Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses.
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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 I'm pretty sure a bunch of my coworkers are incompetent and/or disinterested, myself included, but our engineering job is so braindead that it doesn't matter much.
Anyone can take some json event and send it off to a different event. I think many of us would count as incompetent in a less stupid environment. So the answer is "all the time, probably?"But we also barely hired anyone since the LLM boom so maybe I'm lacking the floor comparison.
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@arichtman @ludicity it's worse, but it was always bad
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@arichtman @ludicity like the old gag goes:
How many people do you have working for you?
About 50% -
@Patrickoldhiker @drikanis @ludicity Amen to that. The fact that I'm so close to retirement is a great source of comfort to me. Yeah, I enjoy my job, and I know I'm good at it. I do not need to use an LLM for anything.
But should I get that dreaded conversation tomorrow and a disappointing redundancy package, it would no longer be a cause for concern.
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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 Rarely proportionately, frequently absolutely.
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@Patrickoldhiker @drikanis @ludicity Amen to that. The fact that I'm so close to retirement is a great source of comfort to me. Yeah, I enjoy my job, and I know I'm good at it. I do not need to use an LLM for anything.
But should I get that dreaded conversation tomorrow and a disappointing redundancy package, it would no longer be a cause for concern.
@rozeboosje @Patrickoldhiker @drikanis @ludicity I'm seeing this comment a lot (and I would feel the same were I closer to retirement). LLMs are pushing knowledge and experience out of the workforce and replacing it with vibes.
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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 done technical interviews of 100+ candidates for software engineering roles over the years. Around 90% of them didn't pass muster. And that's after a CV screening by HR (for whatever that's worth) and a preliminary interview with a teamlead.
It is RIDICULOUS how many career programmers are, in fact, not able to program anything in their language of choice. I'm not talking about having to google how to open a socket, but about how to write a god damned loop ... Awful incompetence.
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@ludicity I've done technical interviews of 100+ candidates for software engineering roles over the years. Around 90% of them didn't pass muster. And that's after a CV screening by HR (for whatever that's worth) and a preliminary interview with a teamlead.
It is RIDICULOUS how many career programmers are, in fact, not able to program anything in their language of choice. I'm not talking about having to google how to open a socket, but about how to write a god damned loop ... Awful incompetence.
@ludicity Maybe these people have other qualities that I didn't screen for in my interviews. Maybe LLMs will let those qualities shine through.
But secretly, the cynic in me thinks this is going to be garbage in, garbage out, only at a hitherto unseen scale.
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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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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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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 work in infra rather than software, and yeah. When I started, we joked that half the job was reading logs and the other half is copypasting those logs into stackoverflow and serverfault to find fixes.
There's always been the occasional person who comes on board who is a liability rather than an engineer, but they generally did not stay long.
Now there's a small but significant number of people who don't read past the google AI box. If that doesn't fix it, they don't seem to know where else to look.
Part of that is absolutely down to corporate culture having KPIs for response time and tickets per day, but not directly measuring or rewarding fixes. So there's a strong incentive to rush to hit those measuring sticks before digging in to spend time learning.
Part of it is definitely that the AI reply is the first thing google shows and it sometimes works. Kinda like how a slot machine sometimes pays out.
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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 working in a company with ~400 engineers. Colleagues generally good, but I also interview people. The quality of candidates has dropped significantly. I can't say for sure if this is due to other factors (are we offering sub-market rate, we switched from mainly Scala to Typescript...) but candidates are not allowed to use llm in interviews and some seem completely lost.
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@Patrickoldhiker @drikanis @ludicity It remains a great fear of mine that those of us who went through education before LLMs, do not understand just how badly LLMs will affect education of young people.
I worry we will get an entire lost generation of people who will lack even the most fundamental skills in reading, writing and math. And no, sending and receiving a thousand SMS and WhatsApp messages a day, will not compensate.
