The client wants to drag and drop their own personalized excel file with no guaranteed formatting or column order or data contract in order to import their data into our system <3
Needs more AI to randomly guess what the columns might be
I love how this is a universal experience.
Do we have the same client?
Everyone has and is that client.
Yeah but when I’m like that it’s justified
Or headers. Just unlabeled data in a CSV.
Yep, RIP
I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.
When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.
Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.
Heh, that won’t stop a C-level from thinking that you just write code.
Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.
They also underestimated how lazy people are. Personally I will never use a self checkout if a have a bunch of produce (which is most trips to the grocery store). I can’t be bothered to slowly look up each item in their database.
Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.
That’s why the best places to work tend to be the places where your CEO has had your job before.
It’s no guarantee. I tell you, the CEO position is like a poison to the brain. My company CEO is so hopped up on LLMs I’m highly suspecting that his slack messages are written by an LLM.
That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
That’s a good analogy, I will use that.
Full self driving… NOW.
See. It can turn the steering wheel on is own. Feature complete!!
The problem is that the CEO who believes he just writes code probably believes all a bus driver does is turn the steering wheel.
It won’t automate your job, but isn’t it already replacing junior devs via team downsizing?
Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.
So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.
You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.
So I’m not wasting my time in college then?
Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.
A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.
I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.
Whether or not you’re wasting your time in college is only something you can answer. However, there definitely are jobs out there for junior software devs right now. If economic outlooks improve, I’d expect demand for juniors to rise also.
Anecdote: I saw stats shared on social media by a CS professor at my former college. Enrollment for their classes is way down this year, when “back in my day” they were packed. Make of it what you will, but it’s possible young people might no longer be seeing software development as an easy career to get into. That could make it a more attractive prospect for someone who’s in it for more than just money.
I can share my experience with college, which it took me a while to appreciate but eventually I realized that while it wasn’t apparent at the time, it did make a difference. But of course, your mileage may wary, it’s just my personal experience.
I felt like I’m forced to go through a lot of bloat I’ll probably never need - why do I have to learn stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Smalltalk and other obscure languages that I’ll realistically never need? Why force so much in-depth math, I’ll probably never need to be able to formally prove the Big O of a Hashtable…
After spending few years working after/during college in offensive cybersecurity, where most of my colleagues did not have a degree, I’ve eventually realized what was the point of all these classes. I noticed that people kept reffering to programming as in “I’m a python programmer”, or “I’m a java programmer”, but I never really felt like that - when someone asked me if I can write something in any language, it didn’t matter what it is, I can just relatively quickly pick up the syntax and write anything I need in whatever you need, and I eventually realized that that’s exactly thanks to the college - the point was not to make me a Smalltalk or Prolog programmer, but to give me a PTSD from every different style of languages, from OOP through functional to whatever Prolog is, and while I do not remember almost anything, I still have the basic understanding of how does that style works, and when I look up any new language I need to use for the job, I’ve already seen and was forced to once learn and understand (well enough to pass exams) something with similar concepts.
And that’s a really big advantage that people without degrees don’t usually have (at least from my experience with my colleagues). It will teach you how to relatively quickly pick up different technologies and use new things, and that is a really valuable thing. And it’s the same about data structures and other math - you will probably not remember it, but the feeling that “wait a minute, this problem sounds familiar, isn’t there like a obscure tree-thing structure that solves exactly this efficiently?” or “wasn’t there some magic with stacking trig coeficients for this?” will stay with you, and give you a headstart in looking up the concrete details that would be pretty hard to find otherwise.
So I’m really glad I went to college. And in addition to that, it was amazing for networking - I had a masters in Gamedev and while that didn’t teach me almost anything new, it gave me a lot of friends and an amazing community of passionate people that I keep on making games with.
Could AI allow you to write code in python, and then turn the python into a static language with static variables at least?
But the main benefits of static typing is in making the programming part easier. What do you gain from translating dynamically typed languages into a statically typed language?
Well that can’t be true, why would anyone have ever made a dynamic typing system?
That’s also to make programming easier. Different programmers have different needs.
If those project managers could read, they would actually be able to use Jira.
I regret what I wrote.
I realised, just being able to read, doesn’t make sure they can actually use Jira
deleted by creator
Is it?
I’m checking the comments to be sure, as I also get a slight “AI-feel” from this meme.
You know what we, in the industry, call a detailed specification fo requirements detailed enough to produce software? Code.
Button that does something? That’s too advanced for me, I’ll use a library
cries in left_pad
It’s kind of astonishing how many people leaned on that library just to add fucking spaces to strings
It should be in the standard library anyway. Why the hell is it not?!
I mean yeah, I can write my own function to do the same thing and probably I’ve done it at some point in some coding exercise as a beginner, but this seems like such a common thing to use, it should be in the standard library of any sane language.
I had a client once explain to me that his request for the 75% redesign of his mobile app would be simple because “it’s just 3 pages”
That was the exact quote
I know that was hardly related to the post, but it reminded me of that and I needed to vent to my therapist (aka strangers on Lemmy)
I feel you. Just ended coding “a little special case” that resulted in dozens of files changed, all because I refused to make it with dirty hidden hack, and that was a clear-cut technical if-branching even, no vague ideas
Talking to a client is times that amount of hurdle
Surprised there’s no one in the comments going bat shit crazy that this was made by AI. Are we not doing that anymore?
You just had to wait 2 more hours for that.
Well, the table sucks. I can’t draw and I could do better.
Managers about to find out the hard way that all the requirements are in the brains of those they laid off.
I’m sure coding bootcamp and AI will turn them into leet hax0rs.
Definitely happening at at least one major company I’m familiar with.
Requirements and everything else.
I feel this in my bones. Even before the recent round of restructuring we’ve had a significant about of turnover. Our infrastructure is a massive rube golberg machine with multiple houses of cards built on top of it. Institutional knowledge was never written down and it has been leaving the company at an accelerating rate over the past 5 years. Tons of “new blood” making lots of assumptions on how things work is resulting in… humorous end results.
Whoa whoa, hold on there! You can’t expect a product manager to come up with such detailed specs!
I am a product manager that loves coming up with detailed specs. How else will I actually get what I want? If you care about some specific behavior/outcome you must specify it. This logic is lost on my leadership.
AI slop image, for this gag?
How queer, I must report to my supervisor posthaste!
AI:
AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying “Hello World!”
AI Programmer: “What a sensible requirement! Here you go.”
AI Billing Department: “Project completed, that’ll be 10 million dollars.”
Client AI Payments Department: “Sounds right, paid!”Me: I need spec – not just trust code Manager: You always make unnecessary demands, I’m replacing you AI: I would be happy to help you, if you could provide spec? Manager: god fuckin dammit
I honestly sometimes think to go into business myself just so I can write contracts that say “you will give us a fucking spec” and just keep billing while they fuck around not providing a spec
“Y’know, I’ve been thinking… The app is missing a couple of things, like This, and That, and it should also do This after That, but not That after This, and maybe even navigate to The Other Thing after 3 Launch events, while also not doing that if the user is under a Pisces moon in the 4th Year of Wilting…”
“So… you want a Rate the App pop-up with specific trigger conditions?”
“What?! No! I want one of those prompts with the stars and the redirect to the Store which lets people post reviews of the app, what are you even talking about?!”
AI Junior Dev: short-circuits
It wouldn’t short circuit, it would just say “OK, no problem!” and then output bullshit.
