4 ms·

Perhaps your vantage point from industry is in fact myopic. We all have our own biases.

cdfalcon 5mo ago
Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice would set up a new grad for failure and have them focusing on the wrong skills for this market. The bit about ignoring trends feels too head in the sand for my liking :/
- danny_codes 5mo ago
  Fads come and go in industry. This version of LLMs will come and go as well, as will the coding languages and paradigms we used before (and, presuming you want your code to actually run, still do with some decent frequency). Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least
  - ActivePattern 5mo ago
    Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". I don't think you need to be Nostradamus to predict that we're never going back to manual coding. Sure, the systems will evolve and improve, but they're certainly not going anywhere.
    - slabity 5mo ago
      > Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". Which is why they very carefully worded it more as 'LLMs in their current form', twice.
      - CamperBob2 5mo ago
        Yes, if you stake out an argument carefully enough, you can make its perimeter infinite and its area zero.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
- DJBunnies 5mo ago
  How do you know they didn't? My college professor was formerly at NASA, where this stuff is important. I recognize not everyone's work is [as] important, but we should still strive for excellence (and safety.)
  - cdfalcon 5mo ago
    One check of their LinkedIn.
- gipp 5mo ago
  Buddy... The whole point of the post is that he wants his students to question whether "succeeding in this market" is really the right choice.
  - lukan 5mo ago
    The right choice is rather to strive for perfect - and be unemployed? To me it was actually not clear what his point was. "Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear." Sounds great. But not that practical.
    - fooqux 5mo ago
      Why isn't it practical? In my life, I've encountered many SWEs that have changed careers. I've met them in national parks working as rangers. In real estate, grocery store butchers, and yak ranchers. Yet I've never once encountered a SWE that was once doing something non-technical and decided to switch. Purely anecdotal, I know. But still, I prefer to think that all those people discovered this practical advice and are far happier for it. I've never met one that regretted their decision.
      - lukan 5mo ago
        Oh, I would consider becoming a park ranger as well, but as a european, I also did not had to go deep in dept, to become a SWE. And a professor should take that into account and give practical advice. In the real world, solving haskell challenes (of which the prof is fan of) is unfortunately not that useful. People have real needs for working software to solve their real pain points. Not to worship code quality. Some projects need obviously better code quality (airplanes, medical equipment..) - but not all of them. And if you want to have sacred code when coding a crude throw away app .. you won't get enough money for that. And positions for academics are limited.
  - dijksterhuis 5mo ago
    i was writing a bit of a lengthy reply, but yeah this is the whole point really. making that money, getting that job title, being at that company, working on that project -- are these success? or is success simply doing the best job possible when writing code?
- microtherion 5mo ago
  When I started studying CS, the "industry" thought students should be taught COBOL, and maybe some PL/I and Fortran, because obviously that was what the market wanted.
- archagon 5mo ago
  I worked at a FAANG in a senior role for around 6 years and I completely agree with the article. (I left before LLM/agent use became widespread, but I would have flamed out anyway if it was forced upon me.)
  - xantronix 5mo ago
    It's scary just how quickly the past has been buried: Decades of accumulated insight on best practices, all discarded in service of the new electric Christ.
    - CamperBob2 5mo ago
      The blacksmith's lament.
    - xtracto 5mo ago
      This hit very close home. I'm a 44 year old developer, with Software Engineering Bachellors and CompSci MPhil and PhD. All my life I spearheaded "best practices" and code quality (from Fred Brooks, Joel Sposky, Martin Fowler, etc...). But since LLMs arrived... things have become crazy. The layer of "obscurity" that permeates code writing seems to make a lot of those "standards" moot or just not really pragmatically possible to follow.
lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
That's a flippant reply. Programming is a practical skill, and its most common expression is industrial or commercial, not academic proofs of concept. The post addresses students who will enter industry; that's the focus of the professor's own post. And I sympathize with many points being made here. However, the point of refactoring code is somewhat odd and detached from the real life constraints of programming in the wild. Like, sure, in the ivory tower, you can confine yourself to nicely bounded problems and tidy little toy POCs. You can survive doing those things, because the selective pressures allow for it. I love those things, personally. They help me understand the nature of the thing. And in an academic settings, you can refine and refactor the hell out of those things to your heart's content (not that there is necessarily an objective end point to refactoring; code organization is subject to goals and constraints which can shift around). But the reality of software in a commercial setting is not the tidy one you can expect in an academic setting. It's messy, subject to commercial pressures, to a hierarchy of values that doesn't place "refactoring" at the top of the list. And why would it? Whether you should refactor something is not just a question of whether it suits your conceptual tastes or even whether it is more maintainable. Unlike algorithms and principles and even techniques, software is not eternal. It is ephemeral. It's shelf-life is bounded. It is a piece of a larger business process. You're not refining some theory or some grasp of a Platonic ideal. You're mostly just putting into place plumbing to get something done. Whether you should refactor something, when you should refactor something, is a matter of prudential judgement, which is to say, of practical reason. So, in light of that, there are actually quite absurd things to say given the difference between the privilege of academia and the gritty reality of industrial and commercial software development. If we were to force our professor into the world of industry, he would quickly lose his job or he would quickly learn that some of his strange idealism is silly and detached from the reality that his students will face.
- godelski 5mo ago
  > It's messy, subject to commercial pressures, to a hierarchy of values that doesn't place "refactoring" at the top of the list. And why would it? Probably because it's a good way to be more profitable. Code that's easier to understand is easier to: maintain, generate new features for, fix bugs, onboard new engineers, etc Code that's well written: executes faster (saving computational costs), scales better, has higher uptimes/more robust, reduces bandwidth, and so on. The thing is the business people will never understand this. Why would they? They're not programmers. They're not in the weeds. But that's what your job is as an engineer. To find all these invisible costs. I'm pretty confident the industry is spending billions unnecessary. Hell, I'm sure Google alone is wasting over $100m/yr due to this. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. You're smarter than that. I know everyone here is smarter than that. So don't fall for the trap

Completely fair - but at least my PoV comes from having actually worked as a SWE, you know? I feel like the best understanding this fellow can have is purely secondhand from watching the success / failures of his students. I also think I get doubly upset from advice like this because it’s given and marketed to impressionable young students. Even agreeing with all the moral points he’s made, I truly think this advice would set up a new grad for failure and have them focusing on the wrong skills for this market. The bit about ignoring trends feels too head in the sand for my liking :/

danny_codes 5mo ago
Fads come and go in industry. This version of LLMs will come and go as well, as will the coding languages and paradigms we used before (and, presuming you want your code to actually run, still do with some decent frequency). Will LLMs in their current ergonomics have staying power? Perhaps. Nobody can predict the future. But I don’t think it’s a given in the least
- ActivePattern 5mo ago
  Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". I don't think you need to be Nostradamus to predict that we're never going back to manual coding. Sure, the systems will evolve and improve, but they're certainly not going anywhere.
  - slabity 5mo ago
    > Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". Which is why they very carefully worded it more as 'LLMs in their current form', twice.
    - CamperBob2 5mo ago
      Yes, if you stake out an argument carefully enough, you can make its perimeter infinite and its area zero.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
DJBunnies 5mo ago
How do you know they didn't? My college professor was formerly at NASA, where this stuff is important. I recognize not everyone's work is [as] important, but we should still strive for excellence (and safety.)
- cdfalcon 5mo ago
  One check of their LinkedIn.
gipp 5mo ago
Buddy... The whole point of the post is that he wants his students to question whether "succeeding in this market" is really the right choice.
- lukan 5mo ago
  The right choice is rather to strive for perfect - and be unemployed? To me it was actually not clear what his point was. "Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear." Sounds great. But not that practical.
  - fooqux 5mo ago
    Why isn't it practical? In my life, I've encountered many SWEs that have changed careers. I've met them in national parks working as rangers. In real estate, grocery store butchers, and yak ranchers. Yet I've never once encountered a SWE that was once doing something non-technical and decided to switch. Purely anecdotal, I know. But still, I prefer to think that all those people discovered this practical advice and are far happier for it. I've never met one that regretted their decision.
    - lukan 5mo ago
      Oh, I would consider becoming a park ranger as well, but as a european, I also did not had to go deep in dept, to become a SWE. And a professor should take that into account and give practical advice. In the real world, solving haskell challenes (of which the prof is fan of) is unfortunately not that useful. People have real needs for working software to solve their real pain points. Not to worship code quality. Some projects need obviously better code quality (airplanes, medical equipment..) - but not all of them. And if you want to have sacred code when coding a crude throw away app .. you won't get enough money for that. And positions for academics are limited.
- dijksterhuis 5mo ago
  i was writing a bit of a lengthy reply, but yeah this is the whole point really. making that money, getting that job title, being at that company, working on that project -- are these success? or is success simply doing the best job possible when writing code?
microtherion 5mo ago
When I started studying CS, the "industry" thought students should be taught COBOL, and maybe some PL/I and Fortran, because obviously that was what the market wanted.
archagon 5mo ago
I worked at a FAANG in a senior role for around 6 years and I completely agree with the article. (I left before LLM/agent use became widespread, but I would have flamed out anyway if it was forced upon me.)
- xantronix 5mo ago
  It's scary just how quickly the past has been buried: Decades of accumulated insight on best practices, all discarded in service of the new electric Christ.
  - CamperBob2 5mo ago
    The blacksmith's lament.
  - xtracto 5mo ago
    This hit very close home. I'm a 44 year old developer, with Software Engineering Bachellors and CompSci MPhil and PhD. All my life I spearheaded "best practices" and code quality (from Fred Brooks, Joel Sposky, Martin Fowler, etc...). But since LLMs arrived... things have become crazy. The layer of "obscurity" that permeates code writing seems to make a lot of those "standards" moot or just not really pragmatically possible to follow.

lo_zamoyski 5mo ago

That's a flippant reply. Programming is a practical skill, and its most common expression is industrial or commercial, not academic proofs of concept. The post addresses students who will enter industry; that's the focus of the professor's own post. And I sympathize with many points being made here. However, the point of refactoring code is somewhat odd and detached from the real life constraints of programming in the wild. Like, sure, in the ivory tower, you can confine yourself to nicely bounded problems and tidy little toy POCs. You can survive doing those things, because the selective pressures allow for it. I love those things, personally. They help me understand the nature of the thing. And in an academic settings, you can refine and refactor the hell out of those things to your heart's content (not that there is necessarily an objective end point to refactoring; code organization is subject to goals and constraints which can shift around). But the reality of software in a commercial setting is not the tidy one you can expect in an academic setting. It's messy, subject to commercial pressures, to a hierarchy of values that doesn't place "refactoring" at the top of the list. And why would it? Whether you should refactor something is not just a question of whether it suits your conceptual tastes or even whether it is more maintainable. Unlike algorithms and principles and even techniques, software is not eternal. It is ephemeral. It's shelf-life is bounded. It is a piece of a larger business process. You're not refining some theory or some grasp of a Platonic ideal. You're mostly just putting into place plumbing to get something done. Whether you should refactor something, when you should refactor something, is a matter of prudential judgement, which is to say, of practical reason. So, in light of that, there are actually quite absurd things to say given the difference between the privilege of academia and the gritty reality of industrial and commercial software development. If we were to force our professor into the world of industry, he would quickly lose his job or he would quickly learn that some of his strange idealism is silly and detached from the reality that his students will face.

godelski 5mo ago
> It's messy, subject to commercial pressures, to a hierarchy of values that doesn't place "refactoring" at the top of the list. And why would it? Probably because it's a good way to be more profitable. Code that's easier to understand is easier to: maintain, generate new features for, fix bugs, onboard new engineers, etc Code that's well written: executes faster (saving computational costs), scales better, has higher uptimes/more robust, reduces bandwidth, and so on. The thing is the business people will never understand this. Why would they? They're not programmers. They're not in the weeds. But that's what your job is as an engineer. To find all these invisible costs. I'm pretty confident the industry is spending billions unnecessary. Hell, I'm sure Google alone is wasting over $100m/yr due to this. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. You're smarter than that. I know everyone here is smarter than that. So don't fall for the trap