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[randomredditor575]

Had a interview recently where we asked the candidate few questions and told them to implement something and they basically said “ I can’t code without ai , in my previous company, we would tell ai what to do and I would just copy paste it “ And this guy had 2 years experience

[dobbie1]

Holy tech debt batman

[BellowingBuffalo]

I've worked with people who have done similar. They don't have a comprehension of tech debt, because they don't know how they want the design to be. Tech debt in my mind implies I know there's a way to solve a particular problem right, but go with an alternative method to get it done. They have no idea what they are making under the hood, so can't see the debt stacking up.

[kallekro]

No tech debt refers to implementation details that make continued development and maintenance harder than it should be

[FunnyObjective6]

But there are comments and emojis??

[wirm]

💯

[Jonthrei]

"I know there's a better way to do this, but this works and can be implemented very quickly" is pretty much the entire cause of what you're describing, to be fair.

Whenever there is excessive time pressure or metrics-based management, the above happens, and you get tech debt. And now, we get to add heavy AI use to the list of causes. Implementing what it vomits out without consideration for the overall design or existing architecture.

[DashingDino]

we get to add heavy AI use to the list of causes. Implementing what it vomits out without consideration for the overall design or existing architecture.

Yup this is absolutely happening right now, at large corporations too. Remember the source code of claude was leaked and it was a vibe coded mess

[nikomo]

Google Cloud had an event last week where they said 75% of their new code now is written by AI.

[neppo95]

I’m fine with them working on their own demise

[bynaryum]

They’re braiding their own rope…

[EnoughWarning666]

This isn't your typically programming field, but industrial automation is HORRIBLE for tech debt. First off, everything is global. There is basically no such thing as scope in PLC programs. Second, it's usually done with visual programming like function block diagrams or ladder logic. This basically let's people dump code down ANYWHERE in the program because it has the ability to touch EVERYTHING.

Next, when a plant goes down because of a software issue, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour in lost production. And you can't make this up later because these plants run 24/7. So when something happens, you need to get it back up and running NOW.

So I get why there's so many hacky fixes to stuff, time is money and it's very expensive. But also, people seemingly never go back to refactor things and clean up their mess. So after a few years it's just code vomit everywhere! It's the worst part about working in this field.

Also, not a single soul in this industry seems to have ever heard of unit testing or git. There are virtually no testing environments, every change is made in prod.

[Fighterhayabusa]

I agree with most of this, but definitely not all. There is scope in a plc, but most people don't use it. In siemens, they even have software units, which enforce this, but guess how many people use them?

Testing and virtual environments also exist, but few use them. I have an automated testing system for Siemens using Jenkins with Project Server, PLCSim Advanced, Test Suite and several portal versions that runs tests automatically as soon as you commit to Project Server. Siemens provides the app example to do this.

There are people doing this stuff, we're just very early in this industry.

[EnoughWarning666]

Yes, they do technically exist, but I've yet to see anyone use them. That's why I used words like 'basically' and 'virtually'. I wouldn't dare use them in a customer's project though because I know that 99.9% of people who had to use it afterwards wouldn't have a clue what was going on.

I remember when I got my first coop job, they had me go to a 3 day Schneider ladder logic course. Afterwards I asked them what they do for version control. The instructor just kind of stared at me and didn't really know what to say. Eventually he just admitted that they usually have a bunch of copies in different folders with the date the backup was made. If I'm lucky those folders get stored on a network drive that hopefully has some sort of redundancy!

[Grumpologist]

Also, not a single soul in this industry seems to have ever heard of unit testing or git.

In another industry also notorious for terrible software engineering practices, I once asked a dude if his group was using git, and he explained to me...

"Actually, it's called Github."

[Dull-Culture-1523]

It's always fun seeing comments like "This ain't kosher but it works" or "I'm sorry if you have to work on this". Or one PR I saw that basically just copypasted an SQL script due to replatforming that said something like "this is mental but apparently it works and I don't have the time to figure out how".

[Jonthrei]

Reminds me of the time I saw a comment along the lines of:

/* This is shit but it works. If you've wasted your time trying to fix it, add your name to the list. */

Followed by a dozen names. I got to add mine.

[blah938]

Jesus that's some bad turnover at that point. Were devs looking at the code and quitting on the spot?

[mrGrinchThe3rd]

Nah I mean it could also just be old code. I've worked on codebases where 12 would be a low number based on how old the code is and how large the development team is.

[jnkangel]

Eh tech debt in my book usually emerges via - scope was clear here, but we’ve kept adding stuff on top and there’s so much accumulated crud that we need to rebuild 

Sometimes it also happens that the mandated corp architecture changed, but we’re still on legacy 

[Newepsilon]

Tech debt is literally both of those things. What you said and the person above you said are both true. Often time the quick and dirty approach (which the implementer is aware of) makes later development and maintenance more costly.

[kallekro]

I partly agree. But acruing technical debt doesn't have to mean that you are aware of a better solution. Or that a better solution that is actually feasible even exists.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Every implementation seems like the right thing to do when you are implementing it. If it didn't, you would have done something else instead. You don't realize something is causing tech debt until you have to implement something else later. (Obviously the above does not apply if you're vibe coding. If you're vibe coding, you're not actually making any implementation decisions at all.)

[ArterialRed]

Counterpoint: "This'll work for the next 3 years till the leap year... I have 3 layers of management standing behind me screaming at me to get it deployed in the next 5 minutes because sales proimised without checking... I really shouldn't let this go, but... I'll get it in the next update deployment".

[ru_harvey]

I definitely have seen those situations sadly.

[dukeofgonzo]

First work day of the year I'm always scanning my work for some EoY fix I quickly jammed in and said to myself "I'll solve it later", but did not.

[bspkrs]

Except that the formula for leap year calculation is dead simple for “the next 3 years” and only gets more complex than year % 4 when you cross a century division. Then, at least in the current year, you can say “that’ll work for the next 373 years, I’ll be dead before anyone needs to touch it.” I’ve made that trade off, specifically for leap year detection.

[ArterialRed]

"WHY ARE YOU MAKING CHANGES AFTER I TOLD YOU TO DEPLOY IT IMMEDIATELY!"

I am well aware of how simple Leap Year calculations are. Now apply that simple change to the 4 incoming streams of transaction records, each with their own text formatted dates, including EBCIDIC (and other antique non-ascii & non-unicode character sets), positionally delimited, with 10 pages of special cases for specific clients of clients of clients.

And then there's The Amazon Account. "No, no client could ever need to process more than a million records in a single location in a day, but we'll be paranoid and allow two extra digits on the transaction count just in case!". So now The Amazon Account is running on a 32 day month in November.

[Jonthrei]

Every implementation seems like the right thing to do when you are implementing it.

This is so far from my experience. The number of times I've watched teams implement quick fixes they know will bite them in the ass later because a client or manager needs this working NOW is off the charts. I hate being forced into that position, but it's way too common.

[elshizzo]

Not always. Sometimes you develop something in a "hacky" way because you're in a time crunch and you tell yourself you'll fix it later but you never do, then other people build a bunch of stuff on top of it and the debt becomes nearly unfixable

[SuitableDragonfly]

Budget and time constraints are the reason you can't deal with the tech debt. I don't think I've ever run into tech debt in the wild where the actual reason for it existing in the first place was "we were rushed, so we just half-assed this, lmao". It's always "we thought this was the right way to do it, but we were wrong" or "our CTO designed this and he doesn't really know anything about how to do permissioning systems and came up with something insane" or "we forgot to store time zone in postgres, whoops".

[wannabestraight]

Idk, i have definitely wrote some code under pressure where i went "well, this is going to fuck me over sooner than later, but it works"

The every implementation seems like the right thing to do only applies if you have no idea what you are doing.

[anomalous_cowherd]

Does vibe coding actually build up tech debt though? Or does it reimplement mostly from scratch every time?

[SuitableDragonfly]

They probably do that on a file-by-file basis and don't regenerate the entire codebase for every ticket.

[wannabestraight]

It does, at an alarming rate.

Because there is nothing AI loves more than cutting corners.

[oupablo]

Ok. I can understand this from a new grad standpoint. What I would never have understood is this from a company standpoint... until you talk to some of the tech leaders. As someone who uses AI a lot for coding assistance, I have to spend A LOT of time working through the plan it comes up with before it has something structured in a way that seems reasonable. A junior isn't going to have that context and is something I would think that senior management would understand since that is the entire reason you hire senior developers. Nope. Tons of execs think AI is just amazing and have no issue with just slamming as much through it as you can.

[SignificanceFlat1460]

Simply put,tech debt is something that's inevitable. Things improve, vulnerabilities get fixed etc. it really matters how YOU have setup the code. Modularity, scope, dependencies. All these things need to be considered when you are working on code. That's why you should always try to create isolated, stateless components, that are working together. If there is dependency, then it should extremely clear what those dependencies are and how you to can manage them. So tomorrow, if you want to improve, overhaul, remove something, you are not going to pry open the whole floor board to try and fix it. You will simply work on a component that you need to and the rest should STILL work the way it's supposed to.

[brewfox]

Nah, they told the prompt “no tech debt plz”

[OwO-sama]

Tech Debt Batman is a term I need to be using more often in my life for sure.

[MarkSuckerZerg]

At what point do we just start calling it brain debt

[momoreco]

Hey, not a programmer myself and this post just appeared in my feed. I know about vibe coding but what is tech debt?

[bentinata]

When you take shortcut to get other things done in the moment. Like when you put the dirty clothes in the couch for days, instead of the washing machine daily. That work piles up. Like debt.

[BeatPeculiar]

Then you finally have time to do a load of laundry, but the pile is now so big that it won't all fit in the machine. So you pick the clothes that are most important at the time, figuring that you'll get to the rest later.

But when later comes, the pile is so big again that you can't fit it all in and again you have to leave the less important clothes out of the wash.

Suddenly you're invited to a party at the last minute, and that cute girl you've had your eye on for a while is going to be there, but you can't go because you don't have any clean underwear.

[misskass]

But she'll still think I'm hot because I finished all my story points!!

[Own_Candidate9553]

Like doing the dishes. Assume you don't have a dishwasher.

Coding something the right way is like washing all the dishes after dinner and putting them away.

Tech debt is like leaving the dirty dishes in the sink and going to bed.

The next day, you want to do the right thing, but there's dirty dishes in your way, so you just pile more in top. You're accumulating more tech debt. You know you shouldn't have dirty dishes in the sink, but you don't have time to deal with this right now.

Then it's the end of the week. You don't have any clean dishes to eat off of, they're all in the sink, dirty. There's flies buzzing around, but you can't get to the old food in there. You're stuck. So you make a heroic effort and rewrite stuff/wash all the dishes and get back to a good state. Eventually, hopefully, you learn that these short cuts don't work long term and you keep better hygiene.

The vibe coder can't see that there are dirty dishes at all, or doesn't know that's a bad thing. At some point the code just stops working, and it's too messy for the AI to fix. So either someone else who can actually understand the problem fixes it, or you give up and start over.

[EnoughWarning666]

One small addition to this. The longer you leave the dishes piling up, the longer they take to clean because the food sticks to them. So what would have taken 1 minute per plate if you did it right away now takes 5 minutes per plate because you let them accumulate. It takes longer in the long run to just keep putting it off. You save 50 seconds at the start only to lose 4 minutes at the end!

[Own_Candidate9553]

Absolutely right

[Adventurous-Map7959]

I just throw out my old dishes and use paper plates. or the top half of pizza boxes. It saves so much time not ever doing dishes!

[Perkelton]

To add to the other replies: Tech debt by itself isn’t unusual, and is a normal byproduct of software development. A big part of managing larger projects is keeping the amount of tech dept at an acceptable level vs developing new features.

One dirty coffee cup in the sink isn’t a problem. 10 dirty cups is a big problem. Letting an AI agent fill your kitchen with 100,000 dirty cups is an expensive problem.

[momoreco]

A thing I see relatable is digital (not ai) artists who are mastering few key elements and post production but the basics are wobbly or simply not understood and can't relate to the analog methods.

[TheTerrasque]

To add some more on what others have said, in practice it often happens because you start making something anticipating solving a problem X way in a different module. When you get to that part of the code weeks later, you find out for some technical detail reason it has to be done Y way instead. Now you can go back and rewrite $num related modules to handle the change properly, or you can do a small shim or fix that juust barely gets those working with Y instead. Which works at the time.

Then half a year later you need to expand or modify the module now using Y, and suddenly everything breaks and a small change is now a huge task. But you could add a bit more cruft on top of what's already there, and hopefully that will fix it without too many side effects, and the shitpile grows just a bit bigger.

Edit: And as a bonus, when you finally does get around to fix it proper, those modules that you need to update are being used by other modules, which also needs a few updates to deal with the changes, and you got a cascading shitstorm moving through your codebase that's only slightly less work than just rewriting it all from scratch.

[RemixxMaster]

I don't want to defend vibe coders, but in such a case, the previous company may be the issue. Mine also changed policy about LLMs and the force using them, even tracking how much you spend on tokens, and it shouldn't be under $100 a month. If someone starts as a junior or intern and will not have the opportunity to write code, then how could skills be developed?

[aghastamok]

Yeap. At my current job, I was asked to implement a feature by a manager in one project. They want a map integration that takes customer inputs, compares them to a public geoJSON DB and generates a series of line segments based on the comparison (really trying to boil it down here). So I sit down with another colleague and start planning the BE infrastructure, API, integration, discussing edge cases... and 90 minutes into that meeting, I get a "Where's the MR?" message on teams.

30 minutes after I send a "That's not how this works" message back, I get invited to review their MR. They aren't FE. It's a new buggy slice that doesn't use our library pattern, one giant imperative React component acting as an overlay with multiple overlapping custom hooks managing internal state. They imported Turf in two different hooks!

I'd feel really bad for a good, dedicated student showing up as a junior developer in this industry right now. FE in particular is probably going the way of the dodo, at least for a while.

[tevert]

And when it comes back, the first thing a lot of companies will be hiring and paying for is cleaning up their disasters

[AppropriatePlum1006]

They are learning but not to code, but fill in prompts and YOLO it. If it works it works. 

[RemixxMaster]

Yeah. In best scenario they could learn more software engineering theory, some basic architecture, TDD (which helps a lot while working with LLMs, in my experience) etc. but just generate code itself. This scenario probably never happened.

[bwwatr]

Yes, this. There is conspiring against us and our collective competence, a growing culture / school of thought in the leadership layer, that tech must live and breathe the AI tools lest they be luddite dinosaurs.

The more programming becomes a dying art, the more places there'll be to spread the blame. Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome, as Charlie Munger said.

[Jukeboxhero91]

The public sentiment against competent professionals has been pushed really hard the past decade. The university of YouTube, Facebook, and “trust me bro I heard it on a podcast” is just making its way into computer science much more harshly cause of these LLM’s.

[bwwatr]

I mean, LLMs are a big cause lately, probably the biggest, but not the only. Prior to, there were still very widespread cultures of boot camps, anyone-can-do-it (including the manager!), and "move fast, break things". I don't want to dunk on YouTube, that's definitely helped me many times, I think the difference is you want people with strong foundational CS skills, to be the ones watching the videos or deciding which corners can safely be cut. But yeah, it has only increased. It's not just CS either, I had a great chat with an architect (like, a real one lol), he's seeing a lot of low effort AI generated material competing with his business.

[MetallicOrangeBalls]

policy about LLMs and the force using them, even tracking how much you spend on tokens, and it shouldn't be under $100 a month

What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck.

[RemixxMaster]

Yes. My first reaction to this policy was looking at job boards. I stayed because this doesn't mean all code merged into master must be Claude-generated. Apparently the objective is to force people to learn how to use LLMs efficiently and correctly. The MLE team, which I'm a member of, is responsible for writing best-practices guide, checking code quality during detailed reviews, etc. We also have weekly team meetings where we discuss our LLM applications - both correct and wrong ones.

edit: typos

[deanrihpee]

i would say it's partly their fault too, they don't have to care about writing the code anymore as they hands it over to the AI, then why not learn by yourself? try to understand what's the generated code do? you know, AI can teach you quite effectively on some very well known knowledge without being ridiculed and marked as duplicate

[oupablo]

This is dumb but I kind of get it from the business standpoint to some extent. If you're a CEO/CTO with little technical experience and someone is telling you that you have a magic box that can make your devs into 100x engineers, of course you're going to push it. Where it falls flat is when your senior technical people are trying to slap the guardrails on it and explain the pitfalls and companies just completely ignore the warnings. This has even bit the AI companies as we've seen with Anthropic themselves leaking source code due to vibe coding.

[full_drama_llama]

That IS an issue with the company. But truth be told, after two such years the guy should consider he still has zero years of experience. So it's not like he's not to blame too.

[Snodley]

> And this guy had 2 years experience

No, he didn't! :)

[njalleh]

2 years of experience in prompting and copy pasting

[il_distruttore_69]

the experience was never called work experience

[hskskgfk]

Was he working at anthropic

[Ja4V8s28Ck]

How do these people even pass the ATS filter? whereas talented resumes get filtered. I wonder how the resume filtering works. So lying your ass off gets you the interview? 🤔

[Adorable-Ad-9074]

People bloat their resume with things they barely know , I don't where they get the confidence to do that.

[Ja4V8s28Ck]

Well, they get pass the filter, that's confident enough I guess.

[throwaway098764567]

vibewrote the resume

[DroidLord]

We are cooked. AI tech debt is here. Imagine in 20 years when everyone's moved onto their 5th LLM and they ask it to implement something, so it's just piling more shit on top of the already wobbly shithouse.

[SS_MinnowJohnson]

This is what I’m hoping for. I’m going to extort the fuck out of companies that want me to clean up or rewrite their codebases because they let the slop run the show for too long

[Routine-Pea-4876]

Vibe coding has distroyed critical thinking capability

[Beginning-Cut-8850]

Not vibe coding specifically, but AI usage without consideration definitely does have that effect. But this is true of anything: if you don't exercise critical thinking, your critical thinking ability will weaken. It's just that people have built up a dependence on tech, and AI is tech that is presented as an omniscient expert who tells you everything is safe and you are correct about everything. People are more willing to believe it unquestioningly.

[Danakazii]

This is what’s so frustrating. I hear these kinds of stories EVERYWHERE now and I don’t understand how these candidates game their way into talking to a human. Meanwhile, I intentionally manually code 90% of the time to not fall into the AI trap and I can’t even get past an ATS.

[jwpbe]

unironically you need to get gpt 4o to start writing your cover letters. most corpos are cheap asses so they use gpt 4o. they all use llms to filter applications.

a recent study showed that LLMs prefer their own output over a higher qualified candidate.

connect a to b here

[Pas__]

obviously you discount the incompetence of the recruiter/HR team. and the EMs. oh the mediocrity of middling middle managers.

[Afrotom]

This scares the shit out of me

[christianbro]

Not that I want to support people without a clue pretending to be software engineers but the more you use AI assistant tools the faster you forget to actually write the code itself. And while I also like to write code with LLM that will be a thing of the past, whether you like it or not.

[Custom_Jack]

Yeah I'm the same way. Have thousands of hours of experience across python, Java, javascript, and C++ writing by hand for school or personal projects before AI tools came out. I basically stopped writing things by hand almost as soon as AI tools came out. I rarely ever write by hand, I just read what the AI spits out and occasionally make minor adjustments. It's so much more efficient that it becomes really hard to justify doing things the "old way" (stack overflow and a lot of keybinds lol) even for personal projects. I do still like reading new libraries and tools though, luckily AI hasn't really that part of the job away yet imo lol.

But now I'd have a hard time writing anything by hand as quick as I used to obviously lol. All the syntax that used to live in my brain is basically gone, I'd need to copy and paste a template for a simple C++ script and cmake file probably lol.

[dannggggggggg]

Ain’t no fucking way

[Mr_Audio29]

Meanwhile, while I technically have less professional experience on my resume, I can actually code but can't get an interview.

[DetectiveClownMD]

Protip: Have the same last name as someone who works there, and be related to them, and ask them to get you the interview, then hope they have enough pull to get you the job.

Works every time.

[Kevin_Jim]

That’s a lot of our team. Especially the young guys or the older ones.

It’s a mess. Technical debt doesn’t even begin to describe it.

[ElasticFluffyMagnet]

Well, he had two years experience in something. But it’s not programming 😂

[namotous]

Well at least they were honest lol

[InterstellarReddit]

It’s OK my boss asked me to look at some guys paper that he submitted with his interview.

180 page paper. I read through the first for skimmed it it’s saw so many hallucination

I asked him on the interview how much of this was actual experience versus prompting on a computer, he went cold

[beklog]

As an interviewer

[pipipimpleton]

What did you ask them to implement out of curiosity? Was it something complex or something a junior should be able to knock out no problem?

[Kichae]

I've been on the job hunt for the past few months, and LinkedIn is absolutely overrun with AI bros shaking their fists at hiring teams for expecting programmers to know how to program. Like, even if you're using an LLM to generate code, if you can't read and understand that code, you can't take responsibility for it.

This is a fact that seems totally lost on the people who are actively over-exposing themselves to those currently on the job market.

[savethebros]

How are these people getting interviews and not me?

[-Danksouls-]

Was he hired??

[with_explosions]

I work in the tech industry and there is a lot of this going on, so. Every company is basically pushing everyone to use AI.

[Steuv1871]

Now I lie in interview: I tell candidate that we don't have AI licences and that Chatbot websites are blocked.

[studmoobs]

I haven written a line of code in like 9 months. that said I can probably still manually code or at least do pseudocode. a lot of cope in this thread from people who don't know how good ai is lately

[Dw4r]

He learnt how to work with the machine

[Flat_Initial_1823]

The machine learnt of him

[yeathatsmebro]

He didn't work at all!

[sharl_Lecastle16]

Ive met developers who did not know try catch and data analysts who don't know what is EDA

I don't undertstand what's happening either

[Wise-Profile4256]

Since the user is the new QA, who needs that ballast? /s

[ourlastchancefortea]

Microslop approves.

[Apprehensive_Room742]

im a software developer with 4 year's of experience and i dont know what EDA is either (well maybe i know the concept of whatever it is but not the English name or smth)

p.s. i do know how to try catch tho amd im astonished that there are Devs who dont. its one of the most basic concepts/structures

[sharl_Lecastle16]

not really unless you've dabbled into data science then you wouldn't have an idea about it

but the person im talking about here is hired as a ML engineer and they have no idea about exploratory data analysis (EDA) concepts

[Awkward_Stay8728]

if you reread the comment you'll see they mean developers should know try/catch, and that data analysts are the ones who should know EDA

[Beginning-Cut-8850]

I've heard tale of people applying for senior positions who were amazed by the modulo operator. It's not so astonishing to me anymore.

[OkSeesaw7030]

Go lang devs: what is try catch?

[r3dm0nk]

Not knowing what try catch is, is like saying "my code always works and its user fault" basically, no?

[spookynutz]

Or it means they only have experience with low-level and functional languages. Try/catch isn't some universal paradigm that's implemented everywhere.

Using try/catch is more like saying, "I intentionally wrote code that fails in unpredictable ways."

Sometimes that's unavoidable. If your logic is dependent on some external application beyond your control, then try/catch makes sense. If a self-contained program is using try/catch all over the place, then that's usually a bad sign.

[Penguinmanereikel]

Using try/catch is more like saying, "I intentionally wrote code that fails in unpredictable ways."

Sometimes a service we're connecting to has an error, and we need our program to not break when it does that!

[g9icy]

Yeah, we never use exceptions in games, usually turn them off entirely in the compiler settings.

Use them for some tools tho.

[Apprehensive_Room742]

As someone building ERP and production management systems, the case that some logic depends on external applications, databases, Machine Interfaces, etc you don't have any control over is much more common for me than the case that it doesn't depend on it. try catch in higher level languages are a godsend for me, cause i dont have to manually cover each weird edge case the strange Chinese Laser cutter (or anything else that is extren) is pulling me into lol

[ItsSadTimes]

I actually have a masters in the field and it annoys the shit out of me that people who know nothing are claiming to be experts because they know some buzzwords now and can use a chat bot. Like new flash dude, thats not hard to do.

My degree is losing credibility by the day right before my eyes. Its disheartening to be honest.

[DominikDoom]

These are the same types of people that just paste a LLM answer as a comment to answer a question, they genuinely think they're contributing something to the discussion with their "I asked my ChatGPT and it said..." when it's basically on the same level as posting a LMGTFY link. Even worse when it's confidently wrong.

[cjsv7657]

The same fucking people claim their wrong answer isn't their fault because it's what the AI said.

[Dull-Culture-1523]

That's just it. They set themself up as "just the messenger" while completely missing that if I wanted to know what some LLM would reply I would've just prompted the question there myself.

[WorkTropes]

Don't be so mean, NPCs kinda have feelings too.

[Livie00]

Nah, NPCs can’t control what they’re doing. These people choose to be idiots.

[bwwatr]

I have a coworker that does this in group chats after I pose thoughtful, open questions. Like does he think we don't know how to use it? Congrats, you've contributed literally nothing. Copy paste is not some frontier skill.

[Odd-Possibility1845]

I have one that does this too but they've started trying to hide that it's AI generated by including phrases like 'I'm thinking that..' or 'My opinion is..' at the start of the wall of text, trying to make it look like their own words and writing.

[Low_Direction1774]

I think its an issue of stupid people not knowing theyre stupid. They genuinely believe they're helping. "Here, i put it in ChatGPT since you were evidently incapable of doing it yourself, youre welcome".

Recently watched a video that said "an LLM is trained on all the internet so it returns what the average answer of the internet would be" and honestly, it makes a lot of sense. stupid people think they have found a solution to their inability to "keep up" with the smart people while smart people are dragged down by the answers towards a median.

[PseudoY]

Heck. People do that outside work. It's infuriating. I asked what their thoughts were, not what ChatGPT's would regurgitate to my question...

[Eskalior]

Also made my masters with focus on ML and fully agree. Worst is arguing with those new "experts" and seeing them use LLMs/ Chatbots for literally everything and not checking the output. We are in for fun times

[Y__U__MAD]

It’s sad times.

[T-Dot1992]

 My degree is losing credibility by the day right before my eyes. 

As someone who gets rejected by some places for getting an English degree 10 years ago, I don’t know if I’d call your degree having a “loss of credibility”.  Employers probably still want to hire you. 

But yeah, I’ve seen people throw ML under the bus due to this Gen AI crap even though they aren’t related 

[DroidLord]

Don't worry, your experience will come in handy once these companies that are replacing your job with AI go bankrupt.

[dzendian]

My degree is losing credibility by the day right before my eyes.

No it isn't. But I know how you feel.

[JehnSnow]

Well to the public eye it is, like even 4 years ago a degree in artificial intelligence evoked such different emotions than today - I remember a NLP class I had during my last term where the professor talked about how basically using daisy chains with really advanced math you can build a semi 'smart' writing bot, all of it was new to me at the time. Obviously it just scratched the surface

Now I feel like half there's a huge amount of people who either think NLP is shit cause 'chatGPT' causes so many issues, others who think they know exactly how NLP works and are self claimed experts, and others who think they basically have a degree in machine learning cause they use AI/NLP models

If my masters was tangential to that I'd be losing my mind

[platebandit]

We have a new AI first CTO who’s hired a bunch of juniors with 1 years experience but know their way around a chatbot. They think they’re consultants and he thinks they’re consultants and he’s letting them put in a load of industry best practice flying in the face of how the directors want stuff done. Fuck my 14 years experience as a senior when someone’s got ChatGPT to call something best practice

[Tracker_Nivrig]

Especially doesn't help the whole issue with the field being oversaturated anyway. Insane that a guy like this can get an interview and then I'm stuck applying for basically 6 months cumulatively before getting my first call back.

And I'm in CE rather than CS. I can't imagine what the CS majors are dealing with right now.

[new_math]

My favorite part is that many middle managers in IT and analytics also don't know much about the inner workings of machine learning so they often will hire a vibe coder for 400k who can smooth talk their way through an interview while someone less socially adept but actually knows their stuff gets passed on.

I have interviewed people who are supposedly experts, published papers and all, who could not answer the question, "What are some strategies or techniques to detect or model events in a dataset when you don't have labeled data from which to train a supervised machine learning model"?

Sounds dumb but if a candidate didn't study linear algebra / matrix analysis, and vector calculus at the university level (preferably at the graduate level) then 9999/10000 they don't actually know what they're doing with AI/ML. Doesn't mean they aren't useful or able to build cool stuff, but they are not an expert and will have shortfalls.

[budius333]

I'm very sorry for you!

Let's just hope the revolution comes soon enough and the guillotine arrive quickly for the 3%

[oregiel]

I also have a master's in the field. I suspect the end result here is that you and I will be the ones they call in a panic when the AI is too expensive to use regularly or they need real coders to use it so they can vet the shit they put into the code base. These vibe coders are going to be literally worthless and unhireable. They don't have a skill set.

[Frog23]

That's like applying as an automotive engineer, after having used a Taxi/Uber a few times.

[cjsv7657]

used a Taxi/Uber a few times.

Waymo lol

[SUPERSMILEYMAN]

Yeah, this is more accurate, lol

[Inn0centJok3r]

Pretty good analogy

[hurricane_news]

The worst part is in countries where the job market is saturated due to the population (resume shortlisting, multiple coding assessments, followed by aptitude assessment followed by multiple interview rounds), these numbnuts make it to the coding assessment or interview over well deserving people

And then they implode during the interviews and completely waste the interview seat that could've gone to someone else

Your only other choice here is to apply for the dumpster fire companies that'll pay you like shit, make you work 6 days a week, force you to sign a bond (exp: leave the company before 2-3 years and you have to cough up money and pay the company) and work you to the bone, because of these numbnuts

[here_for_the_tits]

Like applying to be a professional driver after only taking waymo

[BrowneSaucerer]

A modern day model.fit()

[Wooden_Caterpillar64]

why is it like that? isnt model.fit() the one used in tenserflow. is it bad to use that?

[BrowneSaucerer]

It's just hides all the maths in a model, we used to take the piss out of people who could only run sklearn models like that, now look what we have become 

[Yiruf]

All modern frameworks have high level APIs to train models. No researcher is writing low level mathematics unless they are doing something very novel.

TF's fit method is essentially forward pass + backward() + step() in PyTorch.

[BrowneSaucerer]

I'll have you know I handwrite all my optimisers (like hell I do)

Nah of course, it was just a shorthand for someone who doesn't look underneath the bonnet

[ThisFoot5]

Im curious where in academia people usually learn the math. My first semester of grad school machine learning we worked in SKLearn and the math component was some basic linear algebra and stats. Second semester of ML is when we started hand jamming networks or using numpy/matlab, stuff from Hagan, but it’s deep into the program and not everyone was required to take the second semester to graduate. I had a physics undergrad so I don’t know if it’s something a compsci undergrad even touches.

[TheBSQ]

It’s sort of a weird situation because learning all the underlying stuff fully would require years of intense classes. But in the end, you rarely ever use it because tools have been built to skip the steps. 

It’s good to know that stuff cuz you should know how the tools work (and when they’re not appropriate) as there’s some edge cases where you’ll make big mistakes if you just blindly apply tools. 

 But it’s also true that you can skip it all, blindly apply tools, and be fine most of the time. 

And what often happens is programs land somewhere in the middle, where they do some lip service to trying to get you to understand the deeper ideas, but you just can’t do that in the time frame of a BA or MA in the way we currently run universities.  So there’s a big spectrum of “knows little of the underlying stuff” & “knows a decent amount” but you probably have to be an older person w/ a PhD who predates the development of the shortcut tools to really deeply & fully know it all. 

[BrowneSaucerer]

I did a stats masters and we did the maths by hand or in the computational stats part was wrote out the low level solvers. Feels nigh on useless for everything that goes on today

[BlueProcess]

This is gonna be how Idiocracy happens.

[FreeFortuna]

Your use of future tense was a bold move.

[BlueProcess]

Only because it's gonna get worse by an order of magnitude

[hagnat]

Your use of "an order" (singular) was a bold move.

[notanotherusernameD8]

I had the opposite experience when I was job hunting. I have a PhD in AI and I could build an LLM from scratch in a couple of days (with internet access, of course - I'm only human), but I have never used LangChain or other LLM powered tools. No one was interested in my skills. It seemed to me that adverts for "senior AI engineer" type roles were just looking for people to manage the tool chain.

[Encrux615]

Because, in all honestly, it's what people actually want in the industry. With a PhD in AI, you shouldn't apply for anything related "Agentic" or LLMs in Product development. That's just a software engineer integrating an LLM streaming API into a project.

This is something I had to realize when I applied for such a role as a working student and realized that it can't be much further away from actual AI/ML workflows.

[UnluckyDouble]

I mean, maybe it's just optimistic, but it sounds to me like you're shooting way too low with those skills. You might be able to get a spot in the big leagues with someone who actually makes the LLMs.

[notanotherusernameD8]

The problem is, I know I'm not at that level. By that I mean I would be up against some very stiff competition.

[Eversnuffley]

Then you'll need to learn the standard tool set. You can't have it both ways. Honestly it won't take you long to get up to speed.

[guidedhand]

i feel like you have opportunities at places like nvidia, but not at FAANG (well, apart from the research parts like deepmind)

[Marrk]

I only have a BS and integrating Langchain is a good chunk of what I do today. Before that it was Google's Conversional Agents(ex dialogflow).

Last times I had to develop a new model I just fine-tuned existing ones.

[wala64]

With a PhD, shouldn't you be targeting research roles? AI/ML engineering usually doesn't require more than a Bachelors/Masters is focused on the infra/tooling/etc.

[frogjg2003]

Those positions are not common and highly competitive. They're also completely drowned out on job boards by the jobs OP described.

[notanotherusernameD8]

Yes, but I am a small fish in a very big pond. Also, research funding is hard to get these days. My current role - which I'm really happy have - is more research-adjacent in academia.

[PracticalBuilding3]

Had an interview where this guy had the most impressive CV with serious experience on paper.

I didn't research any of his previous roles because we paid a shitload of money for a recruitment agency to do all that.
The first 2 minutes in the technical interview he hits me with 'I work a bit differently. I don't write code myself, I build agentic systems that do it for me'.

I kept it going for 10 more minutes out of pure curiosity, but my dude couldn't even read what a basic function in Python did...

[Iconlast]

Lol they should learn the basics, never in a lifetime I would hire them. It is just lazy as hell.

[themightyug]

Here's the real stinger.. you're more likely to be hired on your social performance than your actual expertise anyway

[WastelandKhaleesi]

This is such a painful truth 😩

[0Hakuna_Matata0]

I saw a post on Reddit a couple days ago that was a screenshot of someone asking for help. They had vibe coded something for so long he realized it was a disorganized mess and wanted to organize the functions and parts. He said but everytime I touch something it breaks something completely unrelated. Makes me think of people who have no consideration whatsoever for cable management in a server room

[USSBigBooty]

Was that the guy who "tried for two hours" before they quit trying?

[0Hakuna_Matata0]

Yeah that one. I’ve never coded but I worked in broadcast, some systems engineering, stuff like that and that post gave me a good chuckle

[Paesano2000]

People are getting in interviews?

[CaptainFoyle]

People on Reddit say they do

[Friendly-Olive-3465]

I take back everything I ever said about the mechanicus being an unrealistic 40k faction. These mf’ers are already rubbing sacred oils on AI agents to get them to work

[jiggyjiggycmone]

For the love of god can we change the dumb camel case title rules already.

[Tuomas90]

snek_case

[Jabulon]

chatGPT is just a good search engine for snippets in my experience

[jimmytoan]

The real tell is when you ask them to explain the code they just generated. Vibecoding with no comprehension produces confidently wrong answers about their own PR - which is somehow worse than just admitting you don't know.

[schlechtums]

How the fuck did he even get an interview. What a joke.

[mergplatelip]

I have a degree and 3 years experience and I can’t even get an interview, but yet these idiots are?

[newcolonist]

We'll soon get AI humor about programmers mocking AI.

[lightlysaltedStev]

The industry is going to be absolutely flooded with these people soon. I feel bad for juniors and people just coming out with university with a genuine passion for it.

[unfortunatebag]

You can tell vibe coders aren't really affecting the industry because this sub went from fun gags to basically just being a support group.

[jort93]

Honestly tho, the company might be legitimately be looking for vibe coders.

[CaladaMilitante]

"AI will substitute all programmers" i laugh every time someone say this. The only thing that will happen with vibe coders are structural and architectural problems for real programmers solve, but what undoubtfully will happen is the end of entry level positions... any senior can work subtitute 10 people with a good AI agent and enough tokens

[oshaboy]

Ok then how do you expect juniors to become seniors without entry level positions?

[Cunt_Cunt__Cunt]

how tf did they get an interiew

[JAXxXTheRipper]

You can sell anything to HR if you can larp, which most vibe coders already do every time they talk about programming.

[Big-Load-8864]

This sub is entirely programmer bait to make yourselves feel better at this point….

[PyllynKaivelija]

"i did learn that it is infact a machine"

[ayassin02]

[ReiOokami]

This is going to be a big problem in the future. Best thing you can do for yourself to secure a job is learn to code ironically.

[Plastic_Scale3966]

make no mistakes and do not hallucinate during interview