5 ms·

Juniors could just code things the old fashioned way. It isn't hard. And if they do find it too hard, they aren't cut out for this job.

thewhitetulip 7mo ago
Well, not when they are mandated to use AI tools and asked for justification about their usage! I am saying in General, I've never worked in Amazon
sdevonoes 7mo ago
But aren’t companies enforcing AI usage? If noy, wait for it
- ritlo 7mo ago
  Mine's tracking it complete with a leaderboard (LOL) and it's been suggested to me that it'd be in my best interest not to be too low on that list, so I suspect in the back half of the year some sterner conversations and/or pink-slips are going to be coming the way of those who've not caught on that they need to at least be sending some make-work crap to their LLMs every day, even if they immediately throw the output in the metaphorical garbage bin. It's basically an even-more-ridiculous version of ranking programmers by lines-of-code/week. What's especially comical is I've seen enormous gains in my (longish, at this point) career from learning other tools (e.g. expanding my familiarity with Unix or otherwise fairly common command line tools) and never, ever has anyone measured how much I'm using them, and never, ever has management become in any way involved in pushing them on me. It's like the CEO coming down to tell everyone they'll be making sure all the programmers are using regular expressions enough, and tracking time spent engaging with regular expressions, or they'll be counting how many breakpoints they're setting in their debuggers per week. WTF? That kind of thing should be leads' and seniors' business, to spread and encourage knowledge and appropriate tool use among themselves and with juniors, to the degree it should be anyone's business. Seems like yet another smell indicating that this whole LLM boom is built on shaky ground.
  - to11mtm 7mo ago
    > even if they immediately throw the output in the metaphorical garbage bin. Gotta be careful if you do that tho; e.x. Copilot can monitor 'accept' rate, so at bare minimum you'd have to accept the changes than immediately back them out...
    - ourmandave 7mo ago
      I wonder if Copilot can write a commit and backout routine for them.
    - tavavex 7mo ago
      In a couple years, we'll have office workspaces equipped with EEG helmets that you must wear while working, to measure your sentiment upon seeing LLM-generated code. The worst performers get the boot, so you better be happy!
    - lovich 7mo ago
      If you use AI to back it out, sounds like you’ve found an infinite feedback loop for those metrics. Did industrial psychology die out as a field? Why do we keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to perverse incentives. It’s like working on a team working with scrum where the big bosses expect the average velocity to go up every sprint, forever, but the engineers are the ones deciding the point totals on tickets.
  - bonesss 7mo ago
    From a management perspective I would be highly skeptics of token leaderboards. You are incentivizing people to piss away company money with uncertain rewards. I mean… throw some docs into the context window, see it explode. Repeat that a few times with some multi-step workflows. Presto, hundreds of dollars in “AI” spending accomplishing nothing. In olden days we’d just burn the cash in a waste paper basket.
    - tren_hard 7mo ago
      My company doesn’t enforce AI usage but for those who choose to use it, every month they highlight the biggest users. It’s always non-tech people who absolutely don’t understand how LLMs work and just run a single chat for as long as possible before our system cuts them off and forces them into a new chat context.
throw_m239339 7mo ago
Aren't these companies mandating the use of these tools at first place? Juniors aren't the problem.

thewhitetulip 7mo ago

Well, not when they are mandated to use AI tools and asked for justification about their usage! I am saying in General, I've never worked in Amazon

sdevonoes 7mo ago

But aren’t companies enforcing AI usage? If noy, wait for it

ritlo 7mo ago
Mine's tracking it complete with a leaderboard (LOL) and it's been suggested to me that it'd be in my best interest not to be too low on that list, so I suspect in the back half of the year some sterner conversations and/or pink-slips are going to be coming the way of those who've not caught on that they need to at least be sending some make-work crap to their LLMs every day, even if they immediately throw the output in the metaphorical garbage bin. It's basically an even-more-ridiculous version of ranking programmers by lines-of-code/week. What's especially comical is I've seen enormous gains in my (longish, at this point) career from learning other tools (e.g. expanding my familiarity with Unix or otherwise fairly common command line tools) and never, ever has anyone measured how much I'm using them, and never, ever has management become in any way involved in pushing them on me. It's like the CEO coming down to tell everyone they'll be making sure all the programmers are using regular expressions enough, and tracking time spent engaging with regular expressions, or they'll be counting how many breakpoints they're setting in their debuggers per week. WTF? That kind of thing should be leads' and seniors' business, to spread and encourage knowledge and appropriate tool use among themselves and with juniors, to the degree it should be anyone's business. Seems like yet another smell indicating that this whole LLM boom is built on shaky ground.
- to11mtm 7mo ago
  > even if they immediately throw the output in the metaphorical garbage bin. Gotta be careful if you do that tho; e.x. Copilot can monitor 'accept' rate, so at bare minimum you'd have to accept the changes than immediately back them out...
  - ourmandave 7mo ago
    I wonder if Copilot can write a commit and backout routine for them.
  - tavavex 7mo ago
    In a couple years, we'll have office workspaces equipped with EEG helmets that you must wear while working, to measure your sentiment upon seeing LLM-generated code. The worst performers get the boot, so you better be happy!
  - lovich 7mo ago
    If you use AI to back it out, sounds like you’ve found an infinite feedback loop for those metrics. Did industrial psychology die out as a field? Why do we keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to perverse incentives. It’s like working on a team working with scrum where the big bosses expect the average velocity to go up every sprint, forever, but the engineers are the ones deciding the point totals on tickets.
- bonesss 7mo ago
  From a management perspective I would be highly skeptics of token leaderboards. You are incentivizing people to piss away company money with uncertain rewards. I mean… throw some docs into the context window, see it explode. Repeat that a few times with some multi-step workflows. Presto, hundreds of dollars in “AI” spending accomplishing nothing. In olden days we’d just burn the cash in a waste paper basket.
  - tren_hard 7mo ago
    My company doesn’t enforce AI usage but for those who choose to use it, every month they highlight the biggest users. It’s always non-tech people who absolutely don’t understand how LLMs work and just run a single chat for as long as possible before our system cuts them off and forces them into a new chat context.

throw_m239339 7mo ago

Aren't these companies mandating the use of these tools at first place? Juniors aren't the problem.