Comment by austin-cheney
20 days ago
At many elite US universities the students now enter at a struggle because they have never read a novel cover to cover. That blew my mind when I read about it just a year or two ago. It explains why many younger developers simply cannot write casual emails at work and absolutely everything must be a time sucking video meeting. It’s an excuse to take a nap or do something unrelated on a different screen.
It may also explain why so many software developers now are fully incapable of developing software. Everything must start from the world’s largest frameworks and be AI assisted because I guess now even copy/paste is too tiresome. If you need to refactor it’s best to start over from scratch than debug.
The bad news is there are fewer and fewer young candidates available capable of writing original software. It’s the same problem Japan and Korea are having with regard to military enlistment. The population is shrinking, less interested, and less compatible to the minimal requirements.
The good news is that with this growing competence/compatibility gap it gets easier and easier to identify candidates that can perform versus those that absolutely have no current hope.
To be honest my interviewers couldn’t sound less interested when I told them about my thoughts on Camus' Caligula and my love-hate relationship with Livy's History of Rome when I applied for jobs, same when I applied for PhDs.
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Similar things happened when I try to quote Dijkstra and "Out of the Tarpit" during coding interviews. I then started to quote Uncle Bob and they start to understand more. I am not sure people care about reading. Mind you this was the new grad job market.
You're not wrong. Another part of the problem is that industry itself is rampantly anti-intellectual in many ways. I can't tell you how much of an uphill battle it can be to get coworkers to even acknowledge a useful idea from academia or read papers, even at good companies.
Hell, the "industry languages" are just now more broadly adopting good language design ideas that have been around in academic contexts for decades.
I'm not sure how to do it, but we really need a return to a society in which intellectual curiosity and sophisticated debate are viewed as worthwhile—our incessant desire to just maximize profit as quickly as possible over anything else and the sharp division between "the intellectual domain" of academy and "the real world" of industry needs to blur and evaporate.
While things may be worse now with AI making source code itself disposable, and perhaps attention spans really are shorter (I wouldn't know either way, though it does sound a bit cliché for old people to complain about Kids These Days):
Time-sucking meetings have always been a problem, the difference now is just that they're online and you can do something else on another screen, rather than been stuck in a chair with a notepad to doodle in.
One of the two worst software developers I've ever had to work with was heavy on the copy-paste in the early 2010s, I think they'd been at it for a decade by that point already. They were using C++ and ObjC with manual memory management (and proud of it!) due to a complete lack of interest in learning the better ways. (The other one was bad in a different way, treated me the way I'd treat ChatGPT).
> The good news is that with this growing competence/compatibility gap it gets easier and easier to identify candidates that can perform versus those that absolutely have no current hope.
Is it, though? AI probably interviews better than I myself do — and yet, my main competitive advantage over AI (and, from your description, over my human competitors) is that I can actually focus on long-horizon tasks. Leetcode, how does {library de jour} perform {task}, what's the difference between {approach 1} and {approach 2}? That's all stuff that most of the LLMs can one-shot.
Back when I was a product manager in the late 80s and 90s, I had a ton of meetings where I would often have to walk to a different building and sit through an hour of meeting with no laptop/connectivity even if only 20% was relevant. You really couldn’t multitask.
> At many elite US universities the students now enter at a struggle because they have never read a novel cover to cover.
Meh, who cares? My son is a freshman at a large public high school in suburban Chicago. Yes, it’s “honors” English, but they read a novel cover-to-cover every 3-4 weeks. I get the weekly email from the school about which universities are visiting. Elite ones never visit, and as an Ivy League grad I get notified when they are in the area visiting more prestigious schools so I can schedule my son to go over to them for a visit (i.e. I know that they come visit in the area).
The elite schools have made their choice. They’ll discover their mistake later on.
Elite in the economic sense. Places like Harvard are anti-progressive and serve to gate keep opportunity and wealth.
If a visit from a Ivy League school is the difference from submitting a App or not, that's not really the schools problem.