The End Of Jr Engineers

Steve y famous Google Amazon Tech lead the death of the junior engineer hey thank you trying to keep up appreciate that delicious one and it's from Source craft Source craft they're very talented Engineers over at the source graph over at the source graphs all right the death of the junior engineer this blog post is somewhat speculative the sky might not be falling but my Spidey Sense is definitely tinkling the way we are all doing our jobs in software is changing potentially in big ways so let us uh so let's think of this as a thought exercise this right this guy's writing is great okay I'm happy to hear this I'm worried that this is just going to be AI is going to change the world and that's that but let's see what happens uh with that disclaimer we're off I've been chatting with a bunch of both Junior and senior developer type folk at different companies Lately by cross uh articulating these conversations I've picked up on an emerging new pattern which is like 80% of you are way smarter than me my goodness what have I been doing but also another pattern which is that a lot of people pick up picked a bad year to be Junior developer a whole lot of people I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to be just getting started in today's industry yeah agree I I agree I agree with that statement I think that today is a very hard day to get started I think four years ago was a much more amazing time to get started today is very very difficult feels bad not just the computer industry any industry uh so this would be this is like the classic um this right here is just an extremely classic to like I'm an expert at something and I see a trend in something therefore it applies to everything which is just not true like right now if you are getting started as like a journeyman electrician a journeyman carpenter a journeyman anything to do with the physical realities your pay has gone up 50 60 70% in the last three years right you're making you're literally making a way more money doing basic trade stob than you ever ever would a great move to be in trade right now it's a great time to be in in trade right now right trade trades are always dude they they're shockingly good a good year to be a welder exactly my attrition brother makes way more than I do it's it's wild it's wild how much money is being made right now in the trades we're talking like $120 $130 an hour you can hire certified but not insured electricians for like 6070 an hour right now and that's just them and I'm in remember I'm in South Dakota I'm in a place that probably pays less than the average Place yeah double California yeah so right now only in the US yeah I I only talk about the US I have no idea about the rest of the world rest of the world is vastly different I'm sure there's things in the rest of the world that are completely going great versus in the US going terrible um anyways it's just that there are industries that are thriving today if you are in the building type world it's wild how much money right now is out there in the US if I was an electrician I charge $200 an hour right now and you like the weird the crazy part is you could get away with that you you could actually get away with that um it's a bad year to be a junior anything my wife Lynn and I are are huge horror movie Buffs so to reflect with uh the somber theme of today's rant I will use the horror movie titles to introduce the sections let's start by talking about what's happening to Junior developers The Purge F that show our first story of the day is about a law firm and has nothing to do with programming but it indeed centrally relevant to the crisis that is just starting to loom ominously as crisis love to do my buddy uh Jean Kim gave me permission to share this story about his friend who is managing partner at a 50 person Law Firm oh boy oh boy strap in when you need permission to tell a story this is not going to be a good one in short one might surmise that all hell is breaking loose at said Law Firm because of chat jity I would assume complete opposite I assume chat jippy is largely useless in law great in email Communications I know a lawyer that um gives effectively writes like 80% of it and then tells chat GP to kind of like fix up the response to make it more polite to all the things and then goes back through and and rones it into how they write and like that's it you could never do chat chippity for law like it'd be be horrible for law with some wondering whether the entire structure of their firm which has been very stable for a long time might now be completely wrong their whole com structure pension succession planning everything is going through an existential crisis to to a freaking chatot I'm shocked by that because like writing an email and communication is one thing the law is a complete like the law la like programming you can't be almost right like you can't be 85% correct that it's just not how the law works that's called going to jail if you're 80% correct on the law you are going to jail yeah yeah lawyers struggle with the law because it's extremely difficult the problem you see is that there could be a future where they don't need Junior Associates anymore increasingly they don't need senior Associates who a describe the task to be done I.E create prompts and review the resulting work for accuracy and correctness the high-end llvm do so uh with tasks normally fielded by Junior associate lawyers there isn't much room left for the real Junior associate on the payroll I wonder how correct this is because every like at least I have a few friends that are lawyers and this is not the sentiment that I'm generally Gathering From then is that chat gipies are are this useful an LM can produce research summaries briefs contracts memos dude contracts would be crazy to use chat gity pleading petitions anything they need all the documents it creates are perfect with these uh with the catch that if someone senior doesn't double check the work before it's uh before a judge sees it you might wind up in jail or something yeah old chat jity in jail I got jailed due to chat jippy catching the llm in a hallucination catching a junior associate in a mistake pretty similar really just two options for generating the same output except one of those opinions options is fast and tireless and essentially free the other one puked on the chocolate fountain at the the holiday party interesting take I'm still I I'm still very curious if this is true at all right oddly specific oddly specific oh woo oh you picked a bad year to be a junior associate lawyer that's damn sure sorry graduating class of 2024 sucks to be you I'm I'm very curious how true this actually is versus is this just a company that's been sold the goodness of llms you know because there's right now there's a lot of grift in AI there's a ton of grift in AI that is causing people to be very um thinking like the world is actually ending oh everything will just be over uh nft bro very skeptical of the chocolate fountain very skeptical of the chocolate fountain um but I I do see the general point which is if as a senior lawyer I have to review word for word everything a junior writes and it takes them a week to produce it why not take three minutes to produce something with with known failures and flaws and review that like I I get the general sentiment though like I think that that makes sense I think that argument makes a lot of sense but my guess is that your senior your senior uh people it takes them an increasingly larger and more thoughtful approach to everything that an llm produces in comparison and then not only that the junior by the third or fourth task becomes significantly better right and so the amount you have to check goes down down down down down whereas you know right now we have no proof that the llms are getting any better people are keep saying that Chad jiid 5 is going to be like a PhD student compared to uh compared to Chad jipp 4 being a high school student but I would argue that a Chad jipp 4 was not even close to a high school student Chad jipp 4 my daughter could out figure out how many RS are in Strawberry versus jippy 40 right and so they like these comparison it's straw rary dude it's straw rary right my daughter is six and she knows that banan aren't a real thing let's see oh this is a great okay Air Jordan This hey by the way a Jordan your name is fantastic but second off historically we're great at prioritizing short-term profit versus long-term viability so we uh so we should be totally fine this is facts we tend to do things this pretty often which is that we believe we see something that could be useful and could save money therefore we go all in on it and then in a a year or two you realize you eff up and that company goes under right uh Jean shared the law form story to illustrate how widespread this problem is He suggests that the uh the same chaos which is undoubtedly unfolding across legal firms everywhere could affect all writing and editorial jobs you you can imagine a world where a demand for junior writers and editors starts to evaporate Market forces are nudging everyone towards having senior writers who are also good prompt Engineers this can make more sense in the sense that as long as you're not writing like again legal is much different if you're just writing something having the availability of a gyy could be good but even when I just recently I tried something I tried putting in one of my YouTube scripts and asking it to like color up the language a little bit try to like add some new words that I don't often use and what came out out had a bunch of words that I don't use but it just sounded so mediocre you know what I mean it's like it had all the words that are amazing but at the exact same time it read like such a bore I don't know how to describe it it could take the same thing I said and just make it boring I don't know how it it's very which is fine I guess for corporate speak jippy as a style yeah it's like the most average style it's soulless that's probably the best way to put it it's soulless it's soulless more than anything else it's like a greyman from Wheel of Time you can barely even see it you can be like it takes a very keen eye to look at a grayman uh an an arrangement that meets all of their needs faster and cheaper than hiring Juniors uh Jean uh ha as an accomplished and Senior author is delighted with his productivity games from llm Choice Claude Opus he showed me a big writing project that he just finished in which he spent easily 45 plus minutes crafting The Prompt refining it until he had a 7500w narrative that he could serve as a starting point for rewriting editing and adjustment in comparison this blog post is about half that size and the draft was fantastic I have read it and it's glorious interesting interesting as the wheel Wills I feel like this perspective is missing the forest uh from the trees what happens 15 years when all seniors have retired and there's no Juniors trained up to replace him yeah I know I mean this that's exactly it is that we're making short-term intentional gains now not realizing the the cost that's not an author yeah that's an editor and again remember if you're editing so there's this thing called anchor bias which is very very important to remember in this if you use chaty PT to give you out something I'm not saying this is bad you get out something what happens you're going to start from there and edit it which means that you're going to bias or anchor yourself to what's being said which means that you're not going to stray very far from it which means that you might just produce really like even though you're faster and totally depends on the the the the the mode of communication like if I'm just responding to somebody you know like there's various modes of communication but if you're doing creative writing being a standard deviation from the median isn't going to help you right like that's not what you want to be you want to you want to be very much more interesting than that on a good day J can write a thousand words per day his estimates is that Claude did uh for him in 90 minutes what would normally have taken him 10 days it solves the blank page problem and it gets him to the to the 20 yard line where the fun begins see I'm curious I'm I'm very curious about this because I wonder how average if we're going to see the Aver the great averaging of stories he estimates using an llm as a writing tool gets him 2 to 3x faster now helping him meet personal requirements and qu power okay I mean hey I could be wrong I could be wrong I'm fine being wrong that saying that I I am I am absolutely incorrect Jean could not be happier at least for himself because in addition to being faster he also feels working this way is more fun all work and no play makes Jack a doll boy right he's a happy dude but he's terrified for his teenage kids interesting interesting I fell in love with JS in the 90s fell out of love with it in the early 2000s AI feels the same vibing it's going to turn into a even bigger mess seeing some many next big things uh was VR in 80s and 90s Etc AI rocking that Meme space and Fields yeah I I generally agree the thing is I I I truly do hope you know that I'm not anti- aai I'm not anti- aai at all I I actually I think there's a lot of good things you can do with it it's just that I'm not convinced I'm just simply not convinced that it's it's it's it's something that's fantastic yeah I'm terrified for young people too because we are training a lot of them to be hopeless and useless yeah yeah facts facts and I watched the Pod scene from the original black and white 50s version of the movie I love this by the way Invasion of the Body Snatchers is such a good show I was about eight and wow that was traumatizing scary my wife has also been watching horror movies since she was about four same here I watched The Exorcist when I was four and we share a deep love for of horror probably because we're all messed up from childhood yeah yeah yeah yeah we've seen the same plot play out for legal profession and writing and editing jobs where llms are threatening uh to out people the people uh let's watch the same movie again in some genres closer to home just a few days ago our illustrious head of AI rasib uh marota motra uh was showing me a classifier and multiclass prediction model that he had trained and deployed in a single day with Chad jippy he said it would have been a six- we University senior level intern project a year ago this is affecting data science too interesting let's just believe the like I see some people saying I don't even believe this let's just believe this is true an a very quick counter I have to this which is the thing produced something that is already well known and researched I'm sure I'm sure this man motra knows his stuff it's an echo it's an echo of something that already exists as opposed to something that's new so sure maybe maybe it is a six we project for a senior level uh project uh SL intern project uh uh project a year ago it's affecting data science too I'm curious if it's actually affecting data science or if it's just making it more approachable for data science and only if you have this level of knowledge you know and there's there's there's all sorts of things that they're very obvious with ai ai can most certainly take a master and give give him an additional like superpower a quickness I've seen it myself but I also found myself struggling with some things I realized that I was also producing worse things at the exact same time I was producing more things so I'm very curious how well this actually scales is this a one-off thing that a an arguably master of AI can do by himself or is this something that is distributive and actually works across all people can a senior level inter SL intern can the senior level University senior level intern can they do this in a day an old friend great programmer and mathematician who left AI for Quantum Computing a few years uh for a few years is back to programming he confided somewhat excitedly that even though he does does a lot of programming he doesn't consider himself a programmer anymore he said uh he's more of a reviewer coach and Nanny something like that he makes Chad jippy do all the work and he just crafts prompts and reviews the output I really you know I feel like I've never given this a real shot where I've fully let chat jippy do that like how far can you actually get with this you know what I mean like how far can you actually go I like I I get I get I get the idea that you could potentially do some sort of really small pet project but could you get far enough inside of a real code base write me a tower defense and a game and Zig try it well try it is like a multi-day attempt at trying to do something this is pretty much my job but I work in rails which is uh absurdly opinionated really so you just use Chad jiy to write all your code a lot of really 80% you know that that Meme with Seymour Skinner saying am I wrong or are the kids out of touch sometimes I wondering if I'm out of touch I feel like I'm correct I feel like I'm correct but I'm always willing to be quote unquote out of touch the kids are wrong on this one the K I mean to me it just seems like when I'm writing my own code I have so much ideas of where I'm going and how big it is that I'm not sure if I could write it right because English is such a Terri terbly nuanced language that writing has so much implications to it that describing what I want to write in English feels impossible honestly I find it a better version of Google I buy this this seems reasonable I might use chat chippity to draft a PC but I would never build anything in production with it it could be skill issues ah this just feels it just this just feels so hard this just feels so hard for me to actually believe that you you would like this exist that you could just you could just coach chat GPT all all day to program for you yes you can can you all right all right tomorrow we're writing we're we're we're using chat GP humans aren't special I fully disagree with you I think this is one of those I I think who St who said that dang it it's it's like a different color on on my two things someone just said humans aren't special I I just fully disagree with you on that one right humans are extremely special humans are wildly intense and this is a very uh M this is a very materialist way to look at life which is that humans are just just neurons firing and that's it we're not Banning someone over that come on shut up like I I I'm just not reductionist does not equal materialist yeah but I mean it's okay meatbag but like this is the meatbag argument it it comes from materialism I mean that's the that's the hierarchy of of where this all comes from I just I just don't buy it you know I'm just I'm just not humans are special source humans Source trust me bro yeah well it's just cells is it then why can't we just take a bunch of why can't we just make cells and make life just make life bro come on come on if you just have a little bit of Dino DNA we should just be able to just create life right no we can't we can't make life that's the thing is we can't no we don't see you guys keep saying that but what you guys don't realize is that whenever life is being made it's using like an egg using it's using like a chicken it's using something we're using some we're we're piggybacking off of life we're not actually making life we're making versions of it we're just using a piggyback to go somewhere we can't make life we could only jump on something come on bootstrapping we have a bootstrap problem we have a strong bootstrapping problem for sure cuz let's just be real if we could create life you know what the first thing we would do I mean dude let's just be real here there would be like dudes dudes with with with statistically un AAG D's and multiple of them okay can we just be real here catg girls catg girls and dicks all day long that's all that's going to happen catg girls dicks all day long hu to a biobots all day long okay we all know how degenerate it would be it would be immediately degenerate immediately degenerate come on all right anyways let's keep on going uh that resonate resonated with me since I too have been replaced by a bubble bath plant pod a human who pretends to be a programmer but is in fact outsourced uh Outsourcing almost all of it I'm not even sure I'm I literally don't even know what that means to tell you the honest truth naturally when I say make chat GPD do all the work there is plenty of coding we still do by hand uh what I mean is that chat first is the default and writing by hand with completions naturally is our fallback plan my Quantum friend and I are both finding much less need uh for that fallback recently yeah you know what I you know naturally I will say that I'm out of date here and I will give it a shot I will genuinely try to write a program with chat GPT first and maybe I'm just hey maybe I have PR skills maybe I'm just a maybe I'm just a huge proter just a just a just a real PR problem since then I have found several other amazing colleagues who have also adopted the coding strategy to accelerate themselves and frankly it has been a bit of a relief to hear confirmation coming from so many great people that chat first programming is indeed a new thing how much really all right how many people that okay how many people have seen me in how fast I program is it going to be that enjoyable will I be able to go that fast blazingly no you're way faster at making mistakes hell yeah brother your butthole controls the mouse I'm not even sure what that means different type speed in the beginning complexity grows GPT won't keep up and that's what I worry is that I have it all in my head you're not fast you're but you're a true programmer huh interesting co-pilot used to write all my finest bugs it wrote all my finest bugs honestly my biggest my biggest long-term time syncs were all co-pilot bugs like all of them like all of them as of recent uh that's why I quit using it is that I realized I just kept getting just co-piloted and I just got so pissed off at it because it like was so almost correct but when I put it all together and the All These Little Things like the the amalgamation of it became seriously incorrect but it was so hard it was so hard to catch where it went wrong laughs an old man I guess I'm an old man I must be an old man I'm an old man I agree okay we'll keep on going is it really new clearly this new thing has already been around in other domains since even the original chat GPT was able to replace a lot of human labor but for coding let's be serious here chat coding has sucked it of let's see it would often be more efforts to coax the llm into working solution than writing it yourself with the previous model generation you feed an 800 line source code file and ask for substantial changes even chat jity for Turbo o Omni oace uh which many of you are still using right now uh will often run a muck well argued hallucinations code that fails uh to parse uh snarky code left as an exercise empty functions designs leading you in circles going nowhere unexpected refactorings missing code and all the manner of other frustrations you probably tried it yourself you know what I mean so chat programming has been sort of a buff nowadays most people equate AI coding assistance with Co code autocompletes uh they think of chat as something you use when you're just starting out maybe it's faster doc search in fact there's a widespread perception that chat is for junior developers and becomes less useful as you can experience it and the truth be told this wasn't entirely inaccurate prior to miday the models weren't quite there but in the past 6 weeks things have been very very different and you my friend are missing out the perception that chat is just for juniors is now Flatout misconception one that I pray is Stone Dead In Your Heart by the end of this post so Chad chippity 40 is is is is s tier he's spot on to be honest it's really that much better or is it is it cloud is it some other one nugat you know I don't know if I want to I don't know if I want to allow this I don't know if I want to allow this one cuz it almost feels like it's kind of funny that I don't allow nougat modules yeah you know what I'm going to say nougat uh Nate modules is inappropriate for this stream get your C out of here get your C out of here very in appropriate um all right chat chat based programming which I will preemptively label chat oriented programming chop uh or just uh I like cough better because I suspect I'll be let's see I'll be to be saying it a lot I suspect I'll be to be saying it a lot maybe you should quit letting chat GD write your sentences is a brand spanking new phenomenon like seriously it's just over a month old I first noted it when Chad jiid 40 came out which was miday you remember that big manufacturer drama right about open AI 40 jippy model supposedly be having Scarlett Johansson's voice yeah that that's the one I remember not supposedly supposedly is a real big stretch of the imagination here can we all uh can we all just remember uh how definitely Scarlett Johansson's voice that voice was that was extremely Scarlett Johansson's voice the the model changed everything about programming overnight when Chad jiid 40 dropped it could suddenly edit a thousand line source file uh and uh a figure that encompasses 95% of the source files in most repos worldwide with tremendous precision and faithfulness to the original leaving the untouched parts of the file 99.9% diff perfect every once in a rare while I see a drop of space or a character uh or slightly Mis indent Al line but that's it from what I've seen Google Gemini and thops Cloud 3 Opus have also cleared this hurdle which makes multimodel programming a good ball workor against hallucinations and a great way to select the best candidate for design just feed your query to all of them make them fight it out it's a common chop technique okay so let me just get this straight let me just get this straight you take a thousand line source file you hand it to chat jiid 3 to cloud and to Google Gemini Gemini says something about a minor and C++ and how it's inappropriate to show them so you discard Gemini's result along with black vikings and black uh black popes and then you go to Just Chad Deputy versus cloud and you're going through it and so then you diff the Thousand line file against the original and against each other and use that as a way in which you determine who has the best one and then from there you go and do any hand edits if needed okay I guess I'll try I'll we'll try this we'll we'll try this we'll try this live demo live demos aren't fun no no no no I'm gonna just do it tomorrow because I got to do it for like four hours you have to do it for like four hours because if you try to do it any any shorter it's just going to turn into a nightmare it's just all it is is going to be a nightmare uh so programming has leveled up into a problem of explaining situation to an llm using English by the way or any written language which is terribly inaccurate that has slinging context since you want to include a lot of information from different sources and then merging the output back into your code base uh we'd get uh we'd better get a tool for this Chop Chop upgrade all right why don't you why don't I mean this suggests that Devon should be able to work then so real real question if this works and Devon exists why doesn't Devon improve Devon using Devon why are they hiring soft human software Engineers it sounds like a bunch of to me um a big model uh big model upgrade was lifechanging for people who have already been coding in raw chat jiid which still Stills the world's most used and most popular AI coding assistant chat jippy coders have been using chop style for a year or more but it has been only the bravest most patient and dumbest of the early adopters whereas now it's ready for everyone of course Raw involves a lot of manual assembly of context in and shoveling responses out and can get tedious and so many programmers using coding assistance instead I mean I guess business is good if you're you if you are using or if you are the control C and V keys on the keybo keyboard or whatever that one is I command if you're into that sort of thing all AI coding assistants benefit from this upgrade too it has certainly been huge for a coding assistant Cody which is in my opinion has the best chat due to our automated context assembly engine which saves from having to explain your code base every time plus Cody Pro let's use both jippy 4 and cloud and others and you can spot check all your work with another llm is this just a hashtag ad are we getting hashtag ad right now to be real I've heard amazing things about this guy I've heard very amazing things about this guy is this the sponsor segment of the stream and today sponsor is Source CRA um I honestly found this article to be extremely weak and it feels like there's absolutely no critical thought given honestly I'm actually pretty disappointed in general about this entire article I I rarely I I mean how many guys have you seen me okay quit quit suggesting C package manager um I don't know you're punching up in theory I don't do punch up and a punch down you know this by now I do not do that I do not subscribe to that I think it's I think it's a horrible way to live your life if you find something wrong it is wrong you don't don't justify why doing something is not wrong because of somebody's status okay if stealing is wrong it's not okay to steal from somebody who has 10x it's just if if it's wrong it's morally wrong stop stop stop justifying bad behavior um I really really have a very hard time I do read the messages um okay guys guys guys stop it this was funny but it's not funny anymore okay this is not funny stop it chat you're out of control with dude okay Nate look at look at my brand new mod my mod of chaos getting in here mod of chaos is in here just behaving let's go mod of chaos I'm actually having a really hard time CU I I never talk bad about things it's like one of my rules it's one of my rules is that I never talk bad about what I'm reading or watching I don't like to talk bad about a person I don't like to talk bad about of these things like I have no problem disagreeing but this is surely disappointing I feel like this is a complete sellout move I feel like you're completely selling things I feel like You' have given up everything just to sell something that's how I read this and I'm actually I I I'm exceptionally disappointed by this article I think this article is is is is shockingly trash um I think it's written extremely uninterestingly all the way through it feels like I'm reading Chad gity all the way through there's nothing amazing about it and and it just feels like an ad and it feels like you're just have you're having no arguments ever you're just like oh yeah it was hard but now it's great and everyone should do it and there's only one you it's just like this feels very upsetting anyways I'm sorry for talking bad about anybody real talk I'm sorry for ever talking bad about anybody or anything I really don't ever wish to do that you know I'll make fun of Devon all I want apologize to Hassan I I I just said I don't like the guy then I then I proceeded to say that if he was caught in a scandal I would not say a bunch of mean things about him and if he was found to be guilty I would say yeah he's guilty then I feel like that's like the most appropriate and best way possible I'm just upset I'm upset because this is selling people on so many stuff it's writing this crazy article that's making people feel absolutely horrible about the future it's making it's it's you know what it's not the death of the junior developer you know what this article really is this article represents the death of people wanting to become Junior Engineers this article is actual gatekeeping this article actually prevents the next class of people from coming in because it steals from them the worst thing to steal out of all things for people that are new which is Hope and you should never steal Hope from somebody and that just it just pisses me off and that's what I think I'm feeling and I just I absolutely hate that and I don't use the term gatekeeping because gatekeeping is largely a stupid term but in this case it's actual gatekeeping and I'm actually pissed off about this this is a terrible article you have opportunity you have hope get good at your craft find discover anything you like about it and dive deep into it and I guarantee you that if you push long enough push hard enough you will find not only a job you enjoy but you'll be able to have actually some sort of satisfaction in what you're doing so please don't buy these kind of Articles they are absolutely horrible sorry I got super dude I'm like super pissed right now dude I I'm not going to lie to you dude I'm like i' like i' I live it all right we're gonna just we're you know what not only am I done with this article I'm too upset to continue the stream for the day I'm just going to call it today the name is the prim agent

Channel: ThePrimeTime

Views: 316,396

Keywords: programming, software engineer, software engineering, developer, web design, web development, programmer humor

Id: _cgONVgHzRw

Length: 30min 58sec (1858 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024