Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses.
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@ludicity Like… basically everyone I’ve interacted with in my career except a notable handful?
@ludicity Ask me how many times someone other than me has, in my presence, used or mentioned using a debugger (As contrary to inserting a bunch of debug prints in the code).
Zero. It’s zero times.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity Sadly, the answer is not “rarely”. In the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work in a fairly stable group, so can’t really differentiate between before and after LLMs. But regardless, there is a reasonable fraction of NNPPs — net negative productivity programmers.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity About 90% of the time, so goes Sturgeon's Law.
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@haruki_zaemon Oh shit, I didn't know you were on Mastodon!
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity maybe I moved in rarefied circles, but the big divide I've encountered is software engineers who understood things in general vs application "developers" who only knew one stack or app, and would frustratingly be convinced the sun shone from Redmond or wherever.
The advent of LLMs has disrupted this a bit, as they're more likely to answer in general terms, or contextualise the offering from the blessed stack as a poor imitation of a far superior open source equivalent
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
See this post about -1x programmers:
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116085039513622322 -
@nqd Online, I think I get exposed to way more random people. IRL, I was in a bubble of mostly incompetent people (it was huge) and now I'm in a bubble of mostly competent people (it's very small).
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
Uncommonly, both before and after LLMs.
I’ve generally been fortunate to work for companies that filter out people with low skill pretty well without being terrifying during the interview, and also for being on teams with mostly mid-level and higher developers/engineers.
The commonest “problem” behavior I’ve seen is people (at many levels of technical skill) having significant degrees of learned helplessness when confronted with problems outside their stronger skill sets. The developers I know mostly don’t use LLMs for coding or similar tasks, so I can’t really comment on “before vs. after” there.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity more frequently now, and specifically with software engineers who already had a lot of experience beforehand, but seem to be losing all their knowledge and best practices and making far worse choices when it comes to their code nowadays.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity Depends. Rarely professionally, but I did most of my hiring for most of my life and I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe during the interviews.
The worst people were exactly like LLM - stupid, loud and unable to admit they are wrong.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity Among free software developers (a community I professionally deal with): almost never.
In corporate environments, working on enterprise software: constantly, all the time, always, everywhere. The exception was Google (~12 years ago) where everyone was pulling their weight and more; Google's problems are of another nature.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I've mostly met great people, before and after. maybe I'm lucky
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity I worked mostly at (pen)testing and have always been astonished how basics of basics were unclear for many people (e.g. "does this code run on the client or the server?"). My opinion in summary is that the general quality of sw engineering/ers declined since managers figured out they can bill by the hour instead of fulfillment under the guise of "agile" (see "I'm gonna write myself a new minivan this afternoon"). -
Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
Probably it's downstream from where I live, but almost everyone I ran into seemed incompetent to some degree, and most of them incompetent enough I wouldn't work with them again.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity
pre LLM: rarely in open source, often in corporate.Now: likely in open source, mainly as security reporters who play copy&paste monkey with our project and their LLM. Cant say anything about corporate as I no longer experience that (thank the heavens).
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity It wasn't great before, but I've only seen one very specific slice of the tech world. I've encountered developers using technology they didn't understand. I've received too many *screenshots of stack traces* from developers on other teams, and they expected me to solve their problem for them. (Stack traces will, conveniently, show you exactly where the error is. And also it's your code.) I don't have super powers, I just know how to read and... program computers.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity A handful, maybe two or three over the span of 10 years.
I've been extremely lucky, but I also made sure to work for organizations with good hiring practices and/or appeal to competent people. -
@ludicity It wasn't great before, but I've only seen one very specific slice of the tech world. I've encountered developers using technology they didn't understand. I've received too many *screenshots of stack traces* from developers on other teams, and they expected me to solve their problem for them. (Stack traces will, conveniently, show you exactly where the error is. And also it's your code.) I don't have super powers, I just know how to read and... program computers.
@ludicity After, it's hard to say, because I haven't moved much during the LLM "revolution", and I already work at a company with learned helplessness. But there's no way it's gotten better, not at all.
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Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:
"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"
@ludicity asking this question speaks inexperience loudly. Incompetence is widespread in all areas of life. Even before LLMs. Especially in enterprise.
