@mhoye But then we'd have more senior employees who'd know what they were worth and expected to be compensated accordingly and when we didn't, they'd leave to work for a competitor instead of being laid off as junior staff. Why should we train our competitors' new hires?

I honestly can't tell if I'm being cynical and sarcastic or if this is actually what they teach people in Business school.

@mhoye That's not interesting.

Experienced developers prefer a chatbot that does exactly what they ask instead of a junior that might come up with a better solution or idea. The horror of some minion becoming better that you are... there goes your job security.

(idiots)

@mhoye

Ok but how would that increase shareholder value for openAI ?

@mhoye
As I prepared to leave my last job, while working remotely, I had a bunch of Teams meetings with the youngster taking over two of my products, where we walked through the code together, and practiced builds and debug sessions, so they would have practical experience doing it.

The engineering and support for one of the products was outsourced to a small team in Mexico, who I later learned are still making extensive use of those sessions, which the youngster had thoughtfully recorded.

@mhoye my boss is trying to justify creating a position to promote me in to, and part of the justification is if I can spend more time on development of new hires, you can hire people at a more junior level because I can grow them into the person you need, instead of you trying to hire unicorns.

🤞🤞🤞 the argument lands (there’s some other justifications as well, but that’s the part that lines up with your point)

@mhoye So many jobs I have had where I yern to have someone to talk to, to tease out and clarify my thinking.

So, yes, Yes, YES

The LLMs do help, but are no substitute for an actual conversation with an real person.

@mhoye so if you convinced me of that...

Firstly I would be making the same mistake as hype-merchants and naive Execs equating LLMs to Developers. Also I would feel stupid because I would have completely misunderstood the benefits of documenting a spec to the level of a stupid pattern matcher. I would probably also have taken a crack to the head because the cost, speed and quality profiles of these two things are vastly different.

It's as if they're entirely different tools a team can reach for? 🤔😂

@mhoye Why do you hate the future?

(Just kidding. I despise the hallucination engines and their near-comprehensive destructiveness.)

@binford2k This! So much this!

I mean, it's not for free, it costs time and money. But that's spend on something worth it: Growth of a person.

Education – the ultimate status game.

@mhoye

@mhoye so, don't get me wrong, I agree with you wholeheartedly and am making this argument regularly at work. But it's important to view the other perspective: an LLM will follow your instructions far, far faster than a junior developer. Hell, it will follow my own instructions far faster than *I* would.

It's hard to make the argument that speed is not the important metric here - to show that LLM-generated code is at best average, by definition. That a human gets better every single time they perform a task, in a way LLMs don't. That a trained junior can train other juniors, and if you do it right, you get exponentially more developers, where an LLM stays the same.

The problem is that:
- managers in our industry often care less about quality than about speed of delivery, because you can always fix later (which means, really, they'll have made a bundle and left before consequences must be dealt with).
- the asshole developer, which is unfortunately (in my experience) the majority of us, cares about feeling better than the rest, not about making everybody better.

@mhoye

Even better, pair program with your junior colleague and the LLM. Set up the LLM to record design decisions and rationales, to look for ambiguities in the project proposal, and to offer suggestions for structuring and refinement. The LLM can be a good record keeper if you make it one. That way you get a junior colleague who can use the tool effectively instead of being a slop cannon (this assumes you’re not a slop cannon yourself), and you get good documentation of the design and the reasoning behind it.

@mhoye @filmaj Ok but seriously, this is how your boss sees that transaction

YOU RECEIVE: a grateful, more fully developed human being, a colleague and companion, perhaps even beyond the professional relationship

I RECEIVE: an engineer who now demands more money and is now more of a risk to leave the company

@mhoye when I take the time to format my question in the ideal way to feed it into a chat bot, I often find that I discover the answer before needing to submit it.

Creating documentation is an excellent way to understand.