demonstrating your power level
lolwut? I’m so tired of tech people acting like they’re the next Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar…
Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software
hisao@ani.social 1 week agoThe fact that I dislike it that it turned out that software engineering is not a good place for self-expression or for demonstrating your power level or the beauty and depth of your intricate thought patterns through advanced constructs and structures you come up with, doesn’t mean that I disagree that this is true.
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 1 week ago
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Yup. I assist with hiring and ask questions to try to find these people and reject them. I don’t want that toxic culture here, and I’d absolutely prefer working with someone less talented than someone who is toxic like this.
chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
If your code is as comprehensible as that run-on sentence, I can understand why coworkers would ask you to please write simpler code.
Feyd@programming.dev 1 week ago
The problem is that you don’t realize that writing code that is difficult to maintain is in fact not a sign of intelligence, or “power level”.
hisao@ani.social 1 week ago
It depends. If it’s difficult to maintain because it’s some terrible careless spaghetti written by person who didn’t care enough, then it’s definitely not a sign of intelligence or power level. But if it’s difficult to maintain because the rest of the team can’t wrap their head around type-level metaprogramming or edsl you came up with, then it’s a different case.
chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
No. Both are hard to maintain. And in fact, I’d prefer the spaghetti. It can be untangled.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Exactly. Code should be self-explanatory, and anything fancy should be clearly commented.
The difference between a good and great software engineer is understanding the cost of fancy code, and when it’s worth it to pay that cost. A great software engineer practices restraint, preferring code that even the most junior of engineers can maintain. Solutions should be extensible without serious refactors, and should attain good performance through good high-level design instead of low-level optimizations.
I’m guessing the “rockstar” OP is talking about went deep into the weeds of metaprogramming and even they can’t explain how it works a few weeks later. We have that crap here too, and nobody likes it, especially the seniors, but it’s so ingrained in the code that nobody wants to risk introducing bugs by fixing it.
JordanZ@lemmy.world 6 days ago
hisao@ani.social 6 days ago
I agree, and this is why I think code doesn’t need to be manually written by humans (unless it’s for training AI or providing it examples). It’s a great thing that AI evolves so fast in this area.