Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity you can spot club members because they wear a badge with "IBM" written on it.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity i'm a bit worried about confirmation bias here, though of course incompetence has existed and will continue to exist. the difference between a competent and incompetent engineer isn't decided by the tools that they have access to but the time they choose / are afforded to develop competency and how well they have learned-to-learn.
that said, while there isn't a quantitative difference in incompetence engineers, there is a qualitative difference in incompetent engineering. expensive AI licenses move wealth from labour to capital and give management hacks a license to demand specific things from engineers at a specific rate. some of the heaviest AI users ive seen are the junior enggs and interns, and while they werent able to answer questions about what they wrote pre-LLMs either, now it's buried in an amount of noise and unaccountability that makes it hard to catch these pitfalls during code reviews.
LLMs dont make people incompetent the moment you touch them. they change the amount of code, plausibly functional code mind you, that you can create in a given amount of time. this reduces the amount of time seniors can spend in design, reviewing, and talent building, and hinders the processes that (sometimes) build competence out of incompetence. i'm not a full-time-hater of LLMs, but i do worry about the real damage they do to enterprise engineering processes moreso than the engineers themselves.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I can't think of any. A few who weren't very good; a couple who spammed the codebase with buggy code that took considerable effort to clean up; and one or two who were good at day-to-day programming but didn't know much computer science, so sometimes wrote code with terrible big-O. But nobody who was "completely lacking in basic knowledge". I've interviewed a few candidates who appeared not to be able to code, but maybe they just couldn't code *in interviews*?
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@buherator @ludicity I have run into security engineers a couple of times matching that description.
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@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.
Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.
After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.
It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.
@drikanis @ludicity Similar experience here. More and more people cannot function without an LLM prompt ready to answer to them, they totally lost any autonomy. If you ask anything to them, they will basically give you the output of their LLM, instead of formulating an answer by themselves, even when they know the answer. It’s pure cocaine.
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@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.
Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.
After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.
It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity Completely useless? Not a lot, either pre/post, but I mostly worked in safety related industries. There were/are quite a few, which seemed to lack any kind of foresight or initiative.
AI use is picking up steam though, and I do see people outsourcing their thinking, sometimes live during a meeting (and getting obsolete data because of that).People that are unable to see risks in software will use GenAI to generate a lot of security issues. Not looking forward to cleaning those up.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity bear in mind a lot of tech companies are casually relocating PM talent into SWE. Happened at the huge huge tech co I work for. All of a sudden I'm expected to start building things. Never been a coder. But it's fine because AI will help, right? Everyone needs to pay their mortgage and the job market is hard right now. So here we are.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I'd say "occasionally", and the rate at which it occurs is notably distinct between different kinds of workplaces. The more enterprisey, the more likely.
Also, interview candidates seem disproportionately more likely to be terrible, but that at least makes sense--the less competent folks are more likely to be interviewing, right?
I wouldn't say I've noticed much different pre- and post-LLMs, but I HAVE noticed that post-LLM, you've got a lot of people uncritically drinking the Kool-Aid.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
We must welcome folks with no experience, and not deride them as being “useless”.
Lack of compassion and human engagement, and the capitalists dream of the 10x hero programmer got us into this mess.
It’s your job to develop your team. Train them. Believe in them. Support them.
It’s not a pissing contest.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I've worked with people of a wide range of abilities, but not sure I can describe any of my former or present colleagues as completely useless. I've seen managers who were useless or worse than useless for sure though
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity pretty often
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity fortunately none so far. It's still a relatively short career though
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I have fortunately increased my distance from Silicon Valley startups nowadays, otherwise I might have a more pertinent answer RE "after LLMs", but in web dev, the truth is there have already been numerous inflection points in the before times. Examples:
- Mid-late 2000s: Back-end engineers write tons of awful front-end code because organizations refuse to hire specialists as they fail to appreciate how distinct and deep of a discipline semantic HTML, accessibility, CSS, and client-side scripting have become.
- Mid-late 2010s: The advent of various JS frameworks (e.g. React, Next, Tailwind) lead to more and more _front-end_ engineers who _also_ don't understand any of the things I listed above, when that should literally be their damn job.(Edit: dates indicate when these problems started. They haven't stopped.)
Of course, because LLMs "learn from" all of the mountains of bad code already output via these prior layers of dysfunction, that will only multiply the pain further...
Perhaps more related to the "after LLMs" bucket, though, is just how many OSS projects my work has depended on that have accepted vibe-coded PRs, which I find deeply unsettling, especially given the context of findings like this: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116080909947754833
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity A number of times, but it mostly seemed to depend on the shop, its culture, and how they hired. The worst have been the mid-size agencies, which tend to optimize for minimizing inputs while maximizing billable hours, resulting in software that *mostly* works, with source code that looks like it was written by a dog. Such shops absorb large quantities of useless engineers from the market - mostly those that got into it for the money.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity in OSS: rarely, partly because I use obscure programming languages
work, pre-LLM: rarely but more than OSS
work, now: very often, even engineers who I know used to be competent have lost it much faster than I would have thought possible
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@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.
Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.
After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.
It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.
Tangential, I have noticed a trend with customer emails (wide spread, many multiples companies) that makes me believe more people are using LLMs to write reply emails & not reading at all.
there's a 'jje ne sais quoi' to not just them not answering questions but *how* they're not answering questions.
I can't put my finger on it, but it's tripping my spidy-sense / pattern recognition.
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@drikanis @ludicity Similar experience here. More and more people cannot function without an LLM prompt ready to answer to them, they totally lost any autonomy. If you ask anything to them, they will basically give you the output of their LLM, instead of formulating an answer by themselves, even when they know the answer. It’s pure cocaine.
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Uncommonly, both before and after LLMs.
I’ve generally been fortunate to work for companies that filter out people with low skill pretty well without being terrifying during the interview, and also for being on teams with mostly mid-level and higher developers/engineers.
The commonest “problem” behavior I’ve seen is people (at many levels of technical skill) having significant degrees of learned helplessness when confronted with problems outside their stronger skill sets. The developers I know mostly don’t use LLMs for coding or similar tasks, so I can’t really comment on “before vs. after” there.
@ludicity > The developers I know mostly don’t use LLMs for coding or similar tasks, so I can’t really comment on “before vs. after” there.
One potential exception is a third-party contracting business my team works with from time to time. There was one case about a month ago where one of the developers was essentially frozen out of "AI" software development tools for a project (my company only permits the enterprise version of MS Copilot for internal work, and as contractors, they lacked access to that version) and got all hinky about "likely not having enough time to do this project without AI". My own assessment of the project is that it would have been a challenge for a team *that knew what they were doing*, but not an insuperable one.
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