3 ms·

Not training new workers and relying on senior engineers with tools is short sighted and foolish. LLMs seem to be accelerating the trend

baobabKoodaa 2y ago
There's an incentive problem because the benefit from training new workers is distributed across all companies whereas the cost of training them is allocated to the single company that does so
- newsclues 2y ago
  Most broken systems have bad incentives. Companies don’t want to train people ($) because employees with skills and experience are more valuable to other companies because retention is also expensive. We are not training AND retaining talent.
Philpax 2y ago
On one hand, I somewhat agree; on the other hand, I think LLMs and similar tooling will allow juniors to punch far beyond their weight and learn and do things that they would have never have dreamed of before. As mentioned in another comment, they're the teacher that never gets tired and can answer any question (with the necessary qualifications about correctness, learning the answer but not the reasoning, etc) It remains to be seen if juniors can obtain the necessary institutional / "real work" experience from that, but given the number of self-taught programmers I know, I wouldn't rule it out.
- newsclues 2y ago
  I think many people using llms are faking it and have no interest in “making it”. It’s not about learning for most. Just because a small subset of intelligent and motivated people use tools to become better programmers, there is a larger number of people that will use the tools to “cheat”.
brookst 2y ago
Tools are foolish? Like, should we remove all of the other tools that make senior engineers more productive, in favor of hiring more people to do those same tasks? That seems questionable.
- newsclues 2y ago
  Tools are great, but there is a way to learn the fundamentals and progress through skills and technology. Learn to do something manually and then learn the technology. Do you want engineers who are useless if their calculator breaks or do you want someone who can fall back on pen and paper and get the work done?
  - brookst 2y ago
    Well what if their pen breaks? Perhaps a good fluid dynamics engineer needs to be able to create ink from common plants? I get the argument, it’s just silly. Calculators don’t “break”. I would rather have an engineer who uses highly reliable tools than one who is so obsessed with the lowest levels of the stack that they aren’t as strong at the top. I’m willing to live with a useless day in the insanely unlikely event that all readily available calculators stop working.

baobabKoodaa 2y ago

There's an incentive problem because the benefit from training new workers is distributed across all companies whereas the cost of training them is allocated to the single company that does so

newsclues 2y ago
Most broken systems have bad incentives. Companies don’t want to train people ($) because employees with skills and experience are more valuable to other companies because retention is also expensive. We are not training AND retaining talent.

Philpax 2y ago

On one hand, I somewhat agree; on the other hand, I think LLMs and similar tooling will allow juniors to punch far beyond their weight and learn and do things that they would have never have dreamed of before. As mentioned in another comment, they're the teacher that never gets tired and can answer any question (with the necessary qualifications about correctness, learning the answer but not the reasoning, etc) It remains to be seen if juniors can obtain the necessary institutional / "real work" experience from that, but given the number of self-taught programmers I know, I wouldn't rule it out.

newsclues 2y ago
I think many people using llms are faking it and have no interest in “making it”. It’s not about learning for most. Just because a small subset of intelligent and motivated people use tools to become better programmers, there is a larger number of people that will use the tools to “cheat”.

brookst 2y ago

Tools are foolish? Like, should we remove all of the other tools that make senior engineers more productive, in favor of hiring more people to do those same tasks? That seems questionable.

newsclues 2y ago
Tools are great, but there is a way to learn the fundamentals and progress through skills and technology. Learn to do something manually and then learn the technology. Do you want engineers who are useless if their calculator breaks or do you want someone who can fall back on pen and paper and get the work done?
- brookst 2y ago
  Well what if their pen breaks? Perhaps a good fluid dynamics engineer needs to be able to create ink from common plants? I get the argument, it’s just silly. Calculators don’t “break”. I would rather have an engineer who uses highly reliable tools than one who is so obsessed with the lowest levels of the stack that they aren’t as strong at the top. I’m willing to live with a useless day in the insanely unlikely event that all readily available calculators stop working.