alt Hacker NewsForever Junior: The Skills AI Can't Develop for You
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Not to take away anything from this guy but man, my mind just stops registering information after lines like this: `As a Junior fresh out of school, “still learning what I’m doing” isn’t a caveat — it’s the job description`
I fully agree. I see this today, even "so early" in AI adoption (it's been ONLY a couple of years!). I'm a firm believer in "know the stack all the way to the bottom". Possibly I'm an extremist, I believe every developer should at least know a little bit of assembly and maybe even run the NAND game (build a computer from NAND gates - https://nandgame.com/). But basic skills lead to deeper understanding of the elements in the stack. Exactly how TCP works. BGP. Why "it's always DNS". Interrupts. Virtualization. What the hell is PSI. Why kernel space is not user space. JVM allocation pressure. String interning. Concurrency and thread sync and "why isn't my code working multi-threaded" or even "I'll just sync through the db".
I don't know how to solve these. I tried Java internal tech talks (internal to my company) but most devs just weren't interested. I try ad-hoc with sessions with devs but very rarely I feel a bite.
The pipeline is collapsing. In 5 years, who will be the next senior devs? I have so few candidates to look at, and no new ones at all.
This blog post renders horribly on my Chrome browser. Then I realized it's because Ghostery is blocking a lot of it. Looks okay in Incognito mode.
If your site doesn't load basic UI elements because they're designated as ads, you're not doing it right.
AI generates syntax fast, but syntax was never the bottleneck. If you do not learn the low-level fundamentals, you just become an editor for an intern who hallucinates.
The skill required to get an AI to cooperate is not the same one as the craft of coding. Typing what it says out yourself will never get you there.
It’s like calling yourself a mechanic because you brought your car to a shop and paid for a mechanic to do an oil change.
This article is fully terrifying. I don't really know what else to say.
Except that perhaps, deep down, all those people who thought software engineering should be a chartered profession were right.
I find the author’s attitude and approach here really admirable. Lot’s of good ideas in this post.
I'm pretty sure this article is written by AI as there are lots of those long hyphens in it that AI seems so keen to use. If it is I can't tell whether that's ironic or reinforces their argument.
So I'm not sure what I've learnt from it!
I have so many mixed feelings about this...
On one side, as an engineer, Did you really expected to delegate thinking to a Large Language Model? On the other side, How human of the author to believe the illusion that fluency means knowledge, can't fault him for that.
On one side, so you discover that the development of your personal skills can be stilled to a set of instructions to an LLM? How much more of you are you willing to capitulate? On the other hand, I think is brave to write the article confessing his growth.
There will be a generation were had been trained using the current teaching methods where education in it self is a product as opposed the gym where the brain develop muscles. The muscles end up been develop at work. This is not about "seniority", this is about the character to develop yourself, to welcome the challenge. Which I guess good for him, he has it.
Reading these kind of things for me is weird.
(btw. I don't like the term AI because there is no I in AI, but that is a different talk, or maybe that self awareness is what makes it so confusing)
Is writing a blog post one of them?
I found all the breaks grating.
one of them developing taste to avoid working for adtech companies (ublock blocks the domain lol)
This is something that I worry about as well for my junior incident responders at my company.
We have a culture that I’ve pushed to always understand what the model is doing, even if you have to go back after the response action is done and walk through it step by step.
I encourage everyone to use AI to the extent that they feel comfortable and can do their jobs but I feel it’s necessary to always be able to do what the LLM has done if you don’t have access to it
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Many years ago I was working at a firm that investigated stock pump and dump schemes on Yahoo Finance message boards.
We had to scrape the boards and then analyze messages to see if we could identify the identity of the people running the schemes.
This was 2002 and I wasn't aware that the LWP::Simple existed in Perl (aka the requests library in Python).
I ended up using basic TCP socket libraries to connect to port 80 and do http requests. It was, to put it mildly, a major pain in the ass.
That being said, I learned a TON about how http, tcp, html, etc all work together. 20+ years later, I still use some of that knowledge when analyzing network protocols at work.
I mention this b/c nothing is stopping people from doing similar projects now. e.g. Linux from scratch [0] is one great example of learning fundamentals even though we now have 1 click "launch me a Linux VPS" options.
Joel Spolsky make this point too. Even if you are using Java, it's still helpful to understand how CPUs interact with cache because the highest performance comes from optimizing the whole stack.
0 - https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/