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

[ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club]

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"

[philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com]

@ludicity Like… basically everyone I’ve interacted with in my career except a notable handful?

[jacques@mastodon.chester.id.au]

@ludicity I founded an entire subreddit on this topic which still considers me to be an absent god.

Truly. But its name cannot be spoken.

[philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com]

@ludicity Ask me how many times someone other than me has, in my presence, used or mentioned using a debugger (As contrary to inserting a bunch of debug prints in the code).

Zero. It’s zero times.

[uwehalfhand@norcal.social]

@ludicity Sadly, the answer is not “rarely”. In the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work in a fairly stable group, so can’t really differentiate between before and after LLMs. But regardless, there is a reasonable fraction of NNPPs — net negative productivity programmers.

[phated@fosstodon.org]

@ludicity About 90% of the time, so goes Sturgeon's Law.

[drikanis@mstdn.ca]

@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.

[uwehalfhand@norcal.social]

@ludicity @davedave I do very much think so, just I haven’t directly seen that increase yet.

[ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club]

@haruki_zaemon Oh shit, I didn't know you were on Mastodon!

[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.