Comment by goostavos
6 hours ago
I had my first interview last week where I finally saw this in the wild. It was a student applying for an internship. It was the strangest interview. They had excellent textbook knowledge. They could tell you the space and time complexities of any data structure, but they couldn't explain anything about code they'd written or how it worked. After many painful and confusing minutes of trying to get them to explain, like, literally anything about how this thing on their resume worked, they finally shrugged and said that "GenAI did most of it."
It was a bizarre disconnect having someone be both highly educated and yet crippled by not doing.
Sounds a little bit like the stories from Feynman, e.g.: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...
The students had memorized everything, but understood nothing. Add in access to generative AI, and you have the situation that you had with your interview.
It's a good reminder that what we really do, as programmers or software engineers or what you wanna call it, is understanding how computers and computations work.
Lots of theory but no practice.
More like using a calculator but not being able to explain how to do the calculation by hand. A probabilistic calculator which is sometimes wrong at that. The "lots of theory but no practice" has always been true for a majority of graduates in my experience.
Surely, new grads are light on experience (particularly relevant experience), but they should have student projects and whatnot that they should be able to explain, particularly for coding. Hardware projects are more rare simply because they cost money for parts and schools have limited budgets, but software has far fewer demands.
This the kind of interaction that makes be think that there are only 2 possible futures:
Star Trek or Idiocracy.
Hmmm, I think we're more likely to face an Idiocracy outcome. We need more Geordi La Forges out there, but we've got a lot of Fritos out here vibe coding the next Carl's Jr. locating app instead
Star Trek illustrated the issue nicely in the scene where Scotty, who we should remember is an engineer, tries to talk to a computer mouse in the 20th century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE
This is exactly the end state of hiring via Leetcode.