How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect.
How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect.
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I swear this isn't a get off my lawn post
Proceeds to spend 5 paragraphs complaining about what people call the original Javascript. He has some valid points, but this is very much an older developer complaining about the new generation of devs.
I dunno some of these feel like fundamentals that any web dev should know.
You're gonna have headaches down the road if you don't know hiw static html works.
I heard of some people having trouble getting their head around React. I didn't, and I thought it was because I had a pretty good foundation in functional programming. React's magic is transparent if you understand things like first order functions and immutable data.
Now I wonder if the disconnect was even more fundamental.
new generation of devs
The new generation of devs sadly has a lot of people that only can type what they want to achieve into ChatGPT and blindly copy whatever code snippet it comes up with. But they can't develop. Nor do they understand code written by others. They're the reason things like NodeJS's is-even package exists.
Published 8 years ago
I didn't know that the new generation of developers were that far along in their careers already.
We've been saying that about new devs since there became a second generation of devs
Except when I was a new dev, it was blindly copying stuff from stack overflow
In Phaedrus, Socrates talks about the invention of writing:
"it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so."
This isn't the new generation of devs. This is just new devs. Some people refuse to grow out of this stage.
New devs generally suck, I sucked a lot.
The problem I fear today is that there are more crutches new devs can rely on, until they can’t.
And it’s not a sharp boundary between getting by and not being able to work it
More crutches is definitely a problem. Personally, after vocally refusing to use chatgpt for months, my boss has now sat me down and told me to use it because it "halves his development time".
My colleague and boss use it constantly. Guess whose job has become mostly debugging their code when they can't get it to work and don't know why?
That is very frustrating !
The main issue is that not a lot of companies want and do take the time to train less experienced devs. Every company is expecting new hires to be trained already.
So many new devs need to scrape by with whatever means they have. And it is true is a lot of industries.
College computer programming programs normally do not train people to immediately work, unless the students spend thousands of hours coding on their own. Most comp sci students avoid this.
So, when a new dev graduates and they did not do that extra work, then the first year of paid work is them putting in those hours while being paid rather than doing it for free
I am not in the US, so I cannot compare, but people here that go to college equivalent explicitly learn to code.
When people go into computer science at University, they are decent coders and can do a lot of things out of school.
People learn to pass tests, and do computer labs. They have hands on experience in several computer languages. But that is a far cry from what is really needed.
Probably most schools give the fundamentals regardless of country.
Can’t tell who has talent until they try to work a lot; often the people who do not code on their own are not very good, period
I think a student should at least do a few hours average work each week on their own projects , regardless of tech stack. It really shows after 4 years.
it’s like night and day between those that do this as a hobby and go to school ; verses the people who pass tests and do group projects in the labs but don’t do anything outside of what is required.
The trend we see in programming is the same trend we see in many sectors. There is a spectrum of skills, and unfortunately, we only talk about the bad programmers and not the good ones.
The reality is that your company probably don't pay for top skills, so they get what they pay for. The pool of worker is spread thin, so the only thing left is the bad programmer.
So diploma mills churn out a maximum of workers to cash in on the situation.
I've heard of the term "expert beginners".
This is a generalization that has some merit. but ultimately, generalizing an entire group of people and making assumptions about them isn't a good way to judge an individuals ability to code.
See what they can do, and then judge.
You must have missed the part where I said a lot of people, not all of them. There are people calling themselves "developer" that shine during the hiring process, but then can't implement a random feature if there's no ready-to-use library for it.
However, this doesn't mean that there still aren't lots of actual developers around, that know what they're doing and can actually code in an actual programming language.
If you want to play true Scotsman, the embedded devs like to make fun of the web devs for being scared of bitfields and refusing to do logic with anything other than string matching and manipulation.
. . .
Secretly it's partially because we're absolutely terrified of strings in any form and simply refuse to use them.
There are a lot of sub disciplines to the field, some benefit a lot from GPT or blindly copying from SA, some don't, but that's ok either way. Keep your skill sets broad and you'll survive.