8 ms·

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is

• simonw 7mo ago
  > Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.
  • Waterluvian 7mo ago
    That’s been my experience, too. But now I get a sort of, “I dunno. Maybe don’t use AI on Fridays?” There doesn’t seem to be a plan for maintaining that culture.
  • tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
    Every company I worked for didn’t give a shit about my skills. They just wanted to solve the problem in front of them and if they couldn’t then they would hire someone in with the right skills. Improving my skills was seen as a risk as I might leave.
    • catlifeonmars 7mo ago
      I’ve had both experiences, sometimes at the exact same company.
  • 01284a7e 7mo ago
    The opposite is true in my case - though 1 organization that had a small budget for things like AWS certs. I remember almost everyone who would get those certificates would never really learn anything from it either. They would just take the exams.
  • Supermancho 7mo ago
    I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.
    • aduwah 7mo ago
      Hard same over 20 years
    • bdangubic 7mo ago
      This percentage is probably right on the money!
    • tasuki 7mo ago
      > I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!
      • oblio 7mo ago
        If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...
        • tasuki 7mo ago
          Could easily be, yes. And they'd be right not to invest in OP's skills. (To explicitly state the obvious: I'm not saying OP's a bad person for doing this, just saying the employers were right not to invest in them...)
        • lsaferite 7mo ago
          Why would a company you are consulting for invest in training you up exactly? They are paying a consultant with the expectation that they are bringing the knowledge.
  • kajaktum 7mo ago
    You must be lucky then.
    • simonw 7mo ago
      Realizing now that I've been both lucky and selective - I've always picked the kind of employers where this culture is baked in.
  • jasomill 7mo ago
    Given the rest of the paragraph, I believe the parent is trying to say that merely improving developer skills is not valuable to the company, not that improving developer skills cannot provide value in terms of improved work product, morale, retention, etc.
• titzer 7mo ago
  The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is built on. But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us. God I hope it doesn't all crash at once.
  • nicksergeant 7mo ago
    I feel I've upskilled in so many directions (not just "ability to prompt LLMs") since going all in on LLM coding. So many tools, techniques, systems, and new areas of research I'd never have had the time to fully learn in the past. I have a hard time believing any tenured developer is not actually learning things when using LLMs to build. They make interesting choices that are repeatable (new CLIs I didn't even know existed, writing scripts to churn through tricky data, using specific languages for specific tasks like Go for concurrently working through large numerous tasks, etc.) Anyone not learning things via LLM coding right now either doesn't care at all about the underlying code/systems, or they had no foundational knowledge or interest in programming to begin with (which is also a valid way to use these tools, but they don't work very well without guidance for too long [yet]).
    • Waterluvian 7mo ago
      I think there's a considerable difference in its ability to help with breadth vs. depth of expertise.
    • anovikov 7mo ago
      This. I never had patience to figure how to build a from-scratch iOS app because it required too much boilerplate work. Now i do, and i got to enjoy Swift as a language, and learned a lot of iOS (and Mac) APIs.
      • 7mo ago
• stingraycharles 7mo ago
  > Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. Yet every company does it, except the worst sweatshops.
• qsera 7mo ago
  > I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. Frankly I don't think so. The AI using LLMs is the perpetual motion mechanism scam of our time. But it is cloaked in unimaginable complexity, and thus it is the perfect scam. But even the most elaborately hidden power source in a perpetual motion machine cannot fool nature and should come to a complete stop as it runs out.
  • Waterluvian 7mo ago
    I love the perpetual motion machine / thermodynamics analogy. It kind of feels like companies are being fooled into outsourcing/offshoring their jr. developer level work. Then the companies depend on it because operational inertia is powerful, and will pay as the price keeps going up to cover the perpetual motion lie. Then they look back and realize they're just paying Microsoft for 20 jr. developers but are getting zero benefit from in-house skill development.
  • colechristensen 7mo ago
    This is silly. I can build products in a weekend that would take me a year by myself. I am still necessary 1% of the time for debug, design, and direction and those of not at all a shallow skill. I have some graduate algebra texts on the way my math friend is guiding me through because I have found a publishable result and need to shore up my background before writing the paper... It's not perpetual motion, it's very real capability, you just have to be able to learn how to use it.
    • askafriend 7mo ago
      You can see their ego trying to protect itself.
    • tpdly 7mo ago
      You're fooling yourself. People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.
• catlifeonmars 7mo ago
  Maybe I’m just getting extremely lucky, but I don’t use AI to code at work and I’m still keeping up with my peers who are all Clauded up. I do a lot of green field network appliance design and implementation and have not felt really felt the pressure in that space. I do use Claude code at home maybe a couple hours a week, mostly for code base exploration. Still haven’t figured out how to fully vibe code: the generated code just annoys me and the agents are too chatty. (Insert old man shaking fist at cloud).
  • jmmv 7mo ago
    > the generated code just annoys me and the agents are too chatty I’ve eyerolled way less with Codex CLI and the GPT models than with Claude.
    • catlifeonmars 7mo ago
      I haven’t spent much time with Codex+GPT, will definitely give it another look
  • lioeters 7mo ago
    We're witnessing a divergence between Coders and Clauders, with the latter dominating the market at a lower cost of labor + subscription fee to the almighty AI providers. Coders may be called in, hopefully with better renumeration, to review and debug the massive amount of code being generated. Either that or they will also be replaced by specially trained/prompted language models doing the review.
    • Izkata 7mo ago
      > + subscription With how much some people spend on tokens that they've shared on here, and concerns about raising prices, I've kind of been wondering if we're actually heading to a point where seniors who don't use AI are going to be cheaper than juniors who do.
  • Bridged7756 7mo ago
    In the future Claude will keep a tight ship on dissenters. If your monthly quota doesn't exceed the 10k worth of tokens your employer will be notified and you will be flagged as a "dissenter". Your lease will be cancelled, because who would trust someone ignorant enough to not use LLMs in their daily life, and you'll be vetoed from the field for life, for clanker companies will proclaim that anyone who doesn't use LLM-assisted coding should be culled and so they'll run a tight ship. And executives will get millions in bonuses for figuring it out, and the remaining programmers, probably one or two, will raise their necks over who's the best prompter and how everyone else was dumber than them for not figuring it out.
• pfisherman 7mo ago
  This is going to catch some heat, but what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents? I saw something similar in ML when neural nets came around. The whole “stack moar layerz” thing is a meme, but it was a real sentiment about newer entrants into the field not learning anything about ML theory or best practices. As it turns out, neural nets “won” and using them effectively required development and acquisition of some new domain knowledge and best practices. And the kids are ok. The people who scoffed at neural nets and never got up to speed not so much. Edit: as an aside, I have learned plenty from reviewing coding agent generated implementations of various algorithms or methods.
  • ratmeadow 7mo ago
    I think your argument is predicated on LLM coding tools providing significant benefit when used effectively. Personally I still think the answer is "not really" if you're doing any kind of interesting work that's not mostly boilerplate code writing all day.
    • dasil003 7mo ago
      Define interesting. In my experience most business logic is not innovative or difficult, but there are ways to do it well or ways to do it terribly. At the senior levels I feel 90% of the job is deciding the shape of what to build and what NOT to build. I find AI very useful in exploring and trying more things but it doesn’t really change the judgment part of the job.
    • xeromal 7mo ago
      How much of software programmer work is interesting? A fraction of a percent? I'd argue most of us including most startups work on things that help make businesses money and that's pretty "boring" work.
      • empthought 7mo ago
        Of course! If it were interesting, they wouldn't need to pay you. You would pay them!
• coldtea 7mo ago
  >Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company What's valuable to a company is not necessarily what's valuable to the customers or even more so, to a civilization at large.
• clvx 7mo ago
  There's a catch. Do not break customer trust. Many people are just tinkering with solving the problem but the indirect effects have not been tackled either by the tool, processes or just some human thinking.
• v3xro 7mo ago
  > I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home. It could hardly have been a hobby if people were willing to pay you for it (and good rates too)? I will rephrase it like this - the market has shifted away from providing value to the customers of said companies to pumping itself instead and it does not need to employ people for that. Simple as.
• KronisLV 7mo ago
  > Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Doesn't credentialism kinda throw a spanner in that - where it's not enough to have people with a good track record of solving issues, but then someone along the way says "Yeah, we'd also like the devs who'll work on the project to have Java certs." (I've done those certs, they're orthogonal to one's ability to produce good software) Might just be govt. projects or particular orgs where such requirements are drawn up by dinosaurs, go figure (as much as I'd love software development to be "real" engineering with best practices spanning decades, it's still the Wild West in many respects). Then again, the same thing more or less applies to security, a lot of it seems like posturing and checklists (how some years back the status quo was that you'll change your password every 30-90 days because IT said so) instead of the stuff that actually matters. Not to detract from the point too much, but I've very much seen people not care about solving problems and shipping fast as stuff like that, or covering their own asses by paying for Oracle support or whatever (even when it gets in the way of actually shipping, like ADF and WebLogic and the horror that is JDeveloper). But yeah, I think many companies out there don't care that much about the individual growth of their employees that much, unless they have the ability to actually look further into the future - which most don't, given how they prefer not to train junior devs into mid/senior ones over years.
• bluecheese452 7mo ago
  What about a company with high security reqs that do bot alloellms? Like gov type work.
• TomasBM 7mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but I think the problem is much wider. Managers at companies are just doing what they've optimized their careers for: maintaining some edge over some competition, at some cost. What is pure FOMO to you or me, is good strategy to anyone trying to win [1]. In other words, FOMO was always the strategy. This self-reinforcing loop is also not going away. There hasn't been any real evidence that any part of knowledge work, including coding, cannot be automated [2]. Even if human-level quality or cost-effectiveness takes 10 more years, all tasks are functionally solved or about to be. I don't like it, but it's true. The big problem is that the people who are removed from this loop, who have the time to understand its effects and the power to make changes, are doing fuck-all. So, whether the loop stops for a while or speeds up even more, we're fucked until we figure out how to detach full-time employment from survival. [1] I believe this is called meta in PvP games; even if you want to subvert the meta, you gotta know it well first. [2] Although it could just be my impression, and I'd be happy to be proven otherwise.
  • ModernMech 7mo ago
    The evidence that software development cannot be automated is we already tried to do it in the 90s with OOP, UML, and outsourcing. It didn’t work out for the same reasons vibe coding isn’t working out — because building the system is the same as specifying it, and that is a creative iterative process. We are at the point where sure ai can write code, but we could always do that; lack of code writing ability was not what killed the OOP automation efforts. There was plenty ability to code back then as well. The distinction of whether it’s an offshore team in India or Claude writing the code doesn’t change things as far as the larger picture of building the software.
    • TomasBM 7mo ago
      This may be evidence that it's more difficult than evangelists first imagine, but it's not evidence of a technical obstacle. Generally, "automation failed" does not imply that "automation is impossible". To your individual points: - OOP and UML are domain-specific abstractions. Aside from still being very much used in expanding niches [1], they have failed to automate much work because their proponents failed to cover enough cases to have a useful general-purpose abstraction. - Outsourcing is a labor strategy. There's nothing technical that prevents another similarly capable person from doing your job, at least in the next town, if not another country. The obstacles were/are social and political, and the WFH movement shows that. Also, outsourcing is not going anywhere, it's just reduced and converted to nearsourcing due to backlash. - By contrast, software is a general-purpose abstraction [2]. Databases are a type of software. You can see LLMs [3] as schema-less databases that contain millions of abstractions connected to each other. You can get a UML model or Python code or text by querying the LLM's query engine in a language much more flexible than SQL. Vibe coding makes it seem like the funny intermediate bullshit is the end result of using LLMs, but it's not. Sure, I agree that LLMs don't make sense to use when a calculator is enough, but I don't see any functional limitations to improving LLMs. Maybe new algorithms or combinations are needed, but no matter how slowly, quality is expected to reach at least human level for the majority of current tasks (on which many jobs depend). Which leads to my point: we need political, social, philosophical reasons to limit or integrate automation in our civilization, not just watch and hope there's a big enough technical obstacle so we can keep our current jobs. [1] For example, model-based software engineering is still a growing; slowly, but growing. [2] So is the organization of mechanical machines or analog computers, but it's faster to reorganize and orchestrate electrical signals. [3] More precisely, foundation models, because it's far more than natural language processing.
• lopsotronic 7mo ago
  Pour yourself a drink, as I have a longish story that might be a useful metaphor. Back in the day, there were more or less two consumer flight sims: MS Flight Simulator and XPlane. MSFS was and has always been the much prettier one, much easier to work with; xplane is kludgy, very old-school *NIX, and chonky in terms of resource usage. I was doing some work integrating flight systems data (FDAU/FDR outputs) into a cheaper flight re-creation tool, since the aircraft OEM's tool cost more than my annual salary. Hmm, actually, ten years of my salary. So why use xplane at all, then? The difference was that MSFS flight dynamics was driven from a model using table-based lookup that reproduced performance characteristics for a given airframe, whereas xplane (as you might be able to tell from the company name, Laminar Research) does fluid and gas simulation over the actual skin of the airframe, and then does the physics for the forces and masses and such. I caught some flack for going with xplane: "Why not MSFS!? It's so much prettier!" Unless the airframe is in a state that is near-equivalent with tabular lookup model, the actual flight is not going to be actually re-created. A plane in distress is very often in a boundary state- at best. OR you might be flying a plane that doesn't really have a model, like, say, a brand new planform (like the company was trying to develop). Without the aerodynamic fundamentals, the further away you get from the model represented by the tabular lookups, the greater the risk gets. And how does this relate? Those fundamentals- aerodynamic or mathematical or electrical- will be able to deal with a much broader range than models trained on existing data, regardless of whether or not they are LLMs or tabular lookups. If we rely on LLMs for aerodynamics, for chemistry, for electrical engineering, we are setting ourselves up for something like the 2008 Econopalypse except now it affects ALL the physical sciences; a Black Swan event that breaks reality. I am genuinely worried we're working outselves into just such an event, where the fundamentals are all but forgotten, and a new phenomenon simply breaks the nuts and bolts of the applied sciences. As for my xplane selection, it helped in other ways. Because often the FDR data is just plain wrong, but with xplane you could actually tell, because a control surface sticking out one way, while the flight instruments say another, lights up a "YOU GOT PROBLEMS" light in the cockpit as the aircraft inexplicably lurches to the right.
  • SpaceNoodled 7mo ago
    Ah, but it's no longer "inexplicably!"