4 ms·

New Junior Developers Can't Code

6 points by namanyayg 2y ago

coldtea 2y ago
Wait until the next crop in 3-4 years, where all they ever did since uni was leverage AI to churn code for them as cheat... those would be as good with coding as the average person is with calculus
- perrygeo 2y ago
  The big difference is that the average person knows they're no good at calculus. But the average person seems to be getting delusions of grandeur, vastly overestimating their coding chops.
perrygeo 2y ago
> The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing. This is the key. Some people assume that the goal of programming is to produce code. Productive programmers understand that the goal is to produce a theory, a shared understanding with a common domain language, that is incidentally encapsulated in working software systems. Code is such a small part of programming. But if you're a lazy newb who thinks code == programming, LLMs might look like magic pixie dust. But that dust turns out to be a harmful pollutant which accumulates quickly. There is absolutely no honor in layering shit on top of systems you don't understand. What I see more and more is a completely defeatist attitude - "we can never understand these systems. It's too complex and it will always be broken". That's just empirically false and quite frankly a bit sad that these people have never seen or experienced a working software system. There do exist systems that were engineered to fit a purpose, and just work for that purpose indefinitely. It is possible. We can have nice things, but not if we take the defeatist attitude and outsource our thinking.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[dead]
beardyw 2y ago
First coding job I got aged 20: "This COBOL program needs new reference tables. Since we haven't invented addressable disk dives yet, all the tables are stored in the code. It's already optimised but the new ones will break it's memory limit of about 100k. Find a solution." That's coding.
kgwgk 2y ago
> Back when we had to actually think > I recently realized that there’s a whole generation of new programmers who don’t even know what StackOverflow is. There was also a time before StackOverflow, when systems had manuals and libraries had documentation which one could actually read to find out the difference between Number(x) and parseFloat(x).

6 points by namanyayg 2y ago

Wait until the next crop in 3-4 years, where all they ever did since uni was leverage AI to churn code for them as cheat... those would be as good with coding as the average person is with calculus

perrygeo 2y ago
The big difference is that the average person knows they're no good at calculus. But the average person seems to be getting delusions of grandeur, vastly overestimating their coding chops.

perrygeo 2y ago

> The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing. This is the key. Some people assume that the goal of programming is to produce code. Productive programmers understand that the goal is to produce a theory, a shared understanding with a common domain language, that is incidentally encapsulated in working software systems. Code is such a small part of programming. But if you're a lazy newb who thinks code == programming, LLMs might look like magic pixie dust. But that dust turns out to be a harmful pollutant which accumulates quickly. There is absolutely no honor in layering shit on top of systems you don't understand. What I see more and more is a completely defeatist attitude - "we can never understand these systems. It's too complex and it will always be broken". That's just empirically false and quite frankly a bit sad that these people have never seen or experienced a working software system. There do exist systems that were engineered to fit a purpose, and just work for that purpose indefinitely. It is possible. We can have nice things, but not if we take the defeatist attitude and outsource our thinking.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]

beardyw 2y ago

First coding job I got aged 20: "This COBOL program needs new reference tables. Since we haven't invented addressable disk dives yet, all the tables are stored in the code. It's already optimised but the new ones will break it's memory limit of about 100k. Find a solution." That's coding.

kgwgk 2y ago

> Back when we had to actually think > I recently realized that there’s a whole generation of new programmers who don’t even know what StackOverflow is. There was also a time before StackOverflow, when systems had manuals and libraries had documentation which one could actually read to find out the difference between Number(x) and parseFloat(x).