Comment on New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.

TsarVul@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Might sound a bit unrelated, but have you been noticing an apparent rise on ageism too? The social media seem to be fueling it for some reason.

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• Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I work in a small company that doesn’t hire hardly at all… Stories like this scare me because I have no way to personally quantify how common that kind of attitude might be.

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  • TsarVul@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Look, ultimately the problem is the same as it has always been: juniors doing junior shit. There’s just more of it going on. If you’re hiring one, you put a senior on them ready to extinguish fires. A good review process is a must.

    Now that I think about it, there was this one time the same young’un I was talking about tried to commit this insane subroutine that was basically resizing a vector in the most roundabout way imaginable. Probably would have worked, but you can also just use the resize method, y’know? In retrospect, that was probably some Copilot bullshit, but because we have a review process in place, it was never an issue.

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• _g_be@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  How is it more efficient than reading a static page? The kids can’t read. They weren’t taught phonics, they were taught to guess the and with context clues. It’s called “whole language” or “balanced reading”

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  • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Literacy rates are on a severe decline in the US, AI is only going to make that worse.

    Over half of Americans between 16 and 74 read below a 6th grade level (that’s below the expected reading level of an 11 year old!)

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    • AntY@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      We have the same problem with literacy here in Sweden. It’s unnerving to think that these kids will need to become doctors, lawyers and police officers in the future.

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      • 0x0@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Sweden of all places? What happened in the last decade that Sweden’s slowly losing the fame of country to follow in social aspects?

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  • graphene@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I don’t think phonics are the most critical part of why the kids can’t read.

    It’s proven that people who read primarily books and documents read thoroughly, line by line and with understanding, while those that primarily read from screens (such as social media) skip and skim to find certain keywords. This makes reading books (such as documentation) hard for those used to screens from a young age and some believe may be one of the driving forces behind the collapse in reading amongst young people.

    If you’re used to the skip & skim style of reading, you will often miss details, which makes finding a solution in a manual infinitely frustrating.

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    • ZiemekZ@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Skip & skim could also stem from the fact that this how a mind used to everpresent ads reads. It’s like an adblocker built into your brain.

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    • _g_be@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s not that phonics is integral, but rather if reading is a guessing game that’s just one more barrier to reading, and they read less, and what they do read they skim over and potentially ignore foreign words

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Really? My kids are hitting the rules hard. In 1st grade, they’re learning pronunciation rules I never learned (that’s phonics, right?). My 2nd grader is reading the 4th Harry Potter book, and my 5th grader finished the whole series in 3rd grade and is reading at a 7th or 8th grade level.

    I did teach them to read before kindergarten (just used a book for 2-3 months of 10 min lessons), but that’s it, everything else is school and personal interest. They can both type reasonably well because they use the Minecraft console and chat. They’re great at puzzles, and my 5th grader beat me at chess (I tried a wonky opening, and he punished me), which they learned at school (extra curricular, but run by a teacher).

    We love our charter school, though I don’t think it’s that different from the public school.

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  • fadingembers@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Holy shit just like an LLM

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• SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s going to get worse. I suspect that this’ll end with LLM taking the part of a production programs. Juniors just feeding it scenarios to follow, hook the thing up to a database and web page and let it run. It’ll gobble power like there’s no tomorrow and is just a nightmare to maintain, but goes live in a quarter if the time so every manager goes with that.

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• celia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I work at a software development school, and ChatGPT does a lot of damage here too. We try to teach that using it as a tool to help learning is different from using it as a “full project code generator”, but the speed advantages it provides makes it irresistible from many students’ perspective. I’ve lost many students last year because they couldn’t pass a simple code exam (think FizzBuzz difficulty level) because they had no access to internet, and had to code in Emacs. We also can’t block access to it because it starts an endless game where they always find a way to access it.

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  • TsarVul@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Damn, I forgot about the teaching aspect of programming. Must be hard. I can’t blame students for taking shortcuts when they’re almost assuredly swamped with other classwork and sleep-deprived, but still. This is where my defeatist comment comes in, because I genuinely think LLMs are here to stay. Like autocomplete, but dumber. Just gotta have students recognize when ChatGPT hallucinates solutions, I guess.

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• tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Make the junior put it to the test John Henry style. You code something while they use gpt and see who comes up with a working version first

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