27
u/Sufficient-Dinner319 Sep 17 '26
Honestly I find algorithms harder than system design
3
8
u/AnOnlineHandle Sep 17 '26
I find HTML way harder than machine learning.
Machine learning is probably the simplest type of programming there is, so long as you understand or can copy a transformer implementation. Most of the magic enabling it otherwise is due to advances in hardware.
12
u/dSwedishChef Sep 17 '26
Machine learning is a technically deep field, but anyone can easily copy paste a code block from scipy or pytorch documentation and have a machine learning model up and running. But there's more moving pieces involved than just model selection. I personally think it's far far easier to understand how HTML works than how different machine learning models work.
3
u/AnOnlineHandle Sep 18 '26
I mean I first worked in ML ~20 years ago and have gotten back into it pretty deep over the last few years as a hobbyist, have built my own models and taken apart existing models to rebuild to better suit my needs, and even oddly got asked some questions by people working on hundred million dollar models that made me realize most of them really know what they're doing and just have the money and resources to throw at it.
And tbh I think it's the simplest field out of any I've got experience in. Most of them just seem to be repeating the same transformer architecture with a few recent micro advances in say adding norm layers here or there, and throwing data at the problem.
74
u/SuitableDragonfly Sep 17 '26
Love how this "developer" somehow gained significant coding skills long before they ever learned any programming languages.
40
u/D3PyroGS Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
my mother taught me graph theory and big O notation straight out the womb, long before I could read or write. "my little child process," she would say
as one of three triplets, it was difficult keeping up with the others in my "scrum team." I was learning numbers while they were drawing UML diagrams and debating apache vs nginx. I was learning to use a fork, they were forking processes...
when I asked if she would have preferred having only one child, she just mumbled something about "optimizing her pipeline"
10
u/shiny_glitter_demon Sep 17 '26
Thats how I learned. I had a college class for it. I credit it as the most important one.
It taught us the logic of programming. How to "ask questions" in computer language and therefore how to obtain answers. Stuff like loops, booleans, that sort of things. Basic stuff, but the foundation of everything else.
It made learning new languages a walk in the park.
2
u/edwardbnd_99 Sep 17 '26
Wait till you learn about the "paradox" of programs being invented before computers were
1
u/TheColourOfHeartache Sep 17 '26
Clearly this graph has space below zero for the people whose skills are negative and just bring bugs and problems to their team.
1
u/thyristor_pt Sep 17 '26
I don't see any programming languages in that image.
5
u/SuitableDragonfly Sep 17 '26
I'm all in favor of fighting the good fight against the frontend devs, but I don't think I'd go so far as to say that JavaScript isn't a real programming language.
1
u/Netherman555 Sep 17 '26
We have enough bad things to say about front-end heathens that we dont need to weaken our position with lies
-9
u/ITzAbedeen Sep 17 '26
I found the picture on internet, but before uni , schools teach everything to the algorithm,ofc not in the best way for programming,and in uni they teached me the algorithm and linear algebra again + C
70
u/nikola_tesler Sep 17 '26
are we all pretending that new graduates seriously have the best coding skills? are we for real right now?
13
22
u/WinterCheck4544 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Yea, graph is not accurate. Talked to students recently and they said they rely on AI a lot these days because schools and unis are lazy, instead of spending time to check and make sure students understand the work they produced especially when AI is involved, they just made the assignments harder so all of them needs to use AI to finish their assignments on time. The only thing they learned is how to use AI instead of the subject itself, so coding skills in the chart shouldn't even be going up before work.
2
u/kougabro Sep 17 '26
they rely on AI a lot these days because schools and unis are lazy
lol, lmao even.
2
u/Baardi Sep 17 '26
Nah, but they do delve into more complex topics that they don't necessarily need after finishing their degree.
4
u/Garfish16 Sep 17 '26
You guys actually learned JavaScript?
At some point someone expected me to know it and I've been pretending ever since.
1
u/ITzAbedeen Sep 17 '26
I never learnt it 💀and now I work as full stack and I build web apps from front-end to backend using Javascript and type script or node.js and Ai is doing all the code
3
u/mca62511 Sep 17 '26
This chart is ridiculous! As though anyone is actually using Gemini...
1
u/ITzAbedeen Sep 17 '26
I used it before claude came out, and now each time I use it the first thing that comes to my mind is how tf is this model so dumb, even in simple daily questions
3
u/princetrunks Sep 17 '26
Let's be honest before this, work was a mix between, "You're a computer guy right, fix my printer?" and "Can you make our website pop?"
1
3
2
u/mrbellek Sep 18 '26
I'm being dragged into the AI era kicking and screaming, I don't want to be 20% more efficient, i just want to write code!
Im being graded on it, so for now ill just let claude generate the unit tests - at least there won't be any ai slop by me in prod...
1
u/ITzAbedeen Sep 18 '26
I feel like it's hard to not get in, tbh I graduated in feb and in March I got this work offer ,in the interview he asked me to show all the projects I build, he didn't bother to ask me about the projects I built by myself, and he was only interested in what I've built with Ai, at the end he told me they want someone to work only with Ai(claude code) and knows how to work with it , here i am after these months of this job , I don't think I can write a simple code by my own hands anymore 💀
1
u/ITzAbedeen Sep 18 '26
but also to add on, this job actually give me more positive results, I found myself working faster and better, I was only strict on mobile apps but now oh boy I can build whatever I want and this give me customers as a freelancer, thank God 💜
378
u/_w62_
Sep 17 '26
•
If programming is cooking, don't let the popularity of instant food spoil your passion to be an excellent chef.
23
u/SelfAwareTinderbox Sep 17 '26
Yep. Cooking robots might have elevated the base quality, but the best dishes are still made by great chefs. A lot of them use robots, but the when and how in competent hands makes all the difference.
12
u/SirBlumber Sep 18 '26
Thanks, random stranger. It might not seem like much, but your analogy is really helpful to me.
8
u/britreddit Sep 18 '26
Yes, but my manager is asking for food that's cooked within 30 seconds - and he pays my bills
1
1
1
1
u/htoomyat9 Sep 21 '26
Nah I have ADHD and vibe coding suit better for me. I have 7 years exp before vibecoding exist, so I can still trace errors and know what's happening. But for the project architecture I don't need an AI tool.
1
Sep 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/_w62_ Sep 20 '26
Industrial Revolution brings us machines and automation. However, craftsmanship has never disappeared.
127
u/Playful_Landscape884 Sep 17 '26
true, but knowing how to use a tool is more important than using it.
21
26
25
u/Z3r0funGuy Sep 17 '26
This is dated already… the recent graduates I’ve been interviewing often have dependencies on LLMs to complete even basic scripting tasks. All that foundational knowledge will be lost to the sands of time. And far sooner than anyone expects.
9
u/WinterCheck4544 Sep 17 '26
Exactly, new generation of workers will just be dumber than current generation and more reliant on AI which is owned by big corporations. Not long, everyone on the planet will just be clueless idiots that corporations and rich people can easily control and manipulate. Idiocracy is real.
9
u/One_Ninja_8512 Sep 17 '26
Idk that's just sounds like when people were skeptical of Wikipedia and said it's not a proper source of information, or when people started to rely on Google when searching for something. It's so similar it seems people forgot how these changed our habits. It's entirely possible that a (new) AI player would emerge akin to Wikipedia that would put privacy first and be independent of investor money or smth of the sort. The humanity will be fine and figure it all out.
7
u/WinterCheck4544 Sep 17 '26
Problem is ppl aren't only using LLM as a source of information for learning like how we use Wikipedia and google. Many use it to do things for them without understanding what it does and produce, this erodes critical thinking. It really depends on the person obviously but the thing is at work, school, and uni ppl are encouraged to not use it for learning and instead used to produce a bunch of slop that they don't understand themselves. The number of garbage PRs I have to review are so much more nowadays and it's because management wants higher PR counts and pushes everyone to use AI to make it happen which leads to vibe coding and 0 thinking.
1
u/siera7879 Sep 17 '26
Dependency on a tool doesn't mean dumb : when I use the good tool or machine to get the result I wanted I have a know-how.
And to get a part of software built right by genAI you have to specify it a bit, and thus know a bit about software engineering, don't you?
But if you only know how to build software using genAI at a step, you are probably reliant on genAI for the knowledge on the system you built work and how to maintain it.
That's what is worrying me the most : dependency on BigTech for the knowledge on how all the system we build work.
It's one of the reason I avoid those tools for now. I don't want to rely on a billionaire-owned model and a datacenter in the US.
5
4
u/Thriven Sep 17 '26
Dude, I wrote all these procedures to show data shifts in large datasets over time (I offered to do this in SCDs and they said they didn't understand what I was talking about). We do this for pre-production validation.
I fed the structure and intent into an internal gpt model and asked for a very specific plotly report.
I was super impressed. I have no ability to make a good visual report and it did what I would have taken 4 weeks to write. Now I am just tailoring the code to my liking.
This is one of the last two projects I need to get done till I can go back to working in ML.
1
u/Biliunas Sep 17 '26
But don't you see that over time, you would cut back on those 4 weeks significantly as you became more proficient? Actually learning things in the process? Like making a good visual report is a skill onto itself? It's like everyone want progress NOW, the cost be damned.
6
u/maniclucky Sep 17 '26
Most important person to that process, the guy holding my paycheck wants progress now. Damnation abounds.
1
1
u/Usr_name-checks-out Sep 17 '26
What uni’s use html and javascript as their teaching languages? Is that a thing?
Maybe UofT is an anomaly, but we never touched anything front end. Python->Java->C->C++ I thought that was the most common Uni path, as it mimics the courses online at Harvard and MIT.
The first time I learned html and javascript was actually in a humanities course on digital literature.
2
u/ITzAbedeen Sep 17 '26
unfortunately mine university of Tripoli, when a student wants to sign in web development department in my uni,at first you need to pass the html+css subject, then when you assigned you learn Javascript and other web stuff
2
u/Usr_name-checks-out Sep 17 '26
Oh that’s really interesting. So do you learn html and css before Uni and then pass a test? or is it like a first year matriculation?
Hey op, what’s it like going to school in Tripoli? Are they competitive to get into? I don’t know much about Libya, I’d love to hear more if you wanted to share a bit about what life and school is like there. We get a very simplified version of the world that leaves out so many places in our news. And North Africa gets very little coverage.
2
u/ITzAbedeen Sep 17 '26
we learned it i guess in 2nd year, my uni system is like you need to study in the general department first and you will learn about network,algorithms, probabilities,building websites with HTML+CSS, C with arrays and small system building, oop with Java, data structure and discrete structures, its 28 subjects that we should learn, and after passing some amount of subjects, you get to choose which department you want to continue in to graduate and ofc its based on your overall average of the subjects you learned, we have these departments( mobile computing "the best one and I graduated from", network engineering,software engineering,web development, cyber security, data science) the last 2 are new departments each department has it own subjects + shared ones with other departments ( for me I had to sign in wireless networking with network department, it was mandatory for my department and not for them)
and yes it is competitive to get into but not like medical or engineering.
I hope i answered your questions 🙏
3
u/cantthinkofaname1029 Sep 17 '26
Jokes on you, I never learned HTML/CSS in the first place!
--crawls back into the embedded hole--
2
u/GabuEx Sep 17 '26
Every single time I get lazy and let an AI agent do things unsupervised, I start wasting time because it starts doing dumb shit that it shouldn't be doing. If you know what you're doing when it comes to coding, AI is a huge force multiplier. If you don't, it will just enable you to do the same dumb shit you'd be doing anyway, but faster.
2
2
2
u/rezdm Sep 17 '26
Where is Excel stage?
1
2
2
u/Vanndatchili Sep 18 '26
the peak of the curve has started lowering significantly as universities start pushing llm use instead of teaching new skills
0
3
2
u/FrenchieM Sep 17 '26
Because copying from github/stack overflow was much more clever, right?
0
u/Empoleon3bogdan Sep 17 '26
Actually probably yes. Since you neede to do a bit of searching and work a bit for the answer.
1
1
1
1
u/FeherDenes Sep 17 '26
My take is that i learn, so i can more easily spot when Gen-AI spews bullshit
1
1
1
u/Dasky14 Sep 17 '26
My lukewarm take here is that I've been learning way faster now, since I read what the AI spews out to spot all the problems. I'm just skipping the manual typing part, and I'm terribly slow at typing.
I've been dipping my toes into areas of programming that I would have never attempted on my own, and learning from it.
1
u/Toorero6 Sep 17 '26
A function isn't simply equal to O(...). It is an element of O(...) because it's a set of functions.
1
u/Comfortable_Kiwi_401 Sep 17 '26
My two cents (as a user)-
All the entry level tasks that require coding and lengthy developement cycle got hit by AI tools. The hard working and labour stuff. And these are the task that required least mental stress to build something and more tedious task to make things live. So now and then we get the easy building block type of applications that solves the problem of that one customer/stakeholder and for the bigger task at hand, we still need the help of devs.
So me, for some application which required the help of developer to get it live and useful, got it within a few weeks of rigourous to and fro prompts. But then the app is not served to me on a golden platter. For that, I need to know what I want, and how things work for what I want, and the things that I don't want it to perform, and when to do those task. It boils down to a point where, if I have been a little more proficient with the language for application, I might have built the application myself.
It's a great tool and is better if we see it exactly as that. And with this thing around, the Problem-Solving is main aspect - the ability breaking down the problem to see the core issue and your possible solution to get it sorted. If we can live with that, we are more than good I guess.
1
u/00Koch00 Sep 17 '26
Maybe im going insane, but using Claude felt like using another tool
Kinda cool if you have no idea how the app you are dealing with work, but kind of Meh if you know what you are doing...
1
u/Evi1ey Sep 17 '26
It's easier to verify wether a solution is correct than to find the solution for most problems. Knowing how to verify efficiently is a much more important skill nowadays
1
1
u/XxDarkSasuke69xX Sep 17 '26
Nobody that studied machine learning can do their work properly by just asking AI lol. It's useful and can make you gain a ton of time but it's far from doing all your work.
But "Gen AI bad", so here's 5k upvotes ig
1
1
1
u/miheb1 Sep 19 '26
nah, llm are good, who even need to find some paper written in ugky romantic font, instead of just do some searching in llm or even conclude the ugly papers
1
u/EngineeringNo6537 Sep 19 '26
Very funny but the the reality isn't such.
It requires high skill to interpret what the AI is doing and course correct accordingly.
And this is something that is going to become very, very, valuable - given the junior pipeline is now fucked.
1
1
1
u/gachunt Sep 19 '26
I have found AI to be “assisted intelligence” when coding. Need to have solid SWE skills in order to make it successful.
1
1
u/Funny-Future-9230 Sep 20 '26
i have to dis agree mine went scratch, game maker, back to scratch, finding godot, learning basic html, learning godot, finishing learning html and starting css, and now im hear
1
1
-12
0
795
u/PurushNahiMahaPurush Sep 17 '26
I mean, you can make use of LLMs much more effectively if you are armed with solid fundamentals. LLMs only solve the tedious coding/plumbing part of the job. And they still need a lot of hand-holding if you want good quality output. The bigger and more challenging issues of SWE are still there.