| ▲ | keyle 7 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM. This gives me somewhat of a knee jerk reaction. When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast. There was this long argument that you should know things and not have to look it up all the time. Altavista was a joke, and Google was cheating. Then syntax highlighting came around and there'd always be a guy going "yeah nah, you shouldn't need syntax highlighting to program, you screen looks like a Christmas tree". Then we got stuff like auto-complete, and it was amazing, the amount of keystrokes we saved. That too, was seen as heresy by the purists (followed later by LSP - which many today call heresy). That reminds me also, back in the day, people would have entire Encyclopaedia on DVDs collections. Did they use it? No. But they criticised Wikipedia for being inferior. Look at today, though. Same thing with LLMs. Whether you use them as a powerful context based auto-complete, as a research tool faster than wikipedia and google, as rubber-duck debugger, or as a text generator -- who cares: this is today, stop talking like a fossil. It's 2025 and junior developers can't work without LSP and LLM? It's fine. They're not in front of a 386 DX33 with 1 book of K&R C and a blue EDIT screen. They have massive challenged ahead of them, the IT world is complete shambles, and it's impossible to decipher how anything is made, even open source. Today is today. Use all the tools at hand. Don't shame kids for using the best tools. We should be talking about sustainability of such tools rather than what it means to use them (cf. enshittification, open source models etc.) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | sifar 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It is not clear though, which tools enable and which tools inhibit your development at the beginning of your journey. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | discreteevent an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer Reading books was never about knowledge. It was about knowhow. You didn't need to read all the books. Just some. I don't know how many developers I met who would keep asking questions that would be obvious to anyone who had read the book. They never got the big picture and just wasted everyone's time, including their own. "To know everything, you must first know one thing." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ah, but lets do leetcode on the whiteboard as interview, for an re-balancing a red-black tree, regardless of how long those people have been in the industry and the job position they are actually applying for. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | Barrin92 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
>"in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious it isn't hilarious, it's true. My father (now in his 60s) who came from a blue collar background with very little education taught himself programming by manually copying and editing software out of magazines, like a lot of people his age. I teach students now who have access to all the information in the world but a lot of them are quite literally so scatterbrained and heedless anything that isn't catered to them they can't process. Not having working focus and memory is like having muscle atrophy of the mind, you just turn into a vegetable. Professors across disciplines have seen decline in student abilities, and for several decades now, not just due to LLMs. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | aprilthird2021 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast. But I mean, you can get by without memorizing stuff sure, but memorizing stuff does work out your brain and does help out in the long run? Isn't it possible we've reached the cliff of "helpful" tools to the point we are atrophying enough to be worse at our jobs? Like, reading is surely better for the brain than watching TV. But constant cable TV wasn't enough to ruin our brains. What if we've got to the point it finally is enough? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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