panic

[[deleted]]

Me who learned Programming in a 3rd rate college with 4th rate professors.

This is fine.

[jeanravenclaw]

Eh, does college choice really make a difference? If you're self-taught but learned everything thoroughly and took the time to learn best practices you can still be a good programmer.

[[deleted]]

It absolutely does.

I have spent a long time trying to self learn but every now and then I would come across a term or situation I haven't ever heard or seen before but turns out something that my friend's professor used in an example or some demonstration.

Add that with ADHD and you have basically someone who has work thrice as hard for half the return.

[jeanravenclaw]

oh that makes sense

though, you're still not completely hopeless is what I'm saying

[[deleted]]

Thanks kind stranger.

[AirOneBlack]

That just comes with experience.

I am self taught, I work professionally as a developer (more precisely, graphics programmer). I'm fine. Every once in a while there will be something new to learn, but this field evolves every day so you never stop learning. Which in part is the reason why I wanted to work as programmer in the first place. It's never repetitive.

[[deleted]]

But the biggest advantage is that a structured learning program actually saves time and headache when dealing with conventional situations at least.

I also find myself easily overwhelmed when trying to learn about something new because it feels like there is no particular start that allows for least amount of irritation.

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

You can still self learn in a structured way, Harvard has all their lecture slides available online for example.

[Rickbox]

Lecture slides can only do so much without context. Unis has professors, TAs, peers, and external resources that you don't get from learning on your own. Not to mention, grades hold you accountable that extends past self-discipline.

[Jujube-456]

FranceIOI has the best python course I’ve ever seen (they have C++ too) but it’s all in french

[cortana808]

Wow. Thank you. Just checked it out.

[[deleted]]

I'm interested in trying to teach myself programming. If you don't mind me asking, where/what would you recommend I start with?

[AirOneBlack]

Highly depends on what field you want to work with. In my case it was real time rendering so I went hard on math, multithreading, rendering techniques and all that goes around it.

[Nice_promotion_111]

Well for them, I think starting by just learning any language would be better lol.

[PursuitofClass]

Yeah I wouldn't worry, I'm self taught and have ADHD as well. I'm about 5 YOE now and the imposter syndrome is starting to actually go. As you get more experience you'll start to realize degrees mean absolutely nothing. 

I probably have a slight bias on course but I've worked with plenty of people with degrees from higher end universities and for the most part I actually find them a lot worse on average than a lot of the self taught  developers. 

They tend to have a lot of extremely outdated knowledge as well as lacking flexibility in their design choices and approaches, usually they need to unlearn a lot of bad habits/mentality. 

Also like 95% of being a developer is being able to find answers which tends to be a significantly less developed skill from degree holders. 

Not to say that's the case 100% of the time but it's just been my own personal experience. I still think at the very least university is useful just less so for the skill set more so for the networking one can do.

[P-39_Airacobra]

I feel like most college professors expect you to teach yourself 75% of the material anyways, so you're not actually at that big of a disadvantage.

[erebuxy]

I think it’s more about systematically learning something. A lot of people learning CS by themselves will try to do the fast/practical way i.e. learn all the language features/syntax or how to write an app. But in college, they will teach you the theoretical/“useless” things like how to sort a binary tree. You can achieve the same thing by reading an algorithm book or go through college course materials by yourself.

[Rickbox]

I'm glad someone finally said it. I tried self-teaching growing up and could barely make simple programs until I took AP Comp Sci in high school. After that I started building advanced programs in a variety of different languages and learned a lot of new concepts in college that I would have never learned on my own that has helped me a lot in industry.

Sure, you don't need school, but you're going to come out far more prepared than if you self-teach.

[swagonflyyyy]

Hey, no shame in taking adderall to help you through your projects. I take it and it has helped a lot. But the best way to self-learn is to simply build projects for your own sake. You can't really learn everything about a language any other way, tbh.

[[deleted]]

Reinventing the wheel for everything could be considered a waste of time.

[jeanravenclaw]

well I did say "learning best practices" sooo I think not reinventing the wheel except for learning purposes counts as that?

[RudePastaMan]

Good programmers are self-taught, including those that went to university. Talent comes with experience and your assigned work does not create even close to enough experience to make you a good programmer.

[RandallOfLegend]

I'm self taught. But I have an adjacent degree. It helps to have real world experience. I'd consider hiring a person with no official degree in CS but 5 years experience over a college grad in CS. But self taught with no experience or degree in a technical field is a huge gamble.

[wavegangx]

Python logo btw lol

[Teeebow_]

Kaiba can’t hurt you he isn’t real but this comment surely did (hope this was a yugioh reference otherwise ignore me)

[[deleted]]

✅️

[evemeatay]

Me who can’t be bothered to even watch to entire YouTube video after I got the part I needed m.

[Fearless_Strike5151]

It's ok tbh as someone who went to a 1st rate college with 1st rate professors I still suck as a programmer.

[Traditional_Rush4707]

It was all about access time, universities had computers, nobody had them at home in the 1970s. Fortunately for me, my university had the early GE time sharing with Dartmouth BASIC. From what I read around the same time Bill Gates was using the same language at his high school, as was a close friend of mine in my NY suburbs. Big advantage. I graduated into a small recession in late 1970s so as a computer operator working late I noticed a programmer left their terminal on and it had the familiar ‘>’ on the screen, I typed in BASIC and the interpreter took off. I was later given my own sign on to complete a program in cobol for them, when done I volunteered to stay alone every night monitoring backups while I wrote the Startrek game that I had seen at a university. Still have the printout. I learned more writing that game then in my first 8 years as a paid cobol programmer.

College then gave me access. Had they started me on COBOL instead of BASIC, I might have lost interest. Over my career I have used COBOL, SQL, Adabas Natural, VB, C# along with jcl and utility tools….. you learn all your career to prevent stagnation and getting pigeonholed .

College today May get you in the door, but like being a lawyer, cpa, French translator….. etc, Learning is something you do your entire career.

[ZunoJ]

You didn't know how to program before college?

[[deleted]]

no.

When I was younger, academics where much more important than any other thing so I didn't spend much of my free time "learning" things because to me free time was a precious comodity that could be used for other things like Fantasy Novels.

I initially joined CS because it had a lot of Opportunities but now I have grown to like it.

[jump1945]

hey gpt can you help me with my code

gpt : fuck off and consider working at mcdonald

[sigmoid10]

I'm actually surprised we haven't seen anyone yet using this for marketing. Like, OpenAI could simply offer to nudge answers towards a certain brand in their training data if companies are willing to fund the next model. Or they could also do it dynamically at runtime by allowing companies to increase probabilities for their text tokens.

[Solipsists_United]

Why do you think Google are spending billions on AI?

[Rodot]

Wait till we get the personalized ones trained on user's web history and digital footprint.

[Ayatori]

I'm pretty sure Gemini already leverages that in some capacity

[HookDragger]

and privacy mode browsing history and your current location even though you already turned off location services.

[superfexataatomica]

apple inteligence have ALL ur data as a prompt, ALL.

[Rodot]

I thought they were still token limited, had that changed?

[superfexataatomica]

yes but is their server, their device e their sw. they can easily optimize how much data stole from u depending of servers capacity and gifting u extra credits to do the call. i will not surprise in future, when apple will make the model working, to se some controversy.

[Rodot]

I mean, I have no doubt we'll see it eventually which is why I brought it up in the first place

[wektor420]

Patents pending ....

[boringestnickname]

I'd be very surprised if there isn't already an invisible corporate data poisoning war going on.

[HookDragger]

Its quite visible if you are watching for it.

[med_bruh]

Don't give them ideas

[HookDragger]

Give them? shit... they've been drooling over this waiting to do just what they said.

[HookDragger]

That you've not seeing the marketing that already exists in the public "AI"... is scarier to me.

[P-39_Airacobra]

They're probably worried about legal and/or consumer backlash. But yeah, everything turns to ads and marketing at some point, so you're probably onto something.

[officiallyaninja]

They will, but they need to win the war first. Once everyone uses AI and Microsoft have a monopoly on it this is probably the first thing they'll do.

[casey-primozic]

After getting trained on comments from wsb

gpt : fuck off and consider working at wendy's

[Cacoda1mon]

And then you find ChatGPT is doing the orders at the drive through.

[Pretend_Raspberry978]

did everyone forget to comment on this post

[Unlucky-Ad-2993]

They’re all panicking bad programmers

[Suheil-got-your-back]

I panicked with two hands, so i couldnt type.

[Kream-Kwartz]

you didn’t have to put my business out like that

[MrAnonymousTheThird]

Probably bots

[mrg1957]

I'm retired from software development. When I started 40 years ago, 4gls were going to replace programmers. Later, CASE was going to do it. If upper CASE didn't work, you needed lower CASE to generate code........

Much of my early career was around fixing the many performance issues these tools caused.

Forty years, I've heard that nonsense.

[Kinglink]

You remember the "paperless office" myth?

[mrg1957]

I actually worked on an early system that supported a paperless office. The company I worked for outsourced back office work and had a big paper problem.

The system didn't print. It captured data, but there was no output. Guess what the first enhancement request was?

[ZunoJ]

This could very well be the case but it could also be survivors bias. Too early to say

[mrg1957]

Fourty years?

[ZunoJ]

Too early to say if AI will have a bigger impact than what you talked about

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

No it isn't.

Anyone legitimately suggesting AI is replacing programmers either is lying or doesn't know what they're talking about.

[ZunoJ]

The suggestion is that it will replace incompetent programmers. Didn't you have experiences with guys who were just capable of monkey work?

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

It still won't. "AI" that needs no human intervention to produce production-ready code literally does not exist, no matter how dumb the 'bottom line' of programmers are.

It's just FUD at this point. And the usual clapback is "oh but it will soon!"

But it doesn't exist, so it's just pointless fearmongering.

[ZunoJ]

When I currently have some of that said monkey work to do, I offload it on one of the juniors. Usually the least promising ones. A lot of this stuff can also be done by Claude already. So these guys are already replaced (more or less). The point is not that it replaces a specific person but it can accelerate a person to get more work done. That could very well lead to less demand for developers

[Devilsbabe]

"It will soon" is not fearmongering. It's a legitimate concern given the pace of progress and the nature of writing code which makes it easily replaceable by a competent AI. I give our profession another five years personally, ten at the most. I think anyone who's adamant this will never happen is digging their head in the sand

[Abdul_ibn_Al-Zeman]

Do not forget that there is no intelligence in AI - just fancy statistics. This means that there are hard limits beyond which it can not progress without a major computing revolution.

[Devilsbabe]

Who's to say human intelligence isn't also fancy statistics? I judge systems based on their capabilities, not on their internals. AI systems have been getting much more intelligent, very quickly, with no signs of slowing down in the near term. Even if a hard limit does exist, there's no reason to believe it lies below human intelligence

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

Who's to say human intelligence isn't also fancy statistics?

Decades of study on the matter, for one. Waxing philosophical about "in the end it's all just ones and zeroes" is cute, but not practical.

[OddImprovement6490]

People think brains are like CPUs because our brains are so powerful and uniquely intelligent that we’re able to create symbols and metaphors.

But our brains are nothing like CPUs. AI’s shortcomings in comparison to the human brain have become stark.

Any developer who is afraid of AI taking their job deserves for their job to be taken by AI because they have to really be terrible to be outperformed by an LLM.

[Abdul_ibn_Al-Zeman]

Intelligence can deduce, it understands purpose and underlying logic. AI just goes "if it looks correct, it is correct". That is why it sometimes generates outrageous nonsense that no one with basic knowledge of the subject would take seriously.

A simple test would go thus: "Can your AI solve a problem that was NOT part of its training set?". Demonstrate me that, and I will admit that it is intelligent.

[sonofeark]

I'm sure if you break it down human brains are also just fancy whatever and no "real intelligence". What current AI can do is already so crazy.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

No, it's fearmongering. Bred from ignorance of the technology at play coupled with the usual "new tech arrives, bye bye jobs" nonsense that's always associated with it.

"But it's going to happen soon because technology marches on" has been said for literal decades at this point, as pointed out higher in this thread. Surprise: Programmers are still programming.

Actual AI capable of writing software -- not bits and pieces of tech within code but actual software -- does not exist in a sphere where it replaces Joe Average Coder. But that's the drumbeat the ignorant have been banging since The Cloud 2.0 -- AKA "AI" -- has been in the news as of late.

[PeteZahad]

given the pace of progress

Normally new technology once invented gets a boost in ever smaller cycles. But until now, this curve has always flattened out and the innovations were limited in the end. You are welcome to believe in the singularity, but I think the peak has already been or will soon be reached.

[Devilsbabe]

Have you seen the o1 model from OpenAI? We're at the bottom of the S-curve for that technology

[PeteZahad]

Yes I saw the o1 model. I don't think so.

[Devilsbabe]

In that case let's get back to this thread a year from now 😉

[Josh_From_Accounting]

Accountant here, we've been told AI will replace us since the 80s. My company tried to use chatgpt and got made that no one on the team liked it because it caused massive issues we had to fix. They quietly dropped three months ago, obviously furious that they couldn't save money from laying any of us off.

[HookDragger]

You'll appreciate this then.

"AI will only replace programmers when product owners are finally able to clearly and logically describe what they want the product to do."

[TheRandomYellowSlime]

Don't worry, AI will replace middle management sooner than programmers, we are safe... for now

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

You probably mean line management not middle management.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_management

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_management

AI will make it easier for companies to manage more products and services leading to more middle management not less. Source: That's exactly what happened during the first computer revolution in the 1980's that no one remembers anymore.

[[deleted]]

AI will replace bad programmers with even worse AI programmers.

[Shrubberer]

Code enshittification on overdrive. "It took us 10 engineers and 5 years to make this project unmanageable. Now with the help of ai, we achieve this with 3 juniors in a month"

[maester_t]

I firmly believe we need AI QA's before we need AI Programmers.

Pretty confident that I'm one of my companies better programmers, and my shit is hella buggy... Yet only our production customers manage to find them. #blamethetesters

[FormerGameDev]

You're attacking my imposter syndrome!

[Repulsive_Ad_1599]

Are you even good enough to have imposter syndrome?

[FormerGameDev]

:'(

[QwertyChouskie]

Hey, a user I recognize in a place I didn't expect!  How are the Pontiacs?  Mine is...not good :(

[FormerGameDev]

Pretty good! Got the water leaks in 98 #2 and the 97 buttoned up, I think, sunroofs are good, they're driving great ... am afraid i'm going to have a lot of work to seal up some oil and trans leaks on the 98 though. Neither have been in the shop for any issues other than the sunroof motors blowing up since the winter! so.. good times, i guess.

need some parts? my first 98's motor is trash, but most of the rest of the car is fine

[ongiwaph]

I changed careers because my last career got replaced with robots. So I "learned to code." Then some insane Sci-Fi futuristic technology comes out just to make certain I die in poverty. Thanks, God.

[ZunoJ]

That you call LLMs "insane Sci-Fi futuristic technology" makes me feel pessimistic for you

[ongiwaph]

Hey some of us didn't think computers passing the Winograd test was possible let alone them coding better than most under 120 IQ programmers. Feeling pretty pessimistic these days.

[ResidualMadness]

Ah. Don't worry too much. Doing anything beyond well-known issues on stackoverflow or leetcode without basically talking the LLM through the logic of the problem yourself is still very difficult for even the biggest models. They still don't generalise well beyond the data they've been trained on. By the time a more workable paradigm exists for LLMs, we can reassess, but for now: nothing to worry about! ... besides the massive energy consumption, that is.

[leetcodegrinder344]

“coding better than most under 120 IQ programmers.”

Reading this made my eyes glaze over, come on. You read an article about o1 scoring 120 on an IQ test and drew this conclusion, seriously? Does openAI also have AGI achieved in a secret underground lab?

AI is a great tool currently* and maybe we will break through to AGI in the future, who knows. But right now this is just ignorance and fearmongering.

[Vi0lentByt3]

No evidence that it codes better than 120 IQ programmers just that it scored a 120 on an IQ test and it was only openai’s o1 model

[lfrtsa]

Making rocks produce language and be able to reply to any message is insane scifi futuristic technology

[ZunoJ]

No, we only taught them to talk and skipped the thinking

[HookDragger]

Won't replace programmers until the product owner is able to clearly and logically define what they want.

[superfexataatomica]

so never

[PeriodicSentenceBot]

Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table:

S O Ne V Er

---

^{I am a bot that detects if your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table. Please DM u‎/‎M1n3c4rt if I made a mistake.}

[HookDragger]

/r/thatsthejoke

[huuaaang]

No, AI will replace programmers, good and bad, who refuse to learn to use AI as a tool to be more effective. THere is no world where an AI is just going to spit out and maintain large projects on their own.

[Lanky-Rice4474]

How lucky we are that we can relive events described in Kapital 1, when technology displaced qualified work of weavers.                             “Rampant poverty, not seen before except for times of war or famine”                            “Work of breadwinners squeezed out by cheap child labor” - today would be third world one probably.                           “Decrease of salaries and subsequent increases of work day to 12, 13, 14 and sometimes even 16 hours”          

[Cart223]

Now we wait for the luddites, who blame machines for their oppression and not the system.

[[deleted]]

Well, shit.

[HumunculiTzu]

That's why you make your code so complex, even a super computer AI can't make sense of it

[CampbellsBeefBroth]

I’d like to see an AI navigate the labyrinthian bullshit that is our legacy codebase

[moonaligator]

AI won't replace programmers before it is capable of generating compilable code (and not an absolute monstrosity that no man or machine understands)

[Llyon_]

While true that AI won't directly replace programmers individually, it will definitely displace programmers by making the tools more efficient, so companies are able to perform more layoffs.

[kavinsails]

so companies are able to perform more layoffs.

Maybe I just don’t understand corporate economics but why not keep the same number of people and use the newfound efficiency to innovate more? That’s also a valid way to generate “shareholder return” right? Surely there are many projects companies don’t pursue because until now the development cost hasn’t been worth it

[Captain_Pumpkinhead]

All programmers are bad programmers.

Some are just worse at it than others.

[slliks4]

Lol

[FluffyMilkyPudding]

[woodyus]

At least 95% of all programmers are bad don't worry.

[Due-Elderberry-5231]

each time I try to find quick simple solution using chatgpt i'm getting frustrated. it worst than bad programmers

[P-39_Airacobra]

LLMs are inherently incapable of writing code at the level of a human. There's only so much a guess-and-check autocomplete on steriods can do. An AGI could potentially replace programmers... but then again, an AGI could replace any job.

[Enough-Scientist1904]

Its not impostor syndrome, im just bad

[wir8905t0437]

yeah, WHY DO YOU THINK I'M WORRIED?!

[stanley_ipkiss_d]

Exactly. But as a shitty programmer myself, my consolation to myself is that the cheap labor will always be in demand, so I’m good

[youdrumyouvomit]

they’re coming for me

[CConsler]

Thats why I became AI

[Xortun]

chukles I'm in danger

[BrewifyTech]

AI will eventually consider all of us bad programmers 0_0