Comment by throwaway2037

Comment by throwaway2037 13 hours ago

    > Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice

Hot take: This reads like an old person looking down upon young people. Can you explain why it isn't? Else, this reads like: "When I was young, we worked hard and listened to our elders. These days, young people ignore our advice." Every time I see inter-generational commentary like this (which is inevitably from personal experience), I am immediately suspicious. I can assure you that when I was young, I did not listen to older people's advice and I tried to do everything my own way. Why would this be any different in the current generation? In my experience, it isn't.

On a positive note: I can remember mentoring some young people and watching them comb through blogs to learn about programming. I am so old that my shelf is/was full of O'Reilly books. By the time I was mentoring them, few people under 25 were reading O'Reilly books. It opened my eyes that how people changes more than what people learn. Example: Someone is trying to learning about access control modifiers for classes/methods in a programming language. Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT. In my (somewhat contrived) example, the how is changing, but not the what.

ryandrake 13 hours ago

> Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT.

The answer to this (throughout the ages) should be the same: read the authoritative source of information. The official API docs, the official language specification, the man page, the textbook, the published paper, and so on.

Maybe I am showing my age, but one of the more frustrating parts of being a senior mentoring a junior is when they come with a question or problem, and when I ask: “what does the official documentation say?” I get a blank stare. We have moved from consulting the primary source of information to using secondary sources (like O’Reilly, blogs and tutorials), now to tertiary sources like LLMs.

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wyclif 8 hours ago

[Disclaimer: I'm a Gen Xer. Insert meme of Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds.]
I think this is undoubtedly true from my observations. Recently, I got together over drinks with a group of young devs (most around half my age) from another country I was visiting.
One of the things I said, very casually, was, "Hey, don't sleep on good programming books. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. MIT Press. No Starch Press. Stuff like that."
Well, you should've seen the looks on their faces. It was obvious that advice went over very poorly. "Ha, read books? That's hard. We'd rather just watch a YouTube video about how to make a JS dropdown menu."
So yeah, I get that "showing my age" remark. Used to be the discipline in this industry is that you shouldn't ask a question of a senior before you'd read the documentation. If you had read the documentation, man pages, googled, etc., and still couldn't come up with an answer, then you could legitimately ask for a senior mentor's time. Otherwise, the answer from the greybeards would have been "Get out of my face, kid. Go RTFM."
That system that used to exist is totally broken now. When reading and understanding technical documentation is viewed as "old school", then you know we have a big problem.

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HeyLaughingBoy 9 hours ago

No. Just no.
If I have a problem with a USB datastream, the last place I'm going to look is the official USB spec. I'll be buried for weeks. The information may be there, but it will take me so long to find it that it might as well not.
The first place to look is a high quality source that has digested the official spec and regurgitated it into something more comprehensible.
[shudder] the amount of life that I've wasted discussing the meaning of some random phrase in IEC-62304 is time I will never get back!

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transfer92 13 hours ago

> I can assure you that when I was young, I did not listen to older people's advice and I tried to do everything my own way.

Hot take: This reads like a person who was difficult to work with.

Senior people have responsibility, therefore in a business situation they have authority. Junior people who think they know it all don't like this. If there's a disagreement between a senior person and a junior person about something, they should, of course, listen to each other respectfully. If that's not happening, then one of them is not being a good employee. But if they are, then the supervisor makes the final call.

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shagie 13 hours ago

The tangent to that is it is also changing with the how much one internalizes about the problem domain and is able to apply that knowledge later. Hard fought knowledge from the old days is something that shapes how I design systems today.

However, the tendency of people who reach for ChatGPT today to solve a problem results in them making the same mistakes again the next time since the information is so easy to access. It also results in things that are larger are more difficult... the "how do you architect this larger system" is something you learn by building the smaller systems and learning about them so that their advantages and disadvantages and how and such becomes an inherent part of how you conceive of the system as a whole. ... Being able to have ChatGPT do it means people often don't think about the larger problem or how it fits together.

I believe that is harder for a junior who is using ChatGPT to advance to being a mid level or senior developer than it is for a junior from the old days because of the lack of retention of the knowledge of the problems and solutions.

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moosedev 8 hours ago

They’re going to get promoted anyway. The “senior” title will simply (continue to) lose meaning to inflation.

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chinaexpert1 12 hours ago

Yeah Ive got to agree with this hot take. Put yourself in the junior's shoes: if s/he wasn't there you'd be pulling it out of Claude Code yourself, until your satisfied with what comes out enough to start adding your "senior" touches. The fact is the way code is written has changed fundamentally, especially for kids straight out of college, and the answer is to embrace that everyone is using it, not all this shaming. If you're so senior, why not show the kid how to use the LLM right, so the work product is right from the start? It seems part of the problem is dinosaurs are suspicious of the tech, and so dont know how to mentor for it. That being said, Im a machine learning engineer not a developer, and these LLMs have been a godsend. Assuming I do it correctly, there's just no way I could write a whole 10,000 line pipeline in under a week without it. While coding from outputs and error-driven is the wrong way for software Juniors, its fine by me for my AI work. It comes down to knowing when there's a silent error, if you haven't been through everything line by line. I've been caught before, Im not immune, its embarrassing, but every since GPT was in preview I have made it my business to master it.

I have a friend who is a dev, a very senior one at that, who spins up 4 Claudes at once and does the whole enterprises work. Hes a "Senior AI Director" with nobody beneath him, not a single direct report, and NO knowledge of AI or ML, to my chagrin.

So now I'm whining too...

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JSR_FDED 10 hours ago

This isn’t a question of the senior teaching the junior how to use the LLM correctly.
Once you’re a senior you can exercise judgement on when/how to use LLMs.
When you’re a junior you haven’t developed that judgement yet. That judgement comes from consulting documentation, actually writing code by hand, seeing how you can write a small program just fine, but noticing that some things need to change when the code gets a lot bigger.
A junior without judgement isn’t very valuable unless he/she is working hard to develop that judgement. Passing assignments through to the LLM does not build judgement, so it’s not a winning strategy.

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