Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
Question is: how many developers are actually good? Or better, how many produce good results? I wouldn’t call myself a great programmer, just okayish, but I certainly pushed code I knew was absolute garbage, simply because of external pressure (deadlines, legacy crap, maybe just a bad day,…).
I’m more of a mechanical engineer than a coder, and for me it’s been super helpful writing the code. The rest of our repo is clear enough that even I can understand what it actually does by just reading it. What I’m unfamiliar with are the syntax, and which nifty things our libraries can do.
So if you kinda understand programs but barely know the language, then it’s awesome. The actual good programmers at my company prefer a minimal working example to fix over a written feature request. Then they replace my crap with something more elegant.
That sounds awful. Imaging going back and forth requesting changes until it gets it right. It’d be like chatting with openai only it’s trying to merge that crap into your repo.
Our team lead recently sent out two fresh juniors to tackle a task, with no senior informed. And of course, they were supposed to build it in Python, even though they had no experience with it, because Python is just so easy. Apparently, those juniors had managed to build something that was working …on one machine, at some point.
On the day when our team lead wanted to show it to the customer, the two juniors were out of house (luckily for them) and no one knew where a distribution of that working state was. The code in the repo wouldn’t compile and seemed to be missing some commits.
So, a senior got pulled in to try to salvage it, but the juniors hadn’t set up proper dependency management, unit tests, logging, distribution bundling, nor documentation. And the code was spaghetti, too. Honestly, could have just started over fresh.
Our team lead was fuming, but they’ve been made to understand that this was not the fault of the juniors. So, yeah, I do think on that day, they found some new appreciation for seniors.
Heck, even I found new appreciation for what we do. All of that stuff is just the baseline from where we start a project and you easily forget that it’s there, until it’s not.
Even if ai took over 90% of all coding work, that still wouldn’t affect more than maybe two hours a day.
Wait until AI start to summarize meetings into email
I am waiting… with bated breath.
Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.
Question is: how many developers are actually good? Or better, how many produce good results? I wouldn’t call myself a great programmer, just okayish, but I certainly pushed code I knew was absolute garbage, simply because of external pressure (deadlines, legacy crap, maybe just a bad day,…).
I’m more of a mechanical engineer than a coder, and for me it’s been super helpful writing the code. The rest of our repo is clear enough that even I can understand what it actually does by just reading it. What I’m unfamiliar with are the syntax, and which nifty things our libraries can do.
So if you kinda understand programs but barely know the language, then it’s awesome. The actual good programmers at my company prefer a minimal working example to fix over a written feature request. Then they replace my crap with something more elegant.
I’ll just spend most of my time rejecting AI generated PR’s.
That sounds awful. Imaging going back and forth requesting changes until it gets it right. It’d be like chatting with openai only it’s trying to merge that crap into your repo.
Yes, but your bosses don’t know/understand that, why pay you when they can have 3 interns & AI for freeeeeeeeeeee???
The bosses will figure it out when they never receive a working product.
Our team lead recently sent out two fresh juniors to tackle a task, with no senior informed. And of course, they were supposed to build it in Python, even though they had no experience with it, because Python is just so easy. Apparently, those juniors had managed to build something that was working …on one machine, at some point.
On the day when our team lead wanted to show it to the customer, the two juniors were out of house (luckily for them) and no one knew where a distribution of that working state was. The code in the repo wouldn’t compile and seemed to be missing some commits.
So, a senior got pulled in to try to salvage it, but the juniors hadn’t set up proper dependency management, unit tests, logging, distribution bundling, nor documentation. And the code was spaghetti, too. Honestly, could have just started over fresh.
Our team lead was fuming, but they’ve been made to understand that this was not the fault of the juniors. So, yeah, I do think on that day, they found some new appreciation for seniors.
Heck, even I found new appreciation for what we do. All of that stuff is just the baseline from where we start a project and you easily forget that it’s there, until it’s not.