Yes, it is. Mostly because “real engineering” isn’t the high bar it’s made out to be. From that blog:
Nobody I read in these arguments, not one single person, ever worked as a “real” engineer. At best they had some classical training in the classroom, but we all know that looks nothing like reality. Nobody in this debate had anything more than stereotypes to work with. The difference between the engineering in our heads and in reality has been noticed by others before, most visibly by Glenn Vanderburg. He read books on engineering to figure out the difference. But I wanted to go further.
Software has developed in an area where the cost of failure is relatively low. We might make million dollar mistakes, but it’s not likely anybody dies from it. In areas where somebody could die from bad software, techniques like formal verification come into play. Those tend to make everything take 10 times longer, and there’s no compelling reason for the industry at large to do that.
If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. How fast can we make the cycle of change to deployment?
We might make million dollar mistakes, but it’s not likely anybody dies from it.
I had a coworker who got a gig writing PDA software for a remote-controlled baseball machine. He was to this day the most incompetent programmer I’ve ever met personally; his biggest mistake on this project was firing a 120 mph knuckleball (a pitch with no spin so its flight path is incredibly erratic) a foot over a 12-year-old kid’s head. This was the only time in my 25-year career that I had to physically restrain someone (the client, in this case) to prevent a fist fight. I replaced my coworker on the project after this and you can bet I took testing a little bit more seriously than he did.
In many cases this is accurate. Programming alone doesn’t amount to engineering. Lotta low quality lines of code being churned out these days because standards have dropped.
Realist, maybe. Often a pessimist. Never really a class traitor. Besides, I’m more blue collar than white collar, so I’ve never gotten the luxury of working from home at a higher pay, so as far as being the same class…in the sense of rich vs everyone else, sure.
Your snide comment just seemed a bit too glee about people about to lose their job. Or at least: lacking in solidarity with them.
Forget the distinction between blue and white collar, or higher and lower income: these aren’t classes and the distinction onlyserves toseparateus in class struggle. I meant the “wage dependant class here”.
Nah, that’s going to blow, and I was talking about just that several months ago. The internet is going to be completely fucked, now. It has a nice little run of the golden years from like 1995 through about 2012. Decade after that was all downhill and the last year or so gas been a dumpster fire that’s still getting bigger.
Yeah, writing prompts it’s the long term goal, programming will be obsolete.
Nobody that can write a problem in a structured language, taking edge cases into account, will be able to write a prompt for a LLM.
Prompt writers will be the useful professionals, because NO big tech company is trying to make it obsolete making AI ubiquitous and transparent, aiming it to work for natural language requests made by normal users or simply from context clues. /s
Prompt engineering it’s the griftiest side of the latest AI summer. Look a who is selling the courses. The same people that sold crypto courses, metaverse courses, Amazon dropship store courses…
As a professional in the field of artificial neural networks, I endorse this meme wholeheartedly and will figuratively slake my thirst for schadenfreude on the tears of this child with joy.
A lot of you have a lot of faith in people reviewing PRs. I know a few Sr. developers, that if shit was too busy, would skim it and say 'fuck it, it will be QAs problem. If you put this in the correct sub-system in file that would only be executed once a month, for example a maintenance class, It would be really hard to notice something is wrong if it didn’t cause issues seen immediately. Maybe this is the story of an intern that added something that also fucked up boolean comparisons in a subsystem used once a month. Where there is a 2 week lag between the execution and operations noticing something wrong.
Since we are on the topic of disliking Discord, what Matrix clients do you humans use? I tried both Element and Nheko (the latter of which isn’t electron based), and they both felt slow, clunky and unresponsive.
I’ve heard this about Element from a lot of people and I have to wonder: Is that the mobile client or on an actual PC? Because I use it on my phone and it’s actually more reliable than the Discord mobile app.
I gave up on matrix, was too complicated of a setup and the site was throughly unhelpful for newcomers. I eventually got it but, the permission system was somehow worse then IRC and due to the federation aspect of it you can’t modify the standard at all because then the other clients/servers can’t recieve you.
I think I will try Gomuks, since I now also tried Fluffychat, but scrolling felt weird and on a touchpad had the tendency to swipe left on messages to reply instead of scrolling down and I was unable to resize or close the channel info and channel list, or change its font size (there also appears to be no settings button). Maybe the CLI based clients will be more suited for me, since I also don’t mind using irssi for IRC (but it should be noted I also have no problems with graphical IRC clients like hexchat or others, which work perfectly fine on my machine).
On my phone I switched to Element X because Element would take up to a minute to sync messages. I’m willing to put up with the reduced feature set, as long as actual messages fucking arrive in time!
For a open source project like the above which has so many constant moving parts, a discord is probably a good idea to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.
Because I can absolutely see a breaking change involving something outside of the open-source project itself.
I say that as a person who hates discord. But I’m also part of the older generation so waiting 3-9 months for a reply is kinda normal. And the projects I support, it’s pretty common to make a merge request that finally gets approved a two years later.
to ensure the author of the issue can provide more details about their problem and respond to follow up immediately.
if you actually visit that Discord (like I reluctantly do, from time to time), you’ll find that all issues are being discussed in a handful of general channels with multiple people discussing multiple issues at the same time in one never-eding stream of messages. if you miraculously find a proper keyword that brings up someone else having the same issue as you do, the only way to find if someone else replied to it is by scrolling through all that noise.
This entire thread is just a bunch of old nerds screaming at the tide.
Hate stuff all you want. It isn’t going to change anything. “People should do this or that”. It must be exhausting to be so angry at something but do nothing about it.
Imagine using all this energy to really understand while people use Discord and try to make something better.
OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.
OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. They’ll eventually forget you exist while they’re busy making the future happen.
I’m sure the folks that are doing the work aren’t hanging out on Lemmy complaining about kids these days.
Oh noes, people see something that isn’t right and they’re saying something about it! Let’s give no real arguments and just toss some half baked insults, im sure that’ll work
I’d understand your reaction if this were a defense of outdated bullshit that looked like it was invented in the previous century and looked the part like IRC, mailinglists, phpbb, usenet, … But matrix is from the 2010s. It has threads, video calls, voice channels, emojis, emoji reactions, and other stuff I don’t use. It’s evolving. There are many clients (web, mobile, desktop, CLI) for many OSes, etc. The only thing it doesn’t have is VC seed money and large amounts of marketing.
But that’s not the point. The point is opensource projects using closed source products that are controlled by a single, commercial entity.
OR join these projects you apparently like and volunteer to do the extra work to publisher useful documentation. Unless of course you never intend to be useful to FLOSS and just want everyone else to do the work for you.
That’s it: if they use discord these people (including me) won’t. “If you don’t use discord, you aren’t useful to opensource and want everyone else to do the work for you” is quite the take 😂
OR you can continue to complain and get nowhere while completely alienating an entire generation of developers. They’ll eventually forget you exist while they’re busy making the future happen.
L.O.L so the “previous generation” is just sitting around complaining? No work is ever done? The linux kernel is written by teenagers and 20 year olds, rust, PHP, javascript, W3C, firefox, conferences, etc. are all done by the next generation with absolutely no input from the previous generation (whatever that means)? At 40 people either drop dead or start shouting at clouds?
I love discord, for what it’s for. Quick synchronous talks you will never refer back to again. So not software development where indexable logs of information are necessary. I know discord has indexing, and now some form of forum. But every discord I’ve been to for development (especially modding communities) has a large corpus of synchronous logs where people get annoyed if you ask a question that was answered one before a long time ago with extremely common language making it nearly impossible to search for because the keywords have been used out of context of your question hundreds of times since the question was asked.
If the Dev communities used the forums mode in discord more, it wouldn’t always solve it, but it’d be much better. There are better places than discord for these things, but I have been trying to meet people where they’re established.
Ummmm you know youre on lemmy right? The whole point of lemmy is that some company doesnt own everything and thats why people dont want to use discord. Its kind of ironic to use discord for a foss project when you think about it.
Wow! You are so deluded, thinking of yourself as a cool new kid with cool new tech (Discord) fighting against old people. What you don’t get is that people are protesting the use of Discord for something it’s not suited to. There’s no generation gap in it. The best of the youngest developers I know have the same opinion. Perhaps it’s time for you to reflect on your own standing.
Element is just a client, while Matrix is the chat protocol. But yeah, I have recently switched my discord server to a matrix instance and its been pretty great. Some pushback by users who didn’t care about privacy or security, but overall the tech is solid. We didn’t like that discord was moderating private chats and they don’t offer any type of encryption.
I think the point here is that anything that can be indexed by search engines or archival crawlers would be better, so not Matrix either. Forums, for example. Like what happens if the Discord community gets deleted due to whatever circumstances? All of that gathered knowledge will be just gone with no way to recover or search for it.
But I’ll definitely prefer hiring someone who does. Sure, you can code in Vi without plugins, but why? Leave your elitism at home. We have deadlines and money to make.
Edit: The discussions I’ve had about AI here on Lemmy and Hackernews have seriously made me consider asking whether or not the candidate uses AI tools as an interview question, with the only correct answer a variation of “Yes I do”.
Boomer seniors scared of new tools is why Oracle is still around. I don’t want any of those on my team.
Thinking AI is an upgrade from pencil to pen gives the impression that you spent zero effort incorporating it in your workflow, but still thinking you saw the whole payoff. Feels like watching my Dad using Eclipse for 20 years but never learning anything more complicated than having multiple tabs.
With that in mind, work on your prompting skills and give it a shot. Here are some things I’ve had immense success using GPT for:
Refactoring code
Turning code “pure” so it can be unit-testable
Transpiling code between languages
Slapping together frontends and backends in frameworks I’m only somewhat familiar with in days instead of weeks
I know in advance someone will tunnel vision on that last point and say “this is why AI bad”, so I will kindly remind you the alternative is doing the same thing by hand… In weeks instead of days. No, you don’t learn significantly more doing it by hand (in fact when accounting for speed, I would argue you learn less).
In general, the biggest tip I have for using LLM models is 1. They’re only as smart as you are. Get them to do simple tasks that are time consuming but you can easily verify; 2. They forget and hallucinate a lot. Do not give them more than 100 lines of code per chat session if you require high reliability.
Things I’ve had immense success using Copilot for (although I cancelled my Copilot subscription last year, I’m going to switch to this when it comes out: github.com/carlrobertoh/CodeGPT/pull/333)
Adding tonnes of unit tests
Making helper functions instantly
Basically anything autocomplete does, but on steroids
One thing I’m not getting into on this comment is licensing/morals, because it’s not relevant to the OP. If you have any questions/debate for this info though, I’ll read and reply in the morning.
I don’t get the downvotes. I’ve hired probably 30+ engineers over the last 5 or so years, and have been writing code professionally for over 20, and I fully agree with your sentiment.
It’s just the general ai hate. It’s not surprising, because machine learning is yet another scam area. But for programming you would be a complete fool to ignore copilot mastery since paper after paper proves it has completely revolutionised productivity. And it’s not normal to think you will be better than everyone when not using an assistant, it’s just the new paradigm. For starters it has made stack overflow be almost obsolete and it was the next most important tool…
Your original post referred to wanting to hire people based on the tools they use to do a task, not their ability to do the task - in fact, you talked down to people for using certain tools by calling them elitist. That’s why my pen/pencil comparison is accurate.
AI’s not bad, it just doesn’t save me time. For quick, simple things, I can do it myself faster than the AI. For more big, complex tasks, I find myself rigorously checking the AI’s code to make sure no new bugs or vulnerabilities are introduced. Instead of reviewing that code, I’d rather just write it myself and have the confidence that there are no glaring issues. Beyond more intelligent autocomplete, I don’t really have much of a need for AI when I program.
This is how I use it, and it’s a great way for me to speed up. It’s a rubber duck for me. I have a fake conversation, it gives me different ideas or approaches to solve a problem. It does amazing with that
The code it spits out is something else though. The code it’s trained on in GitHub means it could be based on someone with 2 months experience writing their CS201 program, or a seasoned experienced engineer. I’ve found it faster to get the gist of what it’s saying, then rewrite it to fit my application.
Not even mentioning the about 50% chance response of “hey why don’t you use this miracle function that does exactly what you need” and then you realize that the miracle function doesn’t exist, and it just made it up.
Sure, you can code in Vi without plugins, but why? Leave your elitism at home. We have deadlines and money to make.
Nothing elitist about it. Vim is not a modular tool that I can swap out of my mental model. Before someone says it, I’ve tried VS Code’s vim plugin, and it sucks ass.
Please avoid double negatives. I’m not quite sure of the meaning of your sentence.
If you’re saying I have issues using vim if I can’t use it in an IDE, no, that’s not how it works. If you use simple vim (not much more than knowing how to get in and out of edit/visual mode, and use hjkl for navigation), then it’s fine. Once you get into more advanced vim features, though, the key presses in vim get picked up by the IDE first, so IDE shortcuts take precedence.
If someone were to learn vim inside an IDE and develops it organically as part of their flow, it’d be fine. If you already have a lot of standalone vim flow setup in your mind, it’s a problem.
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