New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.

https://ponder.cat/post/1665917

New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code. - Ponder.cat

Lemmy

I’m a little defeatist about it. I saw with my own 3 eyes how a junior asked ChatGPT how to insert something into an std::unordered_map. I tell them about cppreference. The little shit tells me “Sorry unc, ChatGPT is objectively more efficient”. I almost blew a fucking gasket, mainly cuz I’m not that god damn old. I don’t care how much you try to convince me that LLMs are efficient, there is no shot they are more efficient than opening a static page with all the info you would ever need. Not even considering energy efficiency. Utility aside, the damage we have dealt to developing minds is irreversible. We have convinced them that thought is optional. This is gonna bite us in the ass. Hard.
I work in a small company that doesn’t hire hardly at all… Stories like this scare me because I have no way to personally quantify how common that kind of attitude might be.

Look, ultimately the problem is the same as it has always been: juniors doing junior shit. There’s just more of it going on. If you’re hiring one, you put a senior on them ready to extinguish fires. A good review process is a must.

Now that I think about it, there was this one time the same young’un I was talking about tried to commit this insane subroutine that was basically resizing a vector in the most roundabout way imaginable. Probably would have worked, but you can also just use the resize method, y’know? In retrospect, that was probably some Copilot bullshit, but because we have a review process in place, it was never an issue.