> How do junior developers level-up to get into private Slack spaces? Where do they learn from if Stackoverflow is hostile, Reddit is hollowed out, and social squares are empty?
Books seem to still work very well. I am not even sure all this social media learning was that much positive. A lot of it was based on trend chasing, shiny object syndrome and stuff like that in a completely a-historical context. It was always funny when some star social media coder re-discovered something that probably people did in mainframes before I was born and that you can find in a lot of books.
Not obvious from the title, but this is a great post on why it's a terrible terrible time to be an entry-level developer right now:
* Job market sucks for junior devs due to the end of ZIRP and normalization of layoffs
* Dearth of good developer role models due to the "public sphere" getting worse (collapse of developer twitter community, rise of vacuous influencers). I'm a little skeptical about this one as I didn't really benefit much from these sources myself when getting into the industry. And there's always hacker news, which is doing fine!
* Loss of good mentorship opportunities due to rise of remote work
* AI tools are good for seniors who already know how to do things, but terrible for junior devs trying to learn. This is the forklifts metaphor. (And AI is probably not helping the junior dev job market either, although that was already bad for other reasons as mentioned above.)
I am truly worried about where the next generation of senior devs is going to come from. Some juniors, maybe 10% of them, will be fine no matter what: brilliant engineers who are disciplined enough to teach themselves the skills they need and can also adapt well to AI dev tools. I don't worry about them. But I worry about what happens to the median junior engineer, and consequently what our profession will look like in 10-20 years.
I find it at the same time bizarre and fascinating the number of people I used to work with who have become AI influencers on social media.. Some of them have gained really big followings.
Most of them were pretty middling developers when I worked with them... So I guess that tracks.
- Junior jobs become scarce. You either jump to senior very fast, or you are dumped out of the industry. The juniors that make it are those special unicorns that somehow learn everything about the job, including how to do it with AI, within a couple of years. There's a little bit of guidance, but mostly it's the kids who have good taste in blogs/books/videos that end up learning it all on their own. Also the kids who have the motivation to keep studying without a syllabus.
- Instead of junior devs, we just have domain experts who are crap at coding. Quants who can write a model in pandas, but when they venture offpiste, they get AI to build them a monstrosity. Working monstrosity, but if you could code, you would cry. This ends up happening in every industry: there's very few coders left anywhere outside of FAANG, everyone just does the modern equivalent of thinking Excel has solved their problem. Balls of spaghetti the size of which the world has never seen are written, hidden in various domains.
- Universities wisen up about how to teach people to use AI. Once upon a time, they used to teach you how to punch holes. Assembler was taught. Systems languages like c++. Java, JS, Lua. Kids who came out of these universities were somewhat ok for industry. Why not AI as well? There are going to be lessons learned roughly this decade that will be useful to teach the kids. What to tell the AI, what not to. How to leverage it to make the most progress.
But does this count as misleading title? I really expected an article about literal forklifts. Among all the AI craze these days, I was hoping for some real-world hands-on skill insights. The kind of thing hackers often can describe really well.
From that perspective, I got disppointed.
TL;DR: The article is about junior developers having a hard time in the current conditions shaped by remote work, AI and an abandoned Twitter.
Am I the only one who, after reading the title, had to think of the funny classic "Forklift driver Klaus" short vid (which, with its very own kind of humour, shows WHY forklifts require training)?
This is a terrific article the synthesize is several of the trends that have been at play the past five or six years. One interesting phenomenon of AI is that university enrollment and computer science is already falling. A lot. So if the AI promise doesn’t deliver (there are already signs), software engineering talent is going to cost a lot more than it did before.
When I think of a forklift, I think of a machine with wheels, that steers from the back. It has a hydraulic lift in the front, and you can attach things to it, like metal bars, for lifting pallets of stuff off the ground. And training is a pretty good idea because they don’t drive like cars, and it’s really damned easy to accidentally kill yourself or someone else with one.
Is this what this analogy is referring to? Because I read it and wondered - has this person ever been in a warehouse, or just seen one on TV? Or am I being dense and there is something else called a ‘forklift’?
Reminds me of how I used to take the forklift to move things I was too lazy to move by hand when I worked in a factory, even though I absolutely did not do the required training. It was a bit stressful but fun enough to be worth it.
> ~tech~ companies have largely forgotten that part of their job is to teach.
Honestly, you could stop right there. Everyone (everyone°) tries to kick the can of skills-acquisition onto someone else.
Ultimately, in a hyper-individualistic society, it lands on the "workers" entirely to educate themselves - as amply demonstrated by the comments in this thread. Unfortunately, that's not how humans learn best (some people, sure: a population massively over-represented on this board).
That this has become the general practice or expectation explains the gradual erosion of the "average" citizen's knowledge, intellect, and discernment. (More, perhaps, than social media - which is often blamed, and has played a role, but in my opinion has largely taken advantage of cultural incapacities which preceded it.)
17 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 49.8 ms ] threadBooks seem to still work very well. I am not even sure all this social media learning was that much positive. A lot of it was based on trend chasing, shiny object syndrome and stuff like that in a completely a-historical context. It was always funny when some star social media coder re-discovered something that probably people did in mainframes before I was born and that you can find in a lot of books.
* Job market sucks for junior devs due to the end of ZIRP and normalization of layoffs
* Dearth of good developer role models due to the "public sphere" getting worse (collapse of developer twitter community, rise of vacuous influencers). I'm a little skeptical about this one as I didn't really benefit much from these sources myself when getting into the industry. And there's always hacker news, which is doing fine!
* Loss of good mentorship opportunities due to rise of remote work
* AI tools are good for seniors who already know how to do things, but terrible for junior devs trying to learn. This is the forklifts metaphor. (And AI is probably not helping the junior dev job market either, although that was already bad for other reasons as mentioned above.)
I am truly worried about where the next generation of senior devs is going to come from. Some juniors, maybe 10% of them, will be fine no matter what: brilliant engineers who are disciplined enough to teach themselves the skills they need and can also adapt well to AI dev tools. I don't worry about them. But I worry about what happens to the median junior engineer, and consequently what our profession will look like in 10-20 years.
Most of them were pretty middling developers when I worked with them... So I guess that tracks.
I can and I have
> Mentor your junior colleagues, give them the space to learn and make mistakes.
I’d love to. My company stopped hiring juniors during the mini saas recession and then cursor launched. There are no juniors to mentor anymore.
Juniors nowadays are expected to perform senior work. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Remember when mailing lists
never mind
- Junior jobs become scarce. You either jump to senior very fast, or you are dumped out of the industry. The juniors that make it are those special unicorns that somehow learn everything about the job, including how to do it with AI, within a couple of years. There's a little bit of guidance, but mostly it's the kids who have good taste in blogs/books/videos that end up learning it all on their own. Also the kids who have the motivation to keep studying without a syllabus.
- Instead of junior devs, we just have domain experts who are crap at coding. Quants who can write a model in pandas, but when they venture offpiste, they get AI to build them a monstrosity. Working monstrosity, but if you could code, you would cry. This ends up happening in every industry: there's very few coders left anywhere outside of FAANG, everyone just does the modern equivalent of thinking Excel has solved their problem. Balls of spaghetti the size of which the world has never seen are written, hidden in various domains.
- Universities wisen up about how to teach people to use AI. Once upon a time, they used to teach you how to punch holes. Assembler was taught. Systems languages like c++. Java, JS, Lua. Kids who came out of these universities were somewhat ok for industry. Why not AI as well? There are going to be lessons learned roughly this decade that will be useful to teach the kids. What to tell the AI, what not to. How to leverage it to make the most progress.
But does this count as misleading title? I really expected an article about literal forklifts. Among all the AI craze these days, I was hoping for some real-world hands-on skill insights. The kind of thing hackers often can describe really well.
From that perspective, I got disppointed.
TL;DR: The article is about junior developers having a hard time in the current conditions shaped by remote work, AI and an abandoned Twitter.
> Other AI tools are fair game ("explain this code", "generate docs", "generate tests", etc.)
I disagree. Tests are production code.
* For those who wouldn't know it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck
Is this what this analogy is referring to? Because I read it and wondered - has this person ever been in a warehouse, or just seen one on TV? Or am I being dense and there is something else called a ‘forklift’?
Honestly, you could stop right there. Everyone (everyone°) tries to kick the can of skills-acquisition onto someone else.
Ultimately, in a hyper-individualistic society, it lands on the "workers" entirely to educate themselves - as amply demonstrated by the comments in this thread. Unfortunately, that's not how humans learn best (some people, sure: a population massively over-represented on this board).
That this has become the general practice or expectation explains the gradual erosion of the "average" citizen's knowledge, intellect, and discernment. (More, perhaps, than social media - which is often blamed, and has played a role, but in my opinion has largely taken advantage of cultural incapacities which preceded it.)
--
°This includes [US] schools, by the way.