this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Wow, the text generator that doesn't actually understand what it's "writing" is making mistakes? Who could have seen that coming?
I once asked one to write a basic 50-line Python program (just to flesh things out), and it made so many basic errors that any first-year CS student could catch. Nobody should trust LLMs with anything related to security, FFS.
I wish we could say the students will figure it out, but I've had interns ask for help and then I've watched them try to solve problems by repeatedly asking ChatGPT. It's the scariest thing - "Ok, let's try to think about this problem for a moment before we - ok, you're asking ChatGPT to think for a moment. FFS."
I had a chat w/ my sibling about the future of various careers, and my argument was basically that I wouldn't recommend CS to new students. There was a huge need for SW engineers a few years ago, so everyone and their dog seems to be jumping on the bandwagon, and the quality of the applicants I've had has been absolutely terrible. It used to be that you could land a decent SW job without having much skill (basically a pulse and a basic understanding of scripting), but I think that time has passed.
I absolutely think SW engineering is going to be a great career long-term, I just can't encourage everyone to do it because the expectations for ability are going to go up as AI gets better. If you're passionate about it, you're going to ignore whatever I say anyway, and you'll succeed. But if my recommendation changes your mind, then you probably aren't passionate enough about it to succeed in a world where AI can write somewhat passable code and will keep getting (slowly) better.
I'm not worried at all about my job or anyone on my team, I'm worried for the next batch of CS grads who chatGPT'd their way through their degree. "Cs get degrees" isn't going to land you a job anymore, passion about the subject matter will.
And that's not even getting into how flooded the sector is with the hundreds of thousands being laid off for the past few years
And that's what I'm blaming the low quality of applicants on recently. We looked for almost two years for a FE lead, and then they ended up being super toxic a few months in (they blew up in a meeting w/ some remote teams that came to town to visit). Even decent junior devs are hard to find it seems.
So it seems a lot of these layoffs are cutting out the less skilled devs, but given that we've been able to hire a few great people in the last year, there is some good talent getting caught in the cross-fire as well.