Comment on Sounds like a plan
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day agoI’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.
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.
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
bus_factor@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Just because they passed the class doesn’t mean they retained any of the knowledge.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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?
bus_factor@lemmy.world 23 hours 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:
The list goes on and on. With increased complexity you don’t get less problems, just different ones.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
And nearly all of those problems are ones that other people have run into or at least have guidance on how to go about addressing. Old organically grown systems are many times unique one-offs which have little to no established path except to start diving into the fundamentals about the hardware and software.
I’m not here to get into a pissing match about who’s job is/was harder. If you think juniors have a better chance at learning on today’s systems than they did in the past, I still disagree with you. Problems exist on modern system, except juniors will rarely if ever get a chance to try to solve them and thereby learn from them.