What a surprise, right?
Eaxctly my point as well here… https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/461269/-/comment/4095583
Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.
Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.
A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.
“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.
15 years ago I got a job where I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I hated it. I wanted to learn and be valuable and be valued. I left that job.
I worked for a bank and then Red Hat and I loved what I did and burned myself out trying to make them happy. Only to find out they still didn’t value me.
I switched jobs two years ago and increased my pay 30% overnight and back to a job doing nothing. And I’m totally fine with it now. I have a family and I focus on them and during work, if they don’t have anything for me to do I make my own happiness.
Fuck corporations. I’ll take your money, I’ll never again kill myself as I’ll never be valued anyway. Jobs aren’t worth it. People are.
I told my manager that I’ve been burned and can’t make myself work hard for another company again. She’s leaving so there’s no vested interest in the company for her. But yeah, fuck these cunts.
Similar trajectory for me, but I’m now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it’s not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.
But that’s the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.
“People work in roles they don’t care about, for companies they have no investment in, to pay loans they shouldn’t have.”
That sounds like a fight club quote lol. I know you didn’t say “loans they shouldn’t have” but the cost of college is just stupidly high. It doesn’t have to be free but come on.
It doesn’t have to be free but come on.
I beg to differ! My degree was free for all intents and purposes, and no, it didn’t take away from the challenge or the quality of education. I cried blood tears in order to graduate but it was worth it.
Are you also finding copilot to be less helpful of late? The other day it couldn’t follow the simplest of instructions
For me it’s the “Stop responding” button. Sometimes I’ll neglect something in my prompt, such as the fact that I’m stuck on ES5 javascript in my job (ServiceNow). It’ll spit out ES6+ with let declarations or something like that, and I have to go back and qualify my limitations. So I click stop responding. What used to happen was that it would stop and allow for additional prompting. Now it’s just like a client side trick. It hides the output but the server is still returning shit in the background, so if I try to re-prompt or add context it finishes what it was originally saying first, then tacks the new answer onto the old one without pause, separation, or human readable formatting that would indicate that there is a new output. It’s an awful experience.
I’ve been using perplexity.ai but my company thinks its agreements will stop Microsoft from training their AIs on our proprietary data, so I have to be more careful with perplexity than Copilot.
Wow, the text generator that doesn’t actually understand what it’s “writing” is making mistakes? Who could have seen that coming?
I once asked one to write a basic 50-line Python program (just to flesh things out), and it made so many basic errors that any first-year CS student could catch. Nobody should trust LLMs with anything related to security, FFS.
Nobody should trust LLMs with anything
ftfy
also any inputs are probably scrapped and used for training, and none of these people get GDPR
Eh, I’d say mostly.
I have one right now that looks at data and says “Hey, this is weird, here are related things that are different when this weird thing happened. Seems like that may be the cause.”
Which is pretty well within what they are good at, especially if you are doing the training yourself.
you are part of the problem
That is about the most generic statement possible, with nearly zero knowledge of what I’m doing on yours.
So… What problem? Feel free to enlighten me.
also any inputs are probably scraped
ftfy
Let’s hope it’s the bad outputs that are scrapped. <3
I wish we could say the students will figure it out, but I’ve had interns ask for help and then I’ve watched them try to solve problems by repeatedly asking ChatGPT. It’s the scariest thing - “Ok, let’s try to think about this problem for a moment before we - ok, you’re asking ChatGPT to think for a moment. FFS.”
Critical thinking is not being taught anymore.
Has critical thinking ever been taught? Feel like it’s just something you have or you don’t.
Critical thinking, especially Skepticism, does not make for good Consumers or mindless followers of Political Tribes.
British primary schools used to have something called ‘problem solving’ it was usually a simple maths problem described in words that required some degree of critical thinking to solve. e.g. A frog is at the bottom of a 30m well, it climbs 7m each day but in the night it slides 3m back down in its sleep. You can’t just calculate 30/(7-3) because it doesn’t account for the day the frog gets over the top and thus doesn’t slide back down in its sleep.
Not the most complex problem but pretty good for kids under 10 to start getting the basics.
Critical thinking is essentially learning to ask good questions and also caring enough to follow the threads you find.
For example, if mental health is to blame for school shootings then what is causing the mental health crisis and are we ensuring that everyone has affordable access to mental healthcare? Okay, we have a list of factors that adversely impact mental health, what can we do to address each one? Etc.
Critical thinking isn’t hard, it just takes time, effort.
I have the impression that most people (or maybe it’s my faith in Humanity that’s at an all time low and it’s really just “some people”) just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.
Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with it’s ever popular simple explanations of “Deity did it” and “it’s the will of Deity”)
In my mind, it’s really just entitlement. Something along the lines of, “well, I don’t know the answer and why should I have to know if someone else is going to figure it out.”
In a tired way, I understand it. Everyday I just want some of my time back for myself. If I’m always the one who has to work through all the problems for my ideas just to be ignored then I’m just going to be perpetually frustrated. So if my ideas are half baked and the solutions i barf up aren’t to your liking, well, figure it out yourself.
Not to say that I am this way. I don’t get frustrated when my ideas are ignored. I do get frustrated, though, when others eat up half baked ideas knowing they are just that.
Sorry, if what I’ve wrote so far has gotten a bit confusing. I’ll wrap it up and say, it’s entitlement. People don’t want to think for themselves because it’s time consuming. They think the world should order itself in a way that fulfills their needs with minimal effort on their part. Except, to understand how the world would be ordered for that to be reality, they can’t comprehend because no one has really figured that one out. So they fall back on god and gods an easy out because, duh, he’s god.
I had a chat w/ my sibling about the future of various careers, and my argument was basically that I wouldn’t recommend CS to new students. There was a huge need for SW engineers a few years ago, so everyone and their dog seems to be jumping on the bandwagon, and the quality of the applicants I’ve had has been absolutely terrible. It used to be that you could land a decent SW job without having much skill (basically a pulse and a basic understanding of scripting), but I think that time has passed.
I absolutely think SW engineering is going to be a great career long-term, I just can’t encourage everyone to do it because the expectations for ability are going to go up as AI gets better. If you’re passionate about it, you’re going to ignore whatever I say anyway, and you’ll succeed. But if my recommendation changes your mind, then you probably aren’t passionate enough about it to succeed in a world where AI can write somewhat passable code and will keep getting (slowly) better.
I’m not worried at all about my job or anyone on my team, I’m worried for the next batch of CS grads who chatGPT’d their way through their degree. “Cs get degrees” isn’t going to land you a job anymore, passion about the subject matter will.
Outsourcing killed a lot of the junior and even mid-level career level opportunities in CS and AI seems on track to do the same.
The downside is that going into CS now (and having gone into CS in the last decade or so, especially in English-speaking countries) was basically the career equivalent of just out of the starting line running full speed into a brick wall.
The upside is that for anybody who now is a senior techie things have never been this good because there are significantly fewer people at that level than there is need for such people, since in the last decade or so a lot of people haven’t had the chance to progress in their careers to that point.
Whilst personally this benefits me, I’m totally against this shit and what it has done to the kids entering my career.
Yup, and that’s why I’ll discourage people from entering my career, not because it’s a bad gig and it’s going away, but because the bar for competency is about to go up. Do it if you’re passionate and you’ll probably do well for yourself, but don’t do it if you’re just looking for a good job. If you just want a good job, go into nursing, accounting, or the trades.
I think it’s even worse than just the bar for competency going up: even for a coding wizard going into the career, it’s a lot harder to squeeze through the bottleneck which is getting an entry level position nowadays unless they have some public proof out on the Net of how good they’re at coding (say, commits in open source projects, your own public projects, or even Youtube videos about it).
This is something that will negativelly impact perfectly capable young developers who have an introvert personality type (which are most of them in my experience, even in domains such as Hacking) since some of the upsides of Introversion are a greater capacity for really focusing on on things and for detailed analysis - both things that make for the best programmers - and self publicising isn’t a part of the required skillset for good developers (though sooner or later the best ones will have to learn some “image management” if they end up in the Corporate world)
I’m a bit torn on this since on one side salesmanship being more of a criteria determining one’s chances of getting a break at the start of one’s career as a developer is bad news (good coding and good salesmanship tend to be inverselly correlated) but on the other side a junior developer with some experience actually working with other people on real projects with real users (because they contributed to existing open source projects) has already started learning what we have to teach fresh-out-of-Uni developers to make them professionals.
it’s a lot harder to squeeze through the bottleneck
Eh, I think that’s overblown. As someone involved in hiring, we go through a ton of crappy candidates before finding someone half-decent, and when we see someone who actually knows what they’re doing, we rush them through the process. The problem is that we’re not a big tech company, we’re in manufacturing, but we do interesting things w/ software. So getting on at one of the big tech companies may be challenging, but if you broaden the scope a little, there are tons of jobs waiting. We’ve had junior positions open for months because the hiring pool is so trash, but when we see a good candidate, we can get an offer to them by the end of the week.
We don’t care too much about broader visibility (though I will look at your code if you provide a link), we expect competency on our relatively simple coding challenges, as well as a host of technical questions. We also don’t mind hiring immigrants, we’ve sponsored a number of immigrants on our team.
introversion
As an introvert myself, I totally get it. I got my job because a recruiter reached out to me, not because I was particularly good at following up with applications. And that’s why I tend to tell people to not get into CS. I encourage them to take CS classes if they’re offered, but not to make it a career choice, and this is for two reasons:
- manage expectations of the future of CS - junior jobs are likely to contract a bit w/ AI
- thin the field so it’s easier to find the good candidates - we have to go through 5-10 candidates before we find someone we like
I see. That does change the idea I had about things a bit.
It’s been a while since I was last hiring.
I wasn’t aware that the problem nowadays in the West (or at least the US) was an excess of people who don’t really have a natural skill for it choosing software development as a career.
That kind of thing was one of the main problems with outsourcing to India maybe a decade ago: the profession was comparatively very well paid for the country so it attracted far too many people without the right skills resulting in a really low average quality of the programmers there - India had really good programmers just like everywhere else but then had a ton of people also working as programmers who should never had gone into it, so the experience of those having to deal with outsourced programming in India usually was pretty bad (I remotelly was a technical lead for a small outsourced team in India from London, and they were really bad whilst, curiously, the good programmers from the Indian Subcontinent I worked with had emigrated from there and were working in London and New York).
My experience with ChatGPT goes like this:
- Write me a block of code that makes x thing
- Certainly, here’s your code
- Me: This is wrong.
- You’re right, this is the correct version
- Me: This is wrong again.
- You’re right, this is the correct version
- Me: Wrong again, you piece of junk.
- I’m sorry, this is the correct version.
- (even more useless code) … and so on.
All the while it gets further and further from the requirements. So you open five more conversations, give them the same prompt, and try pick which one is least wrong.
All the while realising you did this to save time but at this point coding from scratch would have been faster.
I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn’t notice.
AI is fine if you know what you’re doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you’re doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It’ll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that…), but you’re going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it’s actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don’t bother w/ AI, but YMMV.
An area where it’s probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, “find the docs for a function in library X that does…” I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don’t remember the argument order.
AI is fine if you know what you’re doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion)
I’m not a developer and i havent touched code for over 10 yrs, but when i heard about my company pushing AI tools on the devs, i thought exactly what you said. It should be a tool for experienced devs who already know what they’re doing…
Lo and behold they did the opposite… They fired all the senior people and pushed AI on the interns and new grads… and then expected AI to suddenly make the jr devs work like the expensive Sr devs they just fired…
Wtf
Good. This is digital Darwinism at its finest. Weeds out the companies who thought they could save money by relying on a digital monkey instead of actual professionals.
“When asked about buggy AI, a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”
That’s… That’s so fucking cool…
Amazing
As stated in the article, this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement. Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.
I encourage jrs to use tools such as Phind for solving problems but I also expect them to understand what they’re submitting and be ready to defend it no differently to any other PR. If they’re submitting code they don’t understand that’s incredibly unprofessional and I would come down very hard on them. They don’t do this though because we don’t hire dickheads.
Shift-left eliminated the QA role.
Now we have AI generated shit code, with devs that don’t understand the low level details of both the language, and the specifics of the generated code.
So we basically have content entry (ai inputs) and extremely shitty QA bundled into the “developer” role.
As a 20 year veteran of the industry, people keep asking me if I think AI will make developers obsolete. I keep telling them “maybe some day, but today’s LLMs are not it. The AI bubble is going to burst, and a few legit use cases will make it through”
Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.
Humans literally can not scan all of SO to make a huge copypasta.
It takes much more time, effort, and thought to find various solutions on SO and patch them together into something that works well.
We used to have these shit developers and I accepted a lot of bad code back then – if it actually worked – because otherwise “code review” is full-on training, which is an entire other job from the one I was hired to do.
The client ditched that contracting firm, and the devs I work with now are worth putting in time on code review with – but damn, we got hella shit code in our codebase to deal with now. Some of it got tossed, some of it … we live with.
Computer write shite code and the human still gets blamed.
edit: we have become gods
The human turned the code in. They deserve 100% of the blame.
this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement.
They are the same picture.
More specifically: the same kind of decision makers are behind both.
Oh geez…who could have seen this coming?
Oh wait, every single senior developer who is currently railing against their moron AI-bandwagoning CEOs.
Middle and upper management are like little children - they’ll only learn that fire hurts by putting their hand in it.
But are the shareholders pleased?
I’ve been laughing at this quote for 5 minutes straight
It’s so good
He knows he’s right
Also: I code sometimes, and all of my code is of masterpiece quality. I cannot debug my own code, I ask for outside help and we have to dismantle the NT kernel to find out what’s gone wrong
And none of the forced tech support “AI” replacements work. And the companies don’t give a shit.
I’ve had this argument with them a few times at work. They are definitely going to replace this all with AI. Probably within the next year and no amount of us pointing out that it won’t work and they’ll end up having to bring us back, at 3x the rate, seems to have any effect on them.
I’m probably going to have to listen to a lot of arguments about this strawberry thing tomorrow.
Anyway whatever, severance is severance.
I was once in a similar position: company merger and they decided to move support offshore. We got 6 months lead notice and generous severance paid out as long as we stayed to the end. Fast forward a year and they took 85% customer approval to 13%. We got hired back at 1.5x our old pay rate, so not quite the 3x you mentioned. Hoping this works out similar for you in the end.
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I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.
AI code is not clever. It’s all developers averaged. Even if it worked properly, you’d get average quality code.
It’s rather lazy and cheap. This is where the quality is lacking.
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I don’t like the term “clever” in code, because sometimes it means “I’m too dumb to understand it”. Simply don’t touch clever code, unless you really understand it.
Best example is the fast inverse square root function in Quake. Yeah… it’s clever, but replace it by simple maths and let Quake have performance problems.
On the other hand, using AI for more than assisted coding is never clever. Some day some fuck will use it in medicine and will actually kill people. AI is not at fault here! It’s the programmer who killed a patient in this case by being irresponsible and lazy.
“AI” is just good for simple code snippets. (Which it stole from Github repos).
This whole ai bs needs to die already, and the people who lie about it held accountable.
No sh*t, this is what I predicted from day one.
We should have looked to melroy
Thank you! That is indeed a valid point. I was hoping more people came up with this valid remark. Do you have any other questions or predictions you would like to know? So that we don’t get “surprises” in the field of technology again?
Please hit me with some predictions :D
Sure!
- More and more (AI) spyware / malware is getting injected into projects and operating systems. Without the user consent. Mobile phones, laptops, desktop PCs, smart devices, etc. This comes from companies, but also from governments (no, not just China, but also US and EU).
- AI bubble itself will burst for the “normal users” and most companies who won’t really benefit from AI / LLMs as they thought they will. This will be apparenty only after several years. Where the highly skilled developers left the companies, and you are left with software engineers using AI tools which generates wrong code. The damage LLM (like AI Code generation) is doing and will be continue to do in the upcoming years is very untransparent, but it won’t be nice. We suddently are not getting AGI.
- More research and efforts will be put into alternative computers, like computers based on biology. Like using living cells. After all nature is so much more efficient then our current technologies. This could fix the energy demand issues we now see with AI.
- Biology computer will then also create huge moral issues. Since, how do we know the cells are not becoming aware? How do we know it won’t feel pain or the cells are feeling trapped? After all, we, humans, don’t even know how conscious really works and self aware.
- Users & companies want to get back in control over 5 or 15 years from now. So their could be a big move back from “Cloud” to on-prem. You are already seeing this now with the fediverse.
- The internet becomes too much centralized and controlled by goverments. Blocking public DNS IPs. Overruling them. The only answer would be is to create a much more decentralized internet alternative, so over 20 or 30 years from now (so we can still talk which each other about issues in the goverments par example). The current internet is just too fragile. And the root of the problem is already DNS. Meaning you need to basically start from scratch.
- Over 80 years Windows might only be used by corporate businesses. Most people might only use Android or any Linux based distro. This mainly depends on how fast we change our education process, so young people learn about alternatives. And schools should stop promoting and forcing people to use Microsoft products only. If schools won’t change, then we might have a huge issue, and this topic won’t be valid.
- Google will be split into multiple companies.
- Microsoft might be split later as well into multiple companies, but only much later, after Google.
- … Should I continue or stop here…?
@Eheran@lemmy.world @RagingRobot@lemmy.world
#it #software #ai #predictions
I have a lot of empathy for a lot of people. Even ones, who really don’t deserve it. But when it comes to people like these, I have absolutely none. If you make a chatbot do your corporate security, it deserves to burn to the ground
AI can be a useful tool, but it’s not a substitute for actual expertise. More reviews might patch over the problem, but at the end of the day, you need a competent software developer who understands the business case, risk profile, and concrete needs to take responsibility for the code if that code is actually important.
AI is not particularly good at coding, and it’s not particularly good at the human side of engineering either. AI is cheap. It’s the outsourcing problem all over again and with extra steps of having an algorithm hide the indirection between the expertise you need and the product you’re selling.
How come the hallucinating ghost in the machine is generating code so bad the production servers hallucinate even harder and crash?
You have to be hallucinating to understand.
I’ve licked the frog twice! How many does it take?
A-one. A-two-hoo. A-three… *Crumch*
I take it that frog hadn’t been de-boned.
I’m not sure how AI supposed to understand code. Most of the code out there is garbage. Even most of the working code out there in the world today is garbage.
Heck, I sometimes can’t understand my own code. And this AI thing tries to tell me I should move this code over there and do this and that and then poof it doesn’t compile anymore. The thing is even more clueless than me.
Randomly rearranging non working code one doesn’t understand… sometimes gets working code, sometimes doesn’t fix the bug, sometimes it won’t even compile anymore? Has no clue what the problem is and only solves it randomly by accident?
Sounds like the LLM is as capable as me /s
Sometimes you even get newer and more interesting bugs!
As a senior dev, this sounds like job security. :)
You know you’re Sr. when it doesn’t even bother you anymore. It amuses you.
My boss comes to me saying we must finish feature X by date Y or else.
Me:
We’re literally in this mess right now. Basically, product team set out some goals for the year, and we pointed out early on that feature X is going to have a ton of issues. Halfway through the year, my boss (the director) tells the product team we need to start feature X immediately or it’s going to have risk of missing the EOY goals. Product team gets all the pre-reqs finished about 2 months before EOY (our “year” ends this month), and surprise surprise, there are tons of issues and we’re likely to miss the deadline. Product team is freaking out about their bonuses, whereas I’m chuckling in the corner pointing to the multiple times we told them it’s going to have issues.
There’s a reason you hire senior engineers, and it’s not to wave a magic wand and fix all the issues at the last minute, it’s to tell you your expectations are unreasonable. The process should be:
- product team lists requirements
- some software dev gives a reasonable estimate
- senior dev chuckles and doubles it
- director chuckles and adds 25% or so to the estimate
- if product team doesn’t like the estimate, return to 1
- we release somewhere between 3 and 4
If you skip some of those steps, you’re going to have a bad time.
