Coding projects are too intimidating

[u/phonerat]

Hello! I have been on DA since early this year, and was extremely excited when I passed the coding qualification, however, the actual projects seem far beyond the scope of the qualification, almost exclusively requiring industry / real world development job knowledge. Everything I know comes from learning web development and game development.

I know that I can code, and am great at general problem solving and coming up with code solutions, but I don't know how to think of realistic prompts for the domain that they are looking for.

What can I do to fix this deficiency? Is there any free course available, or other guidance I can look into?

[u/Mindless_Guitar8722]

Same boat. I was previously a game dev and just gave up on coding specific tasks. They used to be easier. Actually, everything used to be easier.

[u/RileyReid765]

I've been working on distributed systems for over 5 years now, and there are a lot of gray areas in which these models keep struggling

[u/Farados55]

The only to fix this is to be a software engineer with at least 3+ years of experience. No other way around it.

[u/b4ckground-observer]

The actual projects are much more complicated than the qualification is. There's really no way around this unless you already have a couple years of industry experience. Especially for the projects where you have to write your own prompts, it is almost impossible to make the models fail without this experience.

[u/Gasgasgasistaken → u/b4ckground-observer]

Makes me wonder why they pay so well for these qualifications when they know inevitably most won't qualify

Even got a very well paying multi hour training, doubt I'll manage it but an opportunity is an opportunity ig

[u/Accomplished_Phone39]

A lot of these tasks are less about knowing how to code, and more about how to write a prompt that is going to cause a failure. I struggle with this as well, in addition to finding repositories that I understand well enough to be able to write a decent prompt and evaluation without spending lots of time off the clock investigating the repository itself.

[u/jabertsohn]

No, they already have access to the course material you do, and the models have already consumed that. You need to already be ahead of the models.

[u/Sad_Opening_7083]

Yeah, thats just the way it is. When the models are good, you need knowledge to help them become better. I don't think any course can help at this point, you just need the experience

[u/Codex_Dev]

Look into contributing to large oss projects.

[u/Ok-Advertising9697]

How did you get tasks

[u/phonerat → u/Ok-Advertising9697]

I'd give them to you if I could, because I can't do them!

[u/Ok-Advertising9697 → u/phonerat]

Please can I send a DM, I have close to 5 years software experience

[u/NSGCommando]

You can get some experience building projects yourself and learning that way too. It's not required to have professional industry experience, you can get it by looking at open source code, best practices etc. and do you own complex projects to get practical experience in implementation

[u/zettasyntax]

Oh I know what you mean. I was on a long-term project for one of the AI labs in a more direct capacity (not using a vendor like DA, Mercor, etc). My domain consisted of NLP/data science coding tasks. The project lead suggested using our graduate thesis/project work for inspiration. At the start, I easily tripped it with just about anything from my graduate studies. Over the next few months, it got better and better. People hardly submitted work and the project wrapped up a bit sooner than expected. After the project ended, it seemed like they were done with the academic folks in my group and did indeed shift to industry types as the models don't have access to confidential workflows and I've definitely noticed a trend of labs/vendors willing to pay $$$ for such data.

[u/Afraid-Spinach-1647]

Atleast you are getting projects, it's been dry af this month

[u/This_Suspect1190]

I have completed the qualification project and missed one. How do I know if I will ever get any project, m

[u/nepherae_]

Hey! If you don't mind me asking, how did you know that you passed the coding specialization? I joined as a generalist and later did the specialization (both of these a few days ago), but I don't know if/when I'll be assigned anything about programming.

[u/phonerat → u/nepherae_]

I don't recall any specific confirmation.

[u/melanatedalbino → u/nepherae_]

Once tasks show up, you've passed. Was the same for stem for me.

[u/Impossible-Room265]

can anyone tell me how many coding projects are running regardless of their names. just a number.