Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses.
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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.
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@ludicity asking this question speaks inexperience loudly. Incompetence is widespread in all areas of life. Even before LLMs. Especially in enterprise.
@bagder I think it's the old Gel-Mann thing, where he has assumed that people in areas that aren't his own are probably real adults, because how else would the world keep working
My sweet summer Ed
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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 lot in corporate world, more rare in startups. In general, a lot of people unable to do basic things like fizzbuzz during interview.
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@bagder I think it's the old Gel-Mann thing, where he has assumed that people in areas that aren't his own are probably real adults, because how else would the world keep working
My sweet summer Ed
@ludicity makes perfect sense. You could of course easily be mislead into believing this based on the fact that most of the world keeps working
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@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 I don't think it's happened in my professional life. At each company I've worked at there are some programmers who seem to be a bit behind the curve, and occasionally a few who don't do very good work, but nobody I would consider completely useless.
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@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").
@buherator @ludicity I have run into security engineers a couple of times matching that description.
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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 would say for GCC, the difference is NOT pre-LLM vs post-LLM when it comes to software engineers that seems completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge.
In fact I would say the difference for GCC bug reports it would be when it became more common knowledge that there is undefined behavior in C/C++.
Since there is so much more things written about how signed integer overflow is undefined behavior and much more written about C/C++ aliasing rules; there have been much push back at their code having undefined behavior in it.
GCC seemly gets less and less bug reports that need to be closed as invalid for having undefined behavior in it. In the last 2 months, GCC has got around 3 or 4 that has had undefined behavior in it. Around 10 years ago, it would have been closer to 12 or so for a 2 month span.
These days my bug triaging is more about bug reports that have been already filed rather than invalid ones.
(been doing this for 20+ years now too so I have noticed trends like this).
