Comment by boomskats
11 hours ago
What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none.
That time when you got to internalise through first hand experience what good & bad look like is when you built the skill/intuition that now differentiates competent LLM wielding devs from the vibers. The problem is that expectations of juniors are inevitably rising, and they don't have the experience or confidence (or motivation) to push back on the 'why don't you just AI' management narrative, so are by default turning to rolling the dice to meet those expectations. This is how we end up with a generation of devs that truly don't understand the technology they're deploying and imho this is the boringdystopia / skynet future that we all need to defend against.
I know it's probably been said a million times, but this kinda feels like global warming, in that it's a problem that we fundamentally will never be able to fix if we just continue to chase short term profit & infinite growth.
> What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none
I would say that baptism by fire _is_ where the quality of an academic education comes from, historically at least. They are the same picture.
Agreed. I remember (a long time ago) being on an internship (workterm) and after doing some amount of work for the day, I spent some time playing around with C pointers, seeing what failed, what didn't, what the compiler complained about, etc.