Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses.

[gord1i@fosstodon.org]

@ludicity maybe I moved in rarefied circles, but the big divide I've encountered is software engineers who understood things in general vs application "developers" who only knew one stack or app, and would frustratingly be convinced the sun shone from Redmond or wherever.

The advent of LLMs has disrupted this a bit, as they're more likely to answer in general terms, or contextualise the offering from the blessed stack as a poor imitation of a far superior open source equivalent

[koantig@mamot.fr]

@ludicity

See this post about -1x programmers:
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116085039513622322

[nqd@minidisc.tokyo]

@ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club online? incredible common, IRL? rarely have i met someone who doesn't have a decent grasp of the tech they're using

[ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club]

@nqd Online, I think I get exposed to way more random people. IRL, I was in a bubble of mostly incompetent people (it was huge) and now I'm in a bubble of mostly competent people (it's very small).

[dpnash@c.im]

@ludicity

Uncommonly, both before and after LLMs.

I’ve generally been fortunate to work for companies that filter out people with low skill pretty well without being terrifying during the interview, and also for being on teams with mostly mid-level and higher developers/engineers.

The commonest “problem” behavior I’ve seen is people (at many levels of technical skill) having significant degrees of learned helplessness when confronted with problems outside their stronger skill sets. The developers I know mostly don’t use LLMs for coding or similar tasks, so I can’t really comment on “before vs. after” there.

[mehluv@mastinsaan.in]

@ludicity more frequently now, and specifically with software engineers who already had a lot of experience beforehand, but seem to be losing all their knowledge and best practices and making far worse choices when it comes to their code nowadays.

[ondrej@mastodon.rfc1925.org]

@ludicity Depends. Rarely professionally, but I did most of my hiring for most of my life and I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe during the interviews.

The worst people were exactly like LLM - stupid, loud and unable to admit they are wrong.

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@ludicity Among free software developers (a community I professionally deal with): almost never.

In corporate environments, working on enterprise software: constantly, all the time, always, everywhere. The exception was Google (~12 years ago) where everyone was pulling their weight and more; Google's problems are of another nature.

[autonomousapps@mstdn.social]

@ludicity I've mostly met great people, before and after. maybe I'm lucky

[buherator@infosec.place]

@ludicity I worked mostly at (pen)testing and have always been astonished how basics of basics were unclear for many people (e.g. "does this code run on the client or the server?"). My opinion in summary is that the general quality of sw engineering/ers declined since managers figured out they can bill by the hour instead of fulfillment under the guise of "agile" (see "I'm gonna write myself a new minivan this afternoon").

[notsimon@defcon.social]

Probably it's downstream from where I live, but almost everyone I ran into seemed incompetent to some degree, and most of them incompetent enough I wouldn't work with them again.

[icing@chaos.social]

@ludicity
pre LLM: rarely in open source, often in corporate.

Now: likely in open source, mainly as security reporters who play copy&paste monkey with our project and their LLM. Cant say anything about corporate as I no longer experience that (thank the heavens).

[theorangetheme@en.osm.town]

@ludicity It wasn't great before, but I've only seen one very specific slice of the tech world. I've encountered developers using technology they didn't understand. I've received too many *screenshots of stack traces* from developers on other teams, and they expected me to solve their problem for them. (Stack traces will, conveniently, show you exactly where the error is. And also it's your code.) I don't have super powers, I just know how to read and... program computers.

[neverpanic@chaos.social]

@ludicity A handful, maybe two or three over the span of 10 years.
I've been extremely lucky, but I also made sure to work for organizations with good hiring practices and/or appeal to competent people.

[theorangetheme@en.osm.town]

@ludicity After, it's hard to say, because I haven't moved much during the LLM "revolution", and I already work at a company with learned helplessness. But there's no way it's gotten better, not at all.

[jablkoziemne@101010.pl]

@drikanis @ludicity

"they claim they can't do any work at all." Saying something like I can't do this terrifies me, as it says Im incompetent and should not be filling that position. Besides that this doesn't provide any information for others to give me help which I desperately need.

That's why I try to say what I want to acomplish, what I hove done, and what's the issue, and thanks to that half the time I get new ideas to check and maybe even I get to solve my problem.

[bagder@mastodon.social]

@ludicity asking this question speaks inexperience loudly. Incompetence is widespread in all areas of life. Even before LLMs. Especially in enterprise.

[ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club]

@bagder I think it's the old Gel-Mann thing, where he has assumed that people in areas that aren't his own are probably real adults, because how else would the world keep working

My sweet summer Ed

[freiksenet@toot.cat]

@ludicity A lot in corporate world, more rare in startups. In general, a lot of people unable to do basic things like fizzbuzz during interview.