Comment by grebc

5 days ago

I mentioned this then other day, my university class had maybe 80% of people who could not code. No joke. And a lot have gone onto to code professionally.

AI is a godsend to this cohort of code monkies.

Edit: we graduated in 2006.

11 comments

grebc

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a34729t  5 days ago

At a FAANG adjacent company in 2017 we hired a guy from Google with 4 years experience who passed our very hard coding interviews. He literally couldnt code. It blew my mind.

  • grebc  5 days ago

    I’m sure any profession has this issue.

    My families business is bookkeeping, they hired someone who graduated with an accounting degree. They didn’t grasp the basics of bookkeeping nor accounting once employed.

    You’d think Google who my understanding pride themselves on technical chops would weed this out with all the interviews they do. But maybe it’s just big places have more cracks for people slip into.

cheesecakegood  5 days ago

I’ve long been curious what you (and a lot of people that express this) feel the cutoff is to know how to code? Because obviously there’s a sliding scale between truly knowing very little, being able to adapt similar work, extensive modifications, coding everything from scratch, etc. on top of understanding certain programming concepts and organization.

  • grebc  5 days ago

    Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line. Not everything you touch when you know how to code is doing the whole thing, but I’d expect you’d be able to piece it all together with some time and docs. Pick your own platform that suits too, I’m not saying iOS or Windows only.

    For context to my above comment re university course. The final project we had to do was make a very rudimentary room reservation server/client on the terminal. Java, however you wanted to store the data was fine, TCP sockets were the parameters given.

    It took me all of a week to finish it. Lots struggled to even begin. We were given 10 weeks.

    I didn’t know much then but I read the docs and figured it out.

    • hypfer  5 days ago

      > Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI is probably where I’d draw the line.

      Wasn't the workflow there always to take the example code of whatever library or framework it was and then customize it?

      I could definitely never start a react or android or c# or whatever application from scratch with no resources. Nor would I want to because why.

      Works with C I guess though. Given that the contract is so small.

      But that also breaks down the moment you want to write C for some uC, and then there's tons of boilerplate again you just pull from the sdk example.

      2 replies →

    • joquarky  5 days ago

      > Can you build a desktop/terminal app, web app/site, mobile app, or even a library without engaging AI

      If companies would start hiring people who are fully experienced and qualified but can't do the monkey dance of performing live coding, maybe they would find these types of programmers again...

1718627440  5 days ago

You can learn to code in a few months in your free time and get good in your job. That's different from refusing to learn it, because you outsource it.

Also coding is not that hard. You kinda only write the algorithms down you make up in your head. And you do have an algorithmic understanding when you graduate. You also invented some/several languages in during your studies. The learning an actual developed language IS learning, but it's just boring learning, nothing compared to what you did for your exams.