Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:

"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"

@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.

@drikanis @ludicity The writing was on the wall when front end developers stopped being able to do anything if there wasn't already a component in a library somewhere they could import.

"Can we have that as a drop down list with an icon next to each item?โ€, I say.

"Noโ€, they say, โ€œI don't think our framework has thatโ€

@dan @drikanis @ludicity Back in the days (2003/2004) we developed our own framework which had to be compliant to Netscape, IE 5.5, Opera. So adding something like this wasn't a huge act... ๐Ÿ˜
@adipoeserPursch @dan @drikanis @ludicity Hate to burst your nostalgia bubble, but most web devs at that time could barely make a useable two-column layout in one browser and there was probably never a time at which more than a few percent of web devs knew, let alone tested in Opera.

@tkissing @dan @drikanis @ludicity Well, we did. Including movable tabs, filters, etc.

It was quite a work.

Don't know whether the company still is "alive".

@tkissing @dan @drikanis @ludicity Well, all JS and DOM, not much CSS, then.
@tkissing @dan @drikanis @ludicity And Ajax as well.
@tkissing @dan @drikanis @ludicity And moveable colums, customizable labels/texts
@tkissing @dan @drikanis @ludicity We called that framework "Fondue".