Mastodawn

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Dec 20

@petrillic you gotta let 'em ripen on the branch

Chris Petrilli Dec 20

@atax1a is this a version control joke? :)

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Dec 20

@petrillic not on purpose, but we did give our coworkers a crash course on gdb, hopefully they got some good pointers out of it

Chris Petrilli Dec 20

@atax1a

Weird Socks Dec 20

@atax1a @petrillic
Oh dear lord

JTinMI Dec 20

@petrillic No, they're too dumb to think of growing them on trees. They think they come from the store.

cuan_knaggs Dec 20

@JTinMI @petrillic <sings badly> devs come from a can, they were put there by a man, downtown

Ölbaum Dec 23

@JTinMI @petrillic The lemon store (because you buy them, squeeze them, and throw them away.)

Tim W RESISTS Dec 20

@petrillic that's where I came from! It was fun up in the Engineer Tree. Did you not get an invite?

HTPC NZ Dec 20

@petrillic well I've spoken to "senior" engineers using AI tools who think their job is safe and best part they won't have juniors around to deal with - i.e. having to fix & mentor their work, just seniors around ensuring everything humming along...

Dźwiedziu Dec 20

@htpcnz
And then the bus factor strikes again!

bluestarultor Dec 20

@htpcnz @petrillic If they're using generative tools, they're already working 20% slower needing to clean up after it. Juniors have the benefit that they learn.

Glyph Dec 20

@petrillic I cannot tell if this is a shitpost or not but it's a thought I had, so, here you go:

senior engineers are a positive externality of an engineering process. the intellectual capital that accumulates in a senior engineer's brain can walk out the door at any time.

positive externalities represent uncaptured value, which is to say, reduced profit.

it is therefore the fiscal duty of any steward of a public company to prevent this process with LLMs.

Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦Dec 20

@glyph @petrillic I hate this and also I am quite sure someone has already pitched this very idea to a16z or yc or some other cesspit.

Sir Dr Rusty o the Isle 🖤💛❤️Dec 20

@glyph @petrillic good luck with that 🙄

Kristopher Kirkland Dec 20

@glyph @petrillic can’t tell if this is a shit post, but I hope so.

A sane group doesn’t manage its intellectual capital with shitty tooling, it does so by retaining senior engineers (which will leave regardless, as people age out of the workforce or even just a particular type of role) and developing junior engineers.

Glyph Dec 20

@kirkland @petrillic If you look at the "generative AI" plans of any one of the major tech companies right now, I don't think it's fair to characterize any corporation as a "sane group" at the moment

Bleep Dec 22

@glyph @petrillic engineers leaving with the info in their heads is one of the reasons to, I don’t know, pay them and treat them well, listen to them, act on the info they give you and keep their work engaging and rewarding. Good engineers leave crappy companies but stay at good companies.

beamjack Dec 20

@petrillic surely they come from inverted binary trees? /s

Su_G Dec 20

@petrillic
Someone else should train them. Someone else should bear the expense of training them.

Seachaint Dec 20

@Su_G @petrillic I think the 'thinking' here is that when it comes to that, their lord and savior nazibot will be equally proficient at senior engineering.

Of course, even if this were true, it implies that the next step is the abrogation of individual companies entirely and their replacement with direct usage of nazibot to deliver software on the fly to users.

Nome of which is at all realistic but this is C-suite logic here

BedastGPT Dec 20

@petrillic Wait, are engineer trees rare? I have one in my back yard. Can I monetize this?

Мя ��Dec 20

@bedast you can take money for climbing on your tree, but that will make engineers very sad

Glen T, heated, not stirred Dec 20

@petrillic I need someone to check the configured IPs versus routed IPs versus IPAM. I am not allocating that to a senior engineer. It can't do any harm, so it can go to a junior network engineer with an interest in extending their Python skills.

I need someone to find a RS-232 console cable which works across Windows, MacOS, Linux and is physically good enough for field staff use. It should include accessories for USB-A, USB-C, and to extend the cable to >10m. I want a negotiated price for qty=300. I want a plan to distribute those assets, and a recommendation for if they should be individually tracked as assets, or as a class, and financial documents supporting a depreciation schedule (preferably of one year). This would suit a NOC operator with an interest in management tasks.

There are lots of janitor tasks like this. If you don't do them, you get bitten down the track.

garland Dec 20

@petrillic I work in medical imaging. At a conference earlier this year, a radiologist advocated for a future in which routine imaging studies would be read by some kind of AI, which would generate a draft report, and then an experienced senior radiologist would review the images and edit/sign off the report. I was like… where do you think experienced senior radiologists come from?

@garland @petrillic personally speaking I prefer an experienced human reading any medical scan. Supplement it with AI if it proves useful but human eyes and brains have been evolved to deal with complex visual images.

Nova Dec 20

@petrillic you see when a mommy senior engineer and a daddy senior engineer love each other very much...

Kostek Poland Dec 20

@petrillic Aren't they the result of cell division? That is shocking news 🤔

Klarname 🌈Dec 20

@petrillic I have spent #vibecoding a prototype the last couple of days. Claude needs more Iterations and fixes than any human and in the end I probably spend more time than necessary.

But hey: you have time to work on other things while Claude fixes it's own errors. I am not convinced that Prototyp will ever work properly.

So if seniors want to maintain such a shit so they dont have to mentor...what a mindset

@strigga_ @petrillic hmm, disappointing in so many ways. I've just had a former bright young colleague finish her MBA reach out to ask me to mentor, seems she thinks 60 years of experience might provide some value. Both flattering and humbling as any teacher knows. As it has been through the ages. Human stories, nuances, conditional probabilities, ethics, philosophical considerations, history of science, so many subtle aspects of *knowledge*

Suvham Paul Dec 20

@petrillic i really miss coding, now i am in a hell loop of applying to jobs and doing leetcode..I really would like where jobs would let juniors figure stuff out on the way and let them learn for themselves.You can tell who is passionate about the work just by working with them.

Solarbird

Dec 20

@petrillic "That's fiscal-year-2030-me's problem. Any luck at all, I'll be gone already."

Ian Smith Dec 20

@petrillic Everyone is probably assuming that others will recruit and train junior professionals who can be hired when required in due course. Letting accountants have too much authority at senior management levels is rarely a good thing.

Chris Petrilli Dec 20

@IanDSmith this is definitely of the same cloth as "if we train people, they'll just leave". It's ... incomprehensible if what you're trying to do is create a high-performing team

Luke Dec 20

@petrillic PIs - we don’t need Postdocs or PGRs anymore (academic version)

Michael Wyman Dec 20

@petrillic but, see, if they stop producing senior engineers, eventually they’ll have no choice but to replace *senior* engineers with AI as they will be no other options. That’s the goal.

@mwyman @petrillic What could possibly go wrong? 🙄

Deven Phillips Dec 20

@petrillic
No, they expect seniors to train the next generations of LLMs so they won't need to have seniors anymore. Ridiculous and delusional at best.

groxx Dec 20

@petrillic well obviously you just hire them.

Reinald Kirchner Dec 20

@petrillic they hope in two years those LLMs might replace seniors as well...

@[email protected]Dec 20

that got a hardy laff out of me.

Booji Dec 20

@petrillic "paid junior engineers". People will have to spend money on college/certificates/personal projects and learn topics until they are employable.

Skjeggtroll Dec 20

"WHERE DO YOU THINK SENIOR ENGINEERS COME FROM? THE ENGINEER TREE?"

Welcome to the grumble? We've got, uh, grey hairs and sarcasm?

@skjeggtroll @petrillic and all the bits that feed into them - history, knowledge of successes and mistakes, context, emotions, ethics... Sarcasm usually reflects knowledge, experience, and understanding logic and thought.

Sir Dr Rusty o the Isle 🖤💛❤️Dec 20

@petrillic "They" weren't at the top of the engineering class. 😕

Papageier Dec 20

@petrillic We dont need senior engineers. By the time the old ones retire, AI will be advanced enough to replace them.

And I have a very attractive bridge on sale right now.

Bobbi Towers Dec 20

@petrillic not only this, but what if I told you that teaching juniors is just as important for the senior engineers, and the sustainability of the company as a whole, as it is for them

Confused Middle Aged Dad Dec 20

@petrillic "we'll just recruit them [experienced/senior engineers] from the market"
"We expect them to be fully productive on day one" ... Something, something AI.
No acknowledgement of range of experience, troubleshooting and all the 'softer skills' of communicating with co-workers, key partners and even just scoping work and clearly defining problems.

AnneH Dec 20

@petrillic Exactly this. (Translation agency) Oh, we'll just use machine translation & AI. ...Er the senior people who used to resolve all the queries & snarlups have left.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Dec 20

Companies that say this are implicitly admitting that they are terrible at retention. Their senior engineers are not people who used to be their junior engineers, those people leave as soon as they can find another job. They get senior engineers from other companies and probably don’t hold onto them for very long either because their working conditions are so toxic.

It’s very useful for them to be so open about it.

Erik Ableson Dec 20

@david_chisnall @petrillic Also part of the overall IT industry that doesn’t know how to manage careers and have tasked HR with « keep salaries low ». As a general rule, there’s no internal path to advancement - you *have* to go elsewhere to get either a raise or more responsibility/recognition

Maurice Dec 20

@petrillic Reminds me of the early 2000s in Germany. Where nearly every job offer in IT was: We want young developers, with years of experience and a university degree.