Oh geez…who could have seen this coming?
Oh wait, every single senior developer who is currently railing against their moron AI-bandwagoning CEOs.
Middle and upper management are like little children - they’ll only learn that fire hurts by putting their hand in it.
Good. This is digital Darwinism at its finest. Weeds out the companies who thought they could save money by relying on a digital monkey instead of actual professionals.
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I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.
There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.
Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.
Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.
Good programmers (and I don’t mean just at the coding level) make less bugs exactly because they want to avoid bug fixing as much as possible.
They still have to do debugging - and hence have to be good at it - just less often than if they didn’t invest any time into figuring out ways of working that reduce the rate of bugs in their work (and, again, this is at more levels than just coding).
I think that misconception of “good coders do not produce bugs” in anchored in the totally wrong idea that it’s at all possible to make code without bugs - the way I see it the path to being a “good coder” must go through being good at debugging and just wanting to avoid doing it as much because how how much more time it takes to have to go all the way down to using the debugger to find bugs than doing things like at least some analysis upfront of the program requirements, using proper naming conventions to reduce the likelihood of the kind of bugs that comes from confusing variables and structuring you code so that you don’t get lost or don’t forget things (especially for code you don’t see for months and later come back to having forgotten the logic you were following with it).
I’ve done some programming without proper debuggers (embedded stuff in shitty shit microcontrollers, shader programming) and it’s a total PITA.
There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.
i’m terrified of people who think this way. my experience has been that they are much less inclined to check for bugs in their code and tend to produce much buggier code
The pain in the arse which is debugging is what motivated me to, as my career progressed, improve my coding, improve my software design, improve my systems design, even improved my software development process and standards and eventually that even extended to getting those I worked with to also improving those things as I sometimes ended up having to debug their bugs.
Debugging definitelly makes better techies, IMHO, mainly because of the lengths people will go to in order the avoid having to do it.
Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.
Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.
A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.
“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.
“People work in roles they don’t care about, for companies they have no investment in, to pay loans they shouldn’t have.”
That sounds like a fight club quote lol. I know you didn’t say “loans they shouldn’t have” but the cost of college is just stupidly high. It doesn’t have to be free but come on.
It doesn’t have to be free but come on.
I beg to differ! My degree was free for all intents and purposes, and no, it didn’t take away from the challenge or the quality of education. I cried blood tears in order to graduate but it was worth it.
Chuck Palahniuk leaking into my writing like the carrot out of the protagonist’s ass in Guts.
15 years ago I got a job where I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I hated it. I wanted to learn and be valuable and be valued. I left that job.
I worked for a bank and then Red Hat and I loved what I did and burned myself out trying to make them happy. Only to find out they still didn’t value me.
I switched jobs two years ago and increased my pay 30% overnight and back to a job doing nothing. And I’m totally fine with it now. I have a family and I focus on them and during work, if they don’t have anything for me to do I make my own happiness.
Fuck corporations. I’ll take your money, I’ll never again kill myself as I’ll never be valued anyway. Jobs aren’t worth it. People are.
Similar trajectory for me, but I’m now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it’s not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.
But that’s the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.
Me and my team take our site down the old fashioned way. Code copied from some rando on the internet.
It’s pretty much the same as AIs do - copy and past random code from Stackoverflow - but they do it automatically.
“When asked about buggy AI, a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”
That’s… That’s so fucking cool…
Amazing
And none of the forced tech support “AI” replacements work. And the companies don’t give a shit.
As stated in the article, this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement. Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.
I encourage jrs to use tools such as Phind for solving problems but I also expect them to understand what they’re submitting and be ready to defend it no differently to any other PR. If they’re submitting code they don’t understand that’s incredibly unprofessional and I would come down very hard on them. They don’t do this though because we don’t hire dickheads.
Shift-left eliminated the QA role.
Now we have AI generated shit code, with devs that don’t understand the low level details of both the language, and the specifics of the generated code.
So we basically have content entry (ai inputs) and extremely shitty QA bundled into the “developer” role.
As a 20 year veteran of the industry, people keep asking me if I think AI will make developers obsolete. I keep telling them “maybe some day, but today’s LLMs are not it. The AI bubble is going to burst, and a few legit use cases will make it through”
Yeah but… i asked chatgpt once how to style something in asciidoctors style.yml. It proposed me html syntax (some inline stuff can be done with html tags in asciidoctor, if output is html). After the usual apology, it suggested some wrong yaml. Third try, because formatting was wrong, it mixed them both.
I mean, sure, some niche usecase in a somewhat obscure (lots of moving parts) lightweight markup. But still, this was a lesson.
this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement.
They are the same picture.
More specifically: the same kind of decision makers are behind both.
We used to have these shit developers and I accepted a lot of bad code back then – if it actually worked – because otherwise “code review” is full-on training, which is an entire other job from the one I was hired to do.
The client ditched that contracting firm, and the devs I work with now are worth putting in time on code review with – but damn, we got hella shit code in our codebase to deal with now. Some of it got tossed, some of it … we live with.
See? AI creates jobs! Granted, it’s specialized mop up situations, but jobs!
It’ll be even more interesting in the future! Every now and then a T1000 will lose all hydraulic fluids right out it’s prosthetic anus and they’ll need someone there with a mop and bucket! Our economy lives on…
If by economy you mean some of us are needed to mop up hydraulic ass-juices at gunpoint I suppose you’re technically correct. At least they have to feed us, right?
…right?
Having spent most of my career working as a senior contractor, which often meant landing on code bases with 3+ layers of fuckups, I can only imagine how painful it will be to end up having to clean and fix AI generated code, since that doesn’t even have a consistent coding style or pattern of design errors and bugs.
If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.
Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.
Even worse than it being wrong, is that by nature of the tool it looks right.
Eh, I’m a senior dev, and I don’t ban it (my boss, the director, does that for me lol; he’s worried about company secrets leaking).
In fact, we had an interview for a senior dev position, and the applicant asked if they could use AI, and I told them to use whatever tools they normally would for development. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that they totally botched the programming challenge because of it (introduced the same bug twice, then said they were very confident in the correctness of the code…), and that made it so much easier to filter them out from our hiring pool. If you’re going to use a tool in an interview, you better feel confident with it. If that dev had solved the problem significantly faster than our other applicants, I would’ve taken that to my boss to have the team experiment with it. We target budget 30 min for our challenges, and our seniors generally finish in under 20, and it took them more than our allotted time to get the code to actually run properly (and that’s with us pointing out certain mistakes the AI generated).
But no, I haven’t seen an actually productive use of AI for software development, beyond searching for docs online (which you can totally do w/ Bing or Google w/o involving our codebase). You may feel more productive because more code is appearing on the screen, but the increase in bugs likely reduces overall productivity. We’re always looking for ways to improve, but when I can solve the same problem in my bare-bones editor (vim) faster than my more junior colleagues can with their fancy IDEs, I really don’t think AI is going to be the thing that improves our productivity, actually understanding logic will. If someone demonstrates that AI does save time, I’ll try it out and campaign for it.
Anyway, that’s my take as someone who has been in the industry for something like 15 years. Knowing your tools is more important, IMO, than having more tools.
I had my suspicions before but the moment I realized for certain Elon Musk couldn’t run a software company was when he judged people by lines of code written.
The one time some manager voiced such an idea, I very overtly in front of everybody offered to make “loop unrolling” software working at the source level (compilers already do it at the Assembly level in some cases for performance) for me and my colleagues to really boost that code line count (while totally screwing maintenability).
Mind you, all devs in that meeting were loudly against measuring performance by code lines, but I like to think that suggestion of mine really hammered down the coup the grace on that “brilliant” idea.
Ew, I would hate to be in charge of code reviews at an org like that.
The proper metric is success of the actual product. We have our engineers give estimates, then hold them to those estimates and evaluate based on consistency of on-time releases and number of production bugs. At the end of the day, predictable, high quality delivery is usually more valuable than faster time to market, unless you’re in a startup or something and just need to get early adopters on-board. Judge QA by defects discovered in production and devs by defects found by QA and in production. It’s really not that hard.
Not trying to defend him, but I thought the reasoning behind doing that was to get the least obedient people to leave the company so that there won’t be a delayed push back from the employees.
In my experience working for almost 3 decades in software development, passive-agressive shit from upper management just causes the best people to leave (as they’re the ones who easilly find better jobs) leaving behind mainly a mix of the incompetent and those who never worked anywhere else (who are either already incompetent or will become so, as only ever having worked in just one company is far too narrow professional experience for anything beyond junior/mid level - you need to have seen more than one way of doing things to understand certain higher level concerns and choices in software development).
Yeah and I’d say these people left are exactly those Elon wants, he doesn’t want white guys in their 50s, he wants obedient young guys.
Sound like a variant of the good old saying “pay peanuts, get monkeys” only using a stick and threats instead of payment.
Mind you, it does sound like the kind of think somebody with his kind of personality - narcissistic shameless and dishonest salesman - would think it’s a great idea.
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I’ve worked as a freelancer (specifically as a Contractor) in Software Development for over a decade and more often than not I ended up having to work with some existing code base, having to deal with the design choices, coding style and bugs of somebody else, often multiple somebody elses.
There’s nothing quite as “entertaining” as having to deal with 3+ different code and design styles in the same code base because all previous developer thought their own way of doing things was the superior way so just added one more layer of their style (not just coding but, worse, software design) on top of what was already there increasing the mess, rather than work within the existing structure and style and doing some refactoring.
Anyway, in my experience having to read, understand and work with existing code that you yourself did not made is way more time costly and less pleasant than actually doing your stuff from scratch.
“AI” is just good for simple code snippets. (Which it stole from Github repos).
This whole ai bs needs to die already, and the people who lie about it held accountable.
Also it is pure junk. Chat-GPT code may come out fast on the screen but it’s garbage. I tried python and c++ both just pure garbage. Sure I got it to do what I wanted but only after a day of hair pulling repetitive madness. Simple task, open an image and invert it . Then we’ll it opened the image but didn’t invert. Or maybe it’s upside down. Can you open the image right side up and invert it…fuck fuck, why is the window full screen? Did I ask for full screen, shit heavens no! Anyway it’s a fuckin idiot just rambling code at me.
Open it how using what at what size what codec where, for how long, for what purpose, using what data structures, use what libraries, what versions. You sound like my PO trying to request an update to software they have no comprehension of.
Debugging and maintenance was always the hardest aspect of large code bases… writing the code is the easy part. Offloading that part to AI only makes the hard stuff harder
What a surprise, right?
Good. Maybe if the stuff trashes enough of our infrastructure somebody somewhere will actually figure out that it’s bad and get rid of it forever.
I know, it’ll never happen. But a man can dream.
