* Job market sucks for junior devs due to the end of ZIRP and normalization of layoffs
* Dearth of good developer role models due to the "public sphere" getting worse (collapse of developer twitter community, rise of vacuous influencers). I'm a little skeptical about this one as I didn't really benefit much from these sources myself when getting into the industry. And there's always hacker news, which is doing fine!
* Loss of good mentorship opportunities due to rise of remote work
* AI tools are good for seniors who already know how to do things, but terrible for junior devs trying to learn. This is the forklifts metaphor. (And AI is probably not helping the junior dev job market either, although that was already bad for other reasons as mentioned above.)
I am truly worried about where the next generation of senior devs is going to come from. Some juniors, maybe 10% of them, will be fine no matter what: brilliant engineers who are disciplined enough to teach themselves the skills they need and can also adapt well to AI dev tools. I don't worry about them. But I worry about what happens to the median junior engineer, and consequently what our profession will look like in 10-20 years.
Most of them were pretty middling developers when I worked with them... So I guess that tracks.
I can and I have
> Mentor your junior colleagues, give them the space to learn and make mistakes.
I’d love to. My company stopped hiring juniors during the mini saas recession and then cursor launched. There are no juniors to mentor anymore.
Juniors nowadays are expected to perform senior work. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Remember when mailing lists
never mind
- Junior jobs become scarce. You either jump to senior very fast, or you are dumped out of the industry. The juniors that make it are those special unicorns that somehow learn everything about the job, including how to do it with AI, within a couple of years. There's a little bit of guidance, but mostly it's the kids who have good taste in blogs/books/videos that end up learning it all on their own. Also the kids who have the motivation to keep studying without a syllabus.
- Instead of junior devs, we just have domain experts who are crap at coding. Quants who can write a model in pandas, but when they venture offpiste, they get AI to build them a monstrosity. Working monstrosity, but if you could code, you would cry. This ends up happening in every industry: there's very few coders left anywhere outside of FAANG, everyone just does the modern equivalent of thinking Excel has solved their problem. Balls of spaghetti the size of which the world has never seen are written, hidden in various domains.
- Universities wisen up about how to teach people to use AI. Once upon a time, they used to teach you how to punch holes. Assembler was taught. Systems languages like c++. Java, JS, Lua. Kids who came out of these universities were somewhat ok for industry. Why not AI as well? There are going to be lessons learned roughly this decade that will be useful to teach the kids. What to tell the AI, what not to. How to leverage it to make the most progress.
Universities will (still) teach only part of the necessary tradecraft, but that fraction will include some basics for how LLMs can churn out dodgy prototypes. Junior/introductory roles will feature the crap-work of taking excel-esque monstrosities and making them marginally less-terrible.
But does this count as misleading title? I really expected an article about literal forklifts. Among all the AI craze these days, I was hoping for some real-world hands-on skill insights. The kind of thing hackers often can describe really well.
From that perspective, I got disppointed.
TL;DR: The article is about junior developers having a hard time in the current conditions shaped by remote work, AI and an abandoned Twitter.
> Other AI tools are fair game ("explain this code", "generate docs", "generate tests", etc.)
I disagree. Tests are production code.
* For those who wouldn't know it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck
A lot of the joke comes from the fact that the narrator uses "overly technical" terms that are common for work (safety) instructions, but are otherwise barely used in everyday speech - mixed with much more colloquial wording (also, of course, when the workers are talking).
This mixture of two very different language registers (words mainly used in technically precise work safety instructions vs. colloquial talk) is not represented in the English subtitles and thus removes a lot of fun of the original German short film.
but well, given that people understanding German are likely a minority here, I felt it was probably necessary to link to a version with subtitles so that it would be accessible to everyone here.
Anyways, here's the link to the vid without subtitles for those who understand German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lSBwF8ojVw
Is this what this analogy is referring to? Because I read it and wondered - has this person ever been in a warehouse, or just seen one on TV? Or am I being dense and there is something else called a ‘forklift’?
Sort of. A drivable machine with rear steering and forks that raise and lower hydraulically with a propane engine or electric motor is a forklift, but there are other machines that can use forks to move pallets and material around.
Fork attachments exist for skid steers and tractors. There’s a piece of equipment with the trade name ‘lull’ (aka telehandler) that is a four wheeled vehicle with forks that is used to lift material.
Because if I am moving a load of bricks and a load of eggs from one place to another and I put the bricks on top of the eggs, how is the outcome different between hand-carrying vs forklift? And why is it the forklift’s fault and not my own?
Honestly, you could stop right there. Everyone (everyone°) tries to kick the can of skills-acquisition onto someone else.
Ultimately, in a hyper-individualistic society, it lands on the "workers" entirely to educate themselves - as amply demonstrated by the comments in this thread. Unfortunately, that's not how humans learn best (some people, sure: a population massively over-represented on this board).
That this has become the general practice or expectation explains the gradual erosion of the "average" citizen's knowledge, intellect, and discernment. (More, perhaps, than social media - which is often blamed, and has played a role, but in my opinion has largely taken advantage of cultural incapacities which preceded it.)
--
°This includes [US] schools, by the way.
elzbardico•5mo ago
Books seem to still work very well. I am not even sure all this social media learning was that much positive. A lot of it was based on trend chasing, shiny object syndrome and stuff like that in a completely a-historical context. It was always funny when some star social media coder re-discovered something that probably people did in mainframes before I was born and that you can find in a lot of books.
libraryofbabel•5mo ago
1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube.
2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.
sokoloff•5mo ago
dingnuts•5mo ago
sokoloff•5mo ago
elzbardico•5mo ago
You don't even have the dopamine hit of counting your content upvotes.
thegrim33•5mo ago
anthony_d•5mo ago
> You don't even have the dopamine hit of counting your content upvotes.
There’s a score displayed at the top right; I’m 100% that some percentage of visitors get a dopamine hit off that.
GJim•5mo ago
Social media is where one shares one's social life (it's in the name!).
Granted there is often crossover between technical discussion forums and social media (I'm thinking of a motorbike forum I frequent), but to suggest the likes of HN is social media is rather silly. Isn't it.
Karrot_Kream•5mo ago
So TikTok isn't social media because most people don't lost content and those that do rarely post about their social life?
Twitter isn't social media because most people don't post about their social life?
GJim•5mo ago
Is a video sharing platform.
> rarely post about their social life
Note your correct use of the word rarely and consider my comment about crossover.
> Twitter
Xitter is a 'micro' blogging site.
> most people don't post about their social life
Again, note your observation of the most common uses of that platform and consider my comment about crossover.
Karrot_Kream•5mo ago
sokoloff•5mo ago
Usenet is (IMO) the original social media. Very few usenet groups had anything to do with sharing one's social life.
dingnuts•5mo ago
frankly terrible advice, especially now that this website is just AI News. If you want to be a better programmer, there are better places, but I'm not going to advertise them here because I do not want to infect them with the HN commentariat which is much too focused on trends.
Engineering fundamentals have not changed in decades. Screw trends, especially at the beginning.
Books written before 2022 are a good bet. Maybe the value of traditional education has also returned.
libraryofbabel•5mo ago
bcrosby95•5mo ago
I'm sure I've missed some things, I've taken more than one hiatus.
Nuance usually cannot be well conveyed in a blog post. Someone is always selling something. When something exists long enough the bullshit behind it is eventually revealed. Reality is messy and there's always bullshit hiding somewhere.
It doesn't mean HN is useless. I use it as a bellweather to see what other people are putting their attention on. I don't pay attention to AI other than what's on here. I mostly follow my interests, which outside my dayjob, is currently concurrency. But I don't write about it.
Ultimately the place to become a better programmer is behind a keyboard learning what works, what doesn't, where it does, where it doesn't, and why or why not. It's difficult to convey all the nuance in every decision which means most people never actually do it. Any post is dripping with assumptions. In my mind nearly any decision could be justified and would be surprised to find a place that actually attempts to teach these.
Rather than consuming media you're probably better off putting it out there and letting people tell you all the ways you're "wrong" (because they love to do that). Somewhat paradoxically I don't really follow my own advice, but that's humans for you.
andyjohnson0•5mo ago
On the whole, junior dev-age people don't read books much. They read short-form stuff on screens.
Brian_K_White•5mo ago
"new devs don't read" is a non-sequitur imo.
If they want the info, they will, or not. The info is there. Take it, don't take it, what do we care either way?
lurking_swe•5mo ago
You can bring a horse to water, can’t make it drink…
Dilettante_•5mo ago
Well don't leave me hanging boss!
libraryofbabel•5mo ago
But here are some titles:
* Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications
* Nand2Tetris. Computers from first principles, often fills in a lot of gaps. Possibly preceded by Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software if they need even more grounding.
* SICP if I think they'd be ready for it
* Crafting Interpreters
* If they're working with Python I'd give them Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho. For whatever other language(s) pick a book that allows them to go from intermediate to advanced in that language and really understand it inside out.
* Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design
* Data and Reality
* The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly to demystify the upper IC track. Or The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier.