Comment on Sounds like a plan

• chellewalker@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Which let me tell you, was real f-ing fun to have to watch unfold during my last year studying for my IT degree. The degree I went for thinking it would be the kind of thing least likely to be automated.

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  • passepartout@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    A lot of younger folks in IT, like myself, have been on the brink of exhaustion since 2022.

    Sure, there was the “obsoletion” of PHP, Java, plain JS, etc. before, in favor of one of the JS frameworks that get released every other day, etc.

    But this one feels different. They are trying to sell you the idea of everything related to sw development and programming will get “outsourced” to a computer. The problem is, LLMs can’t do the necessary thinking to build resilient systems as they can’t “think”, neither effective nor efficient. They can be great tools when used the right way, but that’s about it.

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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Image

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  • bus_factor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I started my degree in 2002, two years after the dotcom bust. I figured the market would rebound within five years. Right after I graduated (but thankfully after I got a job) the housing bubble burst. There’s always something happening, but software engineering is still needed and we still make bank. Being unlucky with the timing will set back your career, but probably won’t end it.

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• partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’m not the slightest worried about my own job, but it is currently a shitty market for fresh grads. Probably due to all the post-covid layoffs saturating the talent pool with more experienced people, and the aforementioned AI fad.

  Its a bit more than that I think. IT is killing its entry level job pipeline which grew people into seniors. In the infra space, we don’t really troubleshoot systems anymore in a “pets” method, we just redeploy new “cattle” meaning all the troubleshooting skills and underlying understanding of our systems you would have had doesn’t get learned anymore. For those of us that had to go through that, we’re fine because we developed the skills, but the new folks we bring in we just tell them to re-deploy to get it working.

  I’m seeing this too in the software dev space. Small modules worth a few story points would have been given to junior developers to learn on and knock out getting some work done, but more importantly getting those juniors trained up with trial and error. Now an LLM can crank out mostly working code for that small module in a seconds and after a few minutes of human review that module is done. So the work is being done faster now, but the critical educational experience the juniors had before is missing.

  In both infra and software dev spaces we’re cutting off our ankles, then legs, because when we retire very very few will have our skills that we had to learn, but didn’t give them the chance to learn.

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  • bus_factor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You still have to debug things a cattle approach, though. If anything there’s even more and more complex things to debug. Training will just have to shift from throwing the new hire into the deep end of the kiddie pool to something else. Granted, “something else” is probably going to be offloading it on educational institutions, which sucks for recent grads, so they’ll have to work it out somehow. Probably by creating a market for post-grad practical skills classes, is my guess.

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    • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      There’s still coworkers who can’t debug worth a shit. I don’t understand. Like that was CS101

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      • bus_factor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Just because they passed the class doesn’t mean they retained any of the knowledge.

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    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      You still have to debug things in a cattle approach, though. If anything there’s even more and more complex things to debug.

      I would disagree on your complexity metric (for the purposes of learning troubleshooting) for cattle. What can be more complex than a completely unique system that only exist because of 10+ years of running on that same hardware with multiple in-place OS upgrade occurring along with sporadic (but not complete) patches to both the OS and the application? Throw in the extra complexity of 9 other unrelated applications running on that same server (or possibly bare metal) because the org was too cheap to spring for separate servers or OS licenses for a whole hypervisor.

      If you have a memory leak in your application in a container running on k8s that will kill the pod after running for 72 consecutive hours, would you even notice it if you have multiple pods running it on a whole cluster as long as the namespace is still available?

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      • bus_factor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I’ve maintained both and still do. While you may not be debugging memory leaks on k8s (although you should), you get all sorts of other fun things to debug. Things like:

        • Why did our AWS bills suddenly triple?
        • Why is that node accepting jobs but just hanging when they start?
        • Why is that statefulset not coming back up? Is the storage still attached somewhere else perhaps?
        • Why did all the data in our Kafka suddenly disappear?
        • Why is everything still down after that outage? Maybe a circular dependency, thundering herd problem, or both?
        • What’s wrong with my Helm chart this time?

        The list goes on and on. With increased complexity you don’t get less problems, just different ones.

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• kautau@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Now it’s “staff augmentation”

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• Windex007@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Right now my company calls it “Investing in IST”

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