems and C and not know how to clear a bit in a word? Maybe 20 years ago you'd still get good results on that, and could have a discussion about whether bits are counted from 1 or 0, from left or right, etc, learning whether the person had had real experience on different types of CPUs or thinks that all processors are intel.
Another "kids these days" story (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot's target audience must be getting old.
My current team has 3 fresh out of college developers with computer science backgrounds, and each of them is competent not only at coding components, but quite solid at high level architectural design, delivering well-tested and quite well planned code. I've seen not a hint of any of the problems described in this article, and must conclude it's a problem with hiring standards(and perhaps the pay that goes with it).
Re: Another "kids these days" story (Score:5, Insightful)
$12/hr coder vs $200k coder
Re: Another "kids these days" story (Score:5, Interesting)
$12/hr coder vs $200k coder
That’s the real issue - companies want 200K professionals for $12/hour; and the complain those they hired cheaply don’t have the skills they need.I’ve run into that in a few contract jobs, I get the you have the experience we need and when I quote my rate, I get a counter offer 1/3 the rate; so I pass. I’m happy to negotiate, but if you low ball me hoping I’ll byte that’s a red flag that you’re going to expect high dollar work at cut rate prices.
Re: (Score:3)
Where are any software engineers getting paid $12/hr? (At least inside the US?)
Where I live in the Midwest (far from a super high cost of living part of the country) the *average starting salary for a Software Engineer is > $100K. The low is in the mid $60sk range which is still >$30/hr.. ??
We have some overseas offices that can hire roughly 1/3 US rates but not domestically.
Re: (Score:2)
I sometimes wonder if these stories aren't AI generated. I'm shocked at how good some of the fresh-out college kids are with coding. Even my son, who is still in high school is doing some things that would have been quite advanced for a CS student 30 years ago. The tools and capabilities at their disposal is so much greater than what we had, they can spend more time learning how to code, and less time chasing their tails.
Re: Another "kids these days" story (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm from a different (technical) field, but generally have to agree that it is about individual capability more than collective capability. Historically there has been some ebb and flow from different programs though in terms of the type of graduates they are putting out as the collective impact of a number of small changes.
I do worry about the loss of sources like StackOverflow though, where you have more background and dialogue on a solution compared to a GPT answer. I was trying to remember how to do s
Re: (Score:3)
So is the story.
Re: (Score:2)
So is the article, stupidbutt.
Re: (Score:3)
I didn't do the interviewing, I am on a fairly large team.
Your obsession with college being inherently bad indicates some really stupid propaganda has taken root in your brain and trying to reason with you is not likely to help.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I didn't do the interviewing, I am on a fairly large team.
Your obsession with college being inherently bad indicates some really stupid propaganda has taken root in your brain and trying to reason with you is not likely to help.
One of my former students (I teach HS) just graduated college was hired at Space X. 12 rounds of interviews. He said they need that many to truly weed out people who can't actually do what they say. He guessed at least 1/2 of the people graduating from his CS program cheated their way through it. He even had stories of people who would have a Zoom interview while having a group of friends in the room, behind the camera, helping sketch out algorithms and code so the interview went well. There have always be
Re: (Score:2)
Fake it till you make it.
"Learn to code" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes the jokes write themselves.
My question is how did they let these new hires through the interview process if they don't have the fundamentals of coding?
Your hiring process is broken. Stop hiring incompetent people or be prepared to spend your own time and money teaching them the skills they don't have.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a hard problem, because nobody wants to decide what an under graduate CS degree should be. Should it be a practical education in applied technology, ie writing code, or is it supposed to be a general academic understanding on the theory of commutable algorithms, state machines, plus a lot of discrete mathematics and number theory? Maybe they should have background in theory around parsing, lexing, and abstract syntax - those things could be their undergraduate curricula too.
I would bet a lot of thes
IT / coding needs to be an trade not college! (Score:2)
IT / coding needs to be an trade not college!
Re: (Score:2)
It needs to be more than one degree AND a trade. There are too many jobs being funneled through one type of education. Some people need the theory for what they're going to do. Others just need minimal capability but a lot of experience.
Re: (Score:3)
"IT" and "coding" are already trades and we have a number of Technical Colleges that will teach you just that.
"Software Engineering" if done right is college-style. That's not to say these things couldn't be learned in a good Tech School or boot camp or on your own, etc but it's the philosophical difference between the typical styles of the institutions. Here's how I typically describe them:
A trade school focuses on the "What and How"..
A college/uni focuses on the "Why" and in-general how to learn.
I don't c
Re:"Learn to code" (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea behind bootcamps was, I guess, to produce code monkeys that could write the code that needs writing, while the Software Engineers holding SE degrees decided what was the code that needed to be written.
After all, in chem/biology labs, you have pipette monkeys and technicians doing the "grunt" work while the PHDs designed the experiments and theorized the reactions.
Re: (Score:2)
It should be all the things. You should learn the theory and how to code and put that into practice using a language that is usable in the workplace. It is an undergraduate degree which should give a well rounded understanding of the subject not a ten hour coding course at your local college. If you don't have the base concepts of writing code and understanding the theoretical and practical aspects of the science then the degree is not worth the paper it's printed on.
Imagine a chemistry degree where you n
Re: (Score:2)
"...nobody wants to decide what an under graduate CS degree should be."
LOL wut? That is literally what colleges do and what accreditation is for. Are you a moron?
"We don't expect someone with a degree physics or chemistry to be able to walk onto a construction site and take care of the plumbing. Maybe surprise and incredulity about a CS grad not having any Java or Python experience is actually an expectations problem."
No, it's not, nor has anyone complained about lack of specific language experience.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In a construction site you can have a chartered engineer, maybe a chartered architect, a chartered surveyor and have plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, electricians and so on.
Nobody is expecting that an architect could drive a cement mixer or that a
Re: (Score:3)
A CS degree should be more than vocational programming training, but it's a waste of money if it doesn't produce graduates with the skills and mindset to quickly become useful in the workplace.
Things like algorithms, compiler design, assembly programming all have their place, but there also needs to be enough challenging programming assignments, in languages that will be useful in industry, that students learn how to design, code, debug, and generally think for themselves. Any assignment that can (and there
Re: (Score:3)
I would bet a lot of these kids who can't code their way out of paper bag can rattle you off a nice proof about how adding even integers will always produce another even integer in their sleep.
Unlikely, but that's not computer science, that's number theory.
If you can't program, then computer science is going to be very, very hard for you. A linked list makes no sense if you can't write one.
when the hiring process cuts cuts out tech schools (Score:2)
when the hiring process cuts cuts out tech schools / people without degrees / etc.
And the best you get are CS grads who know lot's of theory what can you do?
Re: (Score:2)
Or worse. Someone else does the hiring, and when you point out what levels of idiots they hire, suddenly its your fault for not wasting a shit ton of time teaching them something they should already know. The bottom line is it now becomes your problem :-)
Re: (Score:3)
Omg, this. Not exactly the same but I had an internal recruiter pushing this windows sysadmin guy reaaaaally hard for my Linux admin spot which I fought hard to get because "he's a really nice guy, you can hire a Linux guy next year". I had no windows systems, btw.
I also had my CTO at another place hire a guy who was clearly super incompetent and stick him on my team despite me being willing to put in writing that he would be a net negative and I'd rather have no one. It only took the guy 3 months before
Re: (Score:3)
Stop hiring incompetent people or be prepared to spend your own time and money teaching them the skills they don't have.
I think companies need to return to providing training. You can be a great developer, be completely untrained in what the company needs, but be perfectly capable of being trained.
I have actually run into this issue myself just recently. I have been a top developer at my current job for over 20 years. We have recently switched our focus, and my years of miracle working in the specialty for which I was hired have ended. Now I have to learn two completely new skillsets while on the job. The company is showing
Re: (Score:3)
That's awesome that you have a good company.
When you say skill sets do you mean new languages? I've found that after I learned the first few the others are pretty much all the same. Sitting down over a long weekend with the syntax guide, the native built in features/API list and some basic how-to hello world type stuff is enough to get off the ground in most languages. Not be a master but enough to write code that isn't embarrassing right away as long as those books/guides are nearby for a while. Most
Re: (Score:3)
My question is how did they let these new hires through the interview process if they don't have the fundamentals of coding?
Your hiring process is broken. Stop hiring incompetent people or be prepared to spend your own time and money teaching them the skills they don't have.
I have an example of where I recommended something like that. I worked on a small development team at a large defense contractor and we were looking for a junior person. We interviewed several and I recommended a guy with less practical coding experience because he had a great attitude, acknowledged his shortcomings, demonstrated a strong willingness to learn and seemed to have the right personality/fit for our team. We hired him and I mentored him to bring up his coding skills. It worked out well.
Most modern code is shit. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"The Unix pioneers of the 1960s and 70s are long dead..."
Programmers who learned from them are not, though. There are plenty of people who wore out original copies of K&R still around.
But many companies no longer value their ability or experience, generally speaking. That is dependent, though, on what kind of programming you are talking about. People love to assume all programming is application programming, most programming is not.
Re: (Score:3)
But it's certainly true that almost all modern code is trash. Companies want it written as quickly and cheaply as possible, and they don't care about correctness, maintainability, stability, security, privacy, or anything else: they just s
In other news ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Generalist (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention AI isn't going to tell you how to integrate it into the grand scheme of the app on large projects.
Another day (Score:2)
Experienced programmers know... (Score:2)
...that the ONLY valid way to code is to copy from Stack Overflow!
Well Duh (Score:3)
A lot of the commenters on this website said this over a year ago. AI coding assistants create bad code that the "developer" doesn't understand nor could debug.
The analogy that a million monkeys all banging away on keyboards could eventually recreate Shakespeare's works applies here. Companies buying in or selling this to clients are lying. You have to have skills to understand what the code does. Whether you write it or trust some AI generator, you're still responsible for the commit and pull request.
It's like taking a solution from Stack Overflow without understanding or reading what the commenter narratives provide. It's bound to create craptacular solutions full of zero day vulnerabilities.
I think it goes much further than coding (Score:3)
Technology is the new Religion. You must believe what you are told. You must do it their way (the way the software works). You are considered MAD if think for yourself anymore.
Consider me very mad. (umm, like crazy, not angry)
Re: (Score:3)
Like map reading? A lot of people are now totally lost without gps apps because they never developed a spatial sense of their area. "This is to the north, the river is to my east, this street runs NS..." Some people don't even know that blue on a map represents water.
Re: (Score:2)
Some people don't even know that blue on a map represents water.
What? You mean that's not the route I need to follow?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I've seen this with the younger generations working at the small IT firm I co-owned. I had to teach them at weekly evenings the basics of networking and troubleshooting, and this even only on Windows. No one even heard of the tools arp and nslookup.
I didn't begin working in IT with an education, it was all born rom a hobby, but I became surprised at the lack of knowledge of others in the field over the years.
I program in C for my hobby on a personal fork of OpenTTD. Because of that I've been looking up more
Basics (Score:3)
Wait, are you saying that a complex skill like coding requires an understanding of the basics and isn't as simple as just tossing a few premade chunks together?
Things like engineering use a lot of end case formulas and such but they still have to understand the physics and math behind what they are during their education to understand what those end cases truly represent.
Not a problem (Score:2)
Not a problem. According to Elmo, the next year AIs will surpass humans in general intelligence, and then these junior devs with their AI assistants will code better than any developer today.
Maybe, but I don't hold my breath for it.
Is it experience, or oversaturation? (Score:5, Interesting)
CSS, SASS, LESS, SCSS
HTML, DHTML, XHTML
JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, Vue, React, JQuery, Ember, ES6, ES5, ES7, ES8, ES9, ES10-TNG (kidding).
etc
Do you know everything? If you told me you know all of that, I'm going to ask you to explain the difference between all of those style systems, and HTML variants. I will ask you to highlight the major differences / improvements in the different ES standards. I will ask you to outline how React and Angular are different. When you fail to do that, which almost everyone will, and I decline your second round interview, do you honestly think I was the issue?
Hell, I've lost track of the number of resumes that have dead URLs, crap GitHub accounts, and just pure garbage. People will include their personal blog, but it's a blogging service, that looks like a 12-year-old on LSD with HomeStead set it up. Most of the GitHub (or other GIT) links I'm given, have no work on them. They're all forks of other projects, where people didn't even change the GIT History, and do they know I can see the commits? If you have zero, and you were too lazy to change the name of the project, just go fuck off.
Let's assume you get to a third round, and I give you a programming question, with simple instructions, one of those being comment your work, and I'll show you the commenting style to use. How many developers as a % will be able to comment their code? It's less than 10% because 90% either don't comment, don't have useful comments, or just steal work from another project, and can't comment it.
Before I get, “Why do you have so many interview rounds”
1. First round, HR.
2. Second round — Technical.
3. Third round — Programming question and another Tech Lead.
4. Fourth round — Talking to the VP who can approve the salary, you shouldn't be able to fail this one!
It's not AI that caused this problem, the market got oversaturated by garbage, when getting a development job meant saying: “Python, JavaScript, C”, and getting a 100k offer with a 10k signing bonus.
Not a new problem (Score:2)
I seem to recall during the late 1990's and 2000's it seemed like we'd get tons of applicants claiming to be HTML programmers. I was doing embedded C at the time and we'd frequently interview these "programmers" to try and bring on any warm body to "grow" our startup. The recruiters and hiring managers doing phone screens were not doing a good job back then, and little has changed.
I don't mind if someone doesn't know some technical mumbo jumbo, as long as they can pick it up quickly. But the resume/CV game
Re: (Score:2)
I had somebody who was so nervous, he looked like I was a ghost, couldn't speak, was shaking, and just frozen. I asked him a few questions he couldn't answer, and
Re: (Score:3)
It's not just programmers and not just junior, though.
IT is still a wild west where everyone thinks they can just stake a claim. I've had a number of companies fail to sell something to the company I work for when, at the end of a beautiful and convincing presentation I asked them one or two questions, like "what does your product do that Free Software XYZ doesn't?" and they can't answer. Dear sales people: Knowing your competition is very high on your list of responsibilities. Especially the Free and Open
we've witnessed this in really everything (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 57, my wife 56. ...knowing what DHCP is doesn't feel quite as important or tangible as replacing a light fixture or a toilet without paying someone $120/hr to do so.
We look at our parents' generation and grandparents as much more capable and knowledgeable about meaningful life skills than we are. My parents could plumb a sink, hang drywall, rewire an outlet, change their car's oil without watching a youtube video 4 times to try to figure it out. Of course, they struggle to configure wifi or a printer but
Re:we've witnessed this in really everything (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm slightly younger. My parents' generation seems incapable of even setting up nursing care for their spouse before they die. With harebrained investments from one parent, and multiple hacked bank accounts from another parent, they've lost low 6 figures combined.
I hung most of the drywall in their house when I was a teenager. Because another goofy investment is they bought a half-finished house, despite my grandparents begging them not to waste their money. Took them 20 years to finish that house.
Many of my friends are in a similar boat as me. With a surviving parent that can't manage to handle the high-tech world of setting up doctor's appointments or getting a (free!) ride from the local para transit organization. As a latch key child, I didn't realize that the reason my parents didn't take care of me is because they could barely take care of themselves.
Compensate with good practices and some training (Score:3)
So is this "Kids these days" article really a "Lead Engineer these days" commentary?
I could see this for the cheap H-1B's (Score:2)
But bullshit nobody's making it out of a 4-year CS degree in America without knowing how to write code at a reasonable level, certainly at the level where you're just pulling shit from a ticketing system and implementing it.
This is just more bullshit to try and get the public school system to teach a very specific skill in a field that is already overrun with too much labor. They still have to pay a reasonable am
Common coding is changing (Score:2)
Does this mean they can't code?
Look, a lot of programmers could not write a reliable C program, let alone assembly. If they can use the higher level tools (Python, JavaScript) to be productive, who are we (old people) to claim they are not programmers.
Re: (Score:2)
My friend teaches assembly language at a small university. I think enough people that know how a computer works will be around to teach AI how to replace the rest of the "programmers". (I hope I'm joking)
High level programming is important, it's kind of the point of having a programming language in the first place. But competence starts with first principles.
Re: (Score:2)
What is really interesting is I got to work with some very high end cpu architects back in the day. Was interesting that they had absolutely no comprehension of constructs like threads, stacks, and stack frames. Boggled my mind that they just saw the job of the CPU was to run through a continuous stream of instructions - no thoughts to what those instructions did.
A firing offense (Score:4, Interesting)
In any business I run using AI to write code that you do not understand better than the AI or if you painstakingly wrote it by hand is going to be a firing offense. That is not software engineering that is cheating and relying on program prone to fits of fantasy and delusion to do your job for you. People suffer, get injured, and die due to defects like that. If not suffer major security compromises, loss of reputation, unusually severe legal liability, and inordinate financial harm as well. In any field where results really matter like finance or engineering contemporary AI is poison, with very few exceptions. It is one step removed from a glorified toy, and a dangerous one too. Perhaps these junior developers should learn to think carefully about the problem, and study the relevant source code and documentation, and managers should give them the time and patience to do a good job instead of releasing products and services with record setting levels of flakiness, defects, and general unreliability on the world on the grounds that they can fix it in a minor update next week if they ever get around to fixing it at all.
Re: (Score:3)
In the corporate world it's not cheating if your company doesn't get sued. People take credit for work they didn't do themselves at pretty much every large company and there is little repercussions for it, other than to their reputation among their peers. But their peers don't sign their paycheck.
Back in the day (Score:2)
Programming was an obscure field that primarily appealed to math, science and electronics geeks
Then the personal computer was invented and some of the geeks became billionaires
Now, the field attracts people who want to get rich
StackOverflow is part of the problem (Score:3)
StackOverflow has been a source of terrible coding advice and overreliance on copypasta by juniors for far longer than ML has been a problem. Junior engineers have been woefully deficient in actual coding ability for (at least) the better part of a decade. No one ever reads the manual for anything, reads source code or even api interfaces, or does anything to actually understand anything about the art of actual software engineering as applied to the problems they are trying to solve. They just google search a link to an SO post and blindly copy and paste some code that is at least marginally related to the problem at hand, then rejigger things to make that solution do something useful and move on, often without testing or even attempting to understand what the code they just added even does. Now they do the same thing to ML-generated code, an outcome which I can't even tell is worse or better. At least an ML query is a firsthand answer instead of just the 4th most upvoted answer to someone else's marginally relevant question. Instead, it is a firsthand answer by an ML model that has been trained on the 4th most upvoted answer to everyone else's totally irrelevant questions.
I can't wait to see how the phenomenon evolves once enough of the code that is out there to use for training new models is itself generated by ML models. We think incest is problematic when procreating biologically...I can't wait to see what it does to incestuously generated ML offspring.
For the third stage of this interview... (Score:2)
HR in big tech companies has solved hiring by implementing standardized testing via LeetCode, HackerRank, etc.
Now they are mad that the people they hire don't have any critical thinking skills.
Whoops!
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
In the "move fast and break things" era, breaking things is a sign of high output.
Re: (Score:2)
We found people who, even if they *could* code, they couldn't follow simple instructions.
The biggest problem of all. We can teach language, syntax and pitfalls.
Not so much problem solving/solutions development. That's the big chunk which is missing.
Re: (Score:3)
Remember people saying "You won't have always a calculator with you"? Today people do not only have always a calculator with them, but also access to a lot of knowledge online. So learning can prioritize training abilities over knowledge of function tables. You don't need to know 100 mnemonics if you just can look it up. You don't need to learn cos(x) for 20 values of x, if you have an app with a graphical calculator. But you may need to know, *when* something is calculated using a cosine function.