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0 pointsquietbritishjim8mo ago0 comments

Right, but if everyone is low quality then there's no one to do that correction.

That may seem a bit hypothetical but it can easily happen if you have a company that systematically underpays, which I'm sure many of us don't need to think hard to imagine, in which case they will systematically hire poor developers (because those are the only ones that ever applied).

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ZaoLahma8mo ago

Replace the "hire poor developers" with "use LLM driven development", and you have the rough outline for a perfect Software Engineering horror movie.

It used to be that the poor performers (dangerous hip-shootin' code commitin' cowpokes) were limited in the amount of code that they could produce per time unit, leaving enough time for others to correct course. Now the cowpokes are producing ridiculous amount of code that you just can't keep up with.

Cthulhu_8mo ago

This is why at every software project I've done in the past 15 odd years, steps were taken to prevent this in an automated and standardized fashion; code reviews of course, but they're more for functionality. Unit test requirements, integration / end-to-end tests based on acceptance criteria, visual regression tests, linting, type systems, OTAP, CI/CD, audit log via Git and standardized commit messages, etc etc etc.

My job hasn't significantly changed with AI, as AI generated code still has to pass all the hurdles I've set up while setting up this project.

ponector8mo ago

Isn't it a future we are moving to? To hire poor (cheap) developers to do LLM-driven development.

anal_reactor8mo ago

Sad truth is that average dev is average, but it's not polite to say this out loud. This is particularly important at scale - when you are big tech at some point you hit a wall and no matter how much you pay you can't attract any more good devs, simply because all good devs are already hired. This means that corporate processes must be tailored for average dev, and exceptional devs can only exist in start-ups (or hermetically closed departments). The side effect of that is that whole job market promotes the skill of fitting into corporate environment over the skill of programming. So an a junior dev, for me it makes much more sense to learn how to promote my visibility during useless meetings, rather than learn a new technology. And that's how the bar keeps getting lower.

ozim8mo ago

Huh, sad truth?

But average construction worker is also average and average doctor as well.

World cannot be running on „best of the best” - just wrap your head around the fact whole economy and human activities are run by average people doing average stuff.

orochimaaru8mo ago

Learning new technologies wasn’t the issue with the Therac. In fact as someone who has been coding and leading sw engineering teams for the past 28 yrs, I don’t like “new technologies”. When someone does this awesome complicated async state machine using a large set of brittle components alarm bells go off and I make it my life’s mission to make it as simple as it needs to be.

A lot of times that is boring meetings to discuss the simplification.

I can extend the same analogy to all the gen ai bs that’s floating around right now as well.

pjmlp8mo ago

The correction is done by the "lucky" souls doing the onsite, customer facing roles, for the offshoring delivery. Experience from a friend....

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