this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 81 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use...fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company's success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.

Additionally, this is a training issue. Don't offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn't want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We're stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I'm gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.

A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don't care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.

"Why is my organization falling apart!?" Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don't actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It's literally always wealth inequality.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

15 years ago I got a job where I wasn't allowed to do anything. I hated it. I wanted to learn and be valuable and be valued. I left that job.

I worked for a bank and then Red Hat and I loved what I did and burned myself out trying to make them happy. Only to find out they still didn't value me.

I switched jobs two years ago and increased my pay 30% overnight and back to a job doing nothing. And I'm totally fine with it now. I have a family and I focus on them and during work, if they don't have anything for me to do I make my own happiness.

Fuck corporations. I'll take your money, I'll never again kill myself as I'll never be valued anyway. Jobs aren't worth it. People are.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Similar trajectory for me, but I'm now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it's not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.

But that's the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I told my manager that I've been burned and can't make myself work hard for another company again. She's leaving so there's no vested interest in the company for her. But yeah, fuck these cunts.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago (2 children)

"People work in roles they don't care about, for companies they have no investment in, to pay loans they shouldn't have."

That sounds like a fight club quote lol. I know you didn't say "loans they shouldn't have" but the cost of college is just stupidly high. It doesn't have to be free but come on.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

It doesn't have to be free but come on.

I beg to differ! My degree was free for all intents and purposes, and no, it didn't take away from the challenge or the quality of education. I cried blood tears in order to graduate but it was worth it.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

You are my spirit animal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are you also finding copilot to be less helpful of late? The other day it couldn't follow the simplest of instructions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

For me it's the "Stop responding" button. Sometimes I'll neglect something in my prompt, such as the fact that I'm stuck on ES5 javascript in my job (ServiceNow). It'll spit out ES6+ with let declarations or something like that, and I have to go back and qualify my limitations. So I click stop responding. What used to happen was that it would stop and allow for additional prompting. Now it's just like a client side trick. It hides the output but the server is still returning shit in the background, so if I try to re-prompt or add context it finishes what it was originally saying first, then tacks the new answer onto the old one without pause, separation, or human readable formatting that would indicate that there is a new output. It's an awful experience.

I've been using perplexity.ai but my company thinks its agreements will stop Microsoft from training their AIs on our proprietary data, so I have to be more careful with perplexity than Copilot.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 2 days ago (1 children)

“When asked about buggy AI, a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”

That's... That's so fucking cool...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 66 points 2 days ago (7 children)

As stated in the article, this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement. Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.

I encourage jrs to use tools such as Phind for solving problems but I also expect them to understand what they’re submitting and be ready to defend it no differently to any other PR. If they’re submitting code they don’t understand that’s incredibly unprofessional and I would come down very hard on them. They don’t do this though because we don’t hire dickheads.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Shift-left eliminated the QA role.

Now we have AI generated shit code, with devs that don't understand the low level details of both the language, and the specifics of the generated code.

So we basically have content entry (ai inputs) and extremely shitty QA bundled into the "developer" role.

As a 20 year veteran of the industry, people keep asking me if I think AI will make developers obsolete. I keep telling them "maybe some day, but today's LLMs are not it. The AI bubble is going to burst, and a few legit use cases will make it through"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Bad code from AI is just the latest version of mindlessly pasting from Stack Overflow.

Humans literally can not scan all of SO to make a huge copypasta.

It takes much more time, effort, and thought to find various solutions on SO and patch them together into something that works well.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

this has less to do with using AI, more to do with sloppy code reviews and code quality enforcement.

They are the same picture.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

More specifically: the same kind of decision makers are behind both.

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[–] [email protected] 101 points 3 days ago

Good. This is digital Darwinism at its finest. Weeds out the companies who thought they could save money by relying on a digital monkey instead of actual professionals.

[–] [email protected] 269 points 3 days ago (11 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Nobody should trust LLMs with anything

ftfy

also any inputs are probably scrapped and used for training, and none of these people get GDPR

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 3 days ago (21 children)

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."

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 days ago (4 children)

My experience with ChatGPT goes like this:

  • Write me a block of code that makes x thing
  • Certainly, here's your code
  • Me: This is wrong.
  • You're right, this is the correct version
  • Me: This is wrong again.
  • You're right, this is the correct version
  • Me: Wrong again, you piece of junk.
  • I'm sorry, this is the correct version.
  • (even more useless code) ... and so on.
[–] sugar_in_your_tea 31 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn't notice.

AI is fine if you know what you're doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you're doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It'll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that...), but you're going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it's actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don't bother w/ AI, but YMMV.

An area where it's probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, "find the docs for a function in library X that does..." I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don't remember the argument order.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 3 days ago (1 children)

And none of the forced tech support "AI" replacements work. And the companies don't give a shit.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I've had this argument with them a few times at work. They are definitely going to replace this all with AI. Probably within the next year and no amount of us pointing out that it won't work and they'll end up having to bring us back, at 3x the rate, seems to have any effect on them.

I'm probably going to have to listen to a lot of arguments about this strawberry thing tomorrow.

Anyway whatever, severance is severance.

[–] stringere 19 points 2 days ago

I was once in a similar position: company merger and they decided to move support offshore. We got 6 months lead notice and generous severance paid out as long as we stayed to the end. Fast forward a year and they took 85% customer approval to 13%. We got hired back at 1.5x our old pay rate, so not quite the 3x you mentioned. Hoping this works out similar for you in the end.

[–] [email protected] 139 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Oh geez…who could have seen this coming?

Oh wait, every single senior developer who is currently railing against their moron AI-bandwagoning CEOs.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

Middle and upper management are like little children - they'll only learn that fire hurts by putting their hand in it.

[–] [email protected] 81 points 3 days ago (6 children)

Me and my team take our site down the old fashioned way. Code copied from some rando on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago

It's pretty much the same as AIs do - copy and past random code from Stackoverflow - but they do it automatically.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Reminds me of the time that I took down the corporate website by translating the entire website into German. I'd been asked to do this but I hadn't realized that the auto translation Plug-In actually rewrote code into German, I thought it was just going to alter the HTML with JavaScript at runtime, but nope. It actually edited the files.

It also translated the password into German which was fun because it was just random characters so I have no idea what it translated into.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But are the shareholders pleased?

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Except it’s a computer writing the code that somebody probably ran once and said ‘looks good’ for their ‘happy path’ and committed it. So it’s inevitably probably full of weird edge case bugs…have fun.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there's really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there's no need for debugging.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there's no need for debugging.

Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.

Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

AI code is not clever. It's all developers averaged. Even if it worked properly, you'd get average quality code.

It's rather lazy and cheap. This is where the quality is lacking.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 days ago (2 children)

See? AI creates jobs! Granted, it's specialized mop up situations, but jobs!

It'll be even more interesting in the future! Every now and then a T1000 will lose all hydraulic fluids right out it's prosthetic anus and they'll need someone there with a mop and bucket! Our economy lives on...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Having spent most of my career working as a senior contractor, which often meant landing on code bases with 3+ layers of fuckups, I can only imagine how painful it will be to end up having to clean and fix AI generated code, since that doesn't even have a consistent coding style or pattern of design errors and bugs.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Sounds like the Sirius cybernetics corporation:

The fundamental design flaws are obscured by the superficial design flaws.

[–] [email protected] 80 points 3 days ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 52 points 3 days ago (15 children)

If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.

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