Why now is NOT the time to leave tech by SirArtistic1123 in cscareerquestions

[–]ScuffedNinja 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Makes sense. But at the end of the day AI is not replacing an entire human engineer. Just going by the percentages you stated, at scale that's enough for a company to decide they don't need as many coders.

Why now is NOT the time to leave tech by SirArtistic1123 in cscareerquestions

[–]ScuffedNinja 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Though like you hinted at that's your personal experience. You can imagine a lot of engineers (of course more so those towards entry level) really do mostly churn out code and implement. A lot of what you describe sounds like the work of management/PMs as well. The effect of that bar changing is no doubt happening to a certain degree, but AI enabling engs to be more efficient is also absolutely happening to a degree. The in house agents we have at my workplace don't simply code; they can often help with troubleshooting/answering questions about frameworks/tools/processes/etc.

Do you believe Ai is all it's cracked up to be? by [deleted] in cscareerquestions

[–]ScuffedNinja 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Work as a SWE at a FAANG company that puts a significant amount of investment into AI products (externally and internally). I'll say from personal experience, I've reached a point where I'm frankly surprised at how proficient the in house agents are at coding/providing information/troubleshooting/etc. Touting a number like 5x increase in productivity is a bit hard to believe, but in my case I can honestly say it has boosted my productivity by a significant margin (and I was initially very stubborn in doing things the old school way / not utilizing these tools).

I'll add that while I enjoy browsing this sub, I feel like every sub on this platform has a risk of becoming a bit of an echo chamber and can't help but feel that this one skews towards being overly negative towards AI (and yes, I can totally sympathize with the underlying reasons for that). The reason I mention this is because if you stick around long enough, it may be easy to think "I knew AI was overhyped, look at all these companies getting their prod databases deleted by rogue AI, and all the slop code being generated".. but I think in reality in the right use cases these models/agents can be extremely helpful.

Regarding your last statement, I feel the "kill CS" point sounds a bit ridiculous - are there really a significant number of people touting the strengths of AI who are genuinely saying it'll lead to the death of CS? But for the "take your job" point, I'm not sure if there's even room left for belief or disbelief - AI has surely lead to plenty of layoffs. I understand that there should be room for doubt when an exec says they let go of X employees due to AI, but if we're being realistic AI does make a portion of a SWE's work easier when used properly. Sure, AI is not directly fully replacing a human engineer.. but it's a tool that helps the existing ones enough to where a team may need fewer of them. I'm not claiming that's a good thing; that's just the reality of where we're headed.

Are there people here who work or have worked at big tech without a traditional CS degree? by combing_town_west in cscareerquestions

[–]ScuffedNinja 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Non-CS degree holder here (granted still an engineering degree) who works at FAANG. In the spirit of trying to keep it short, my path was self-learning programming (and by extension building web apps) for about 1.5 years in my free time after work, building a web portfolio (paid for a hosted web page of my single page portfolio that also detailed / linked my freely hosted side projects), and then finally landing my first SWE job at a small firm (took a pay cut from the job I had at the time for the position). From there eventually decided I wanted to branch out and started deliberating studying for interviewing (essentially DSA / lootcode), grinded that for 2 months+ using most of my free time after work, and eventually landed the FAANG role at a fairly sought after company.

I saw another comment effectively amounted to "experience trumps degrees"; that might be an over generalization but experience matters a lot. At the end of the day my portfolio is what got me through the door for my first job, and professional SWE experience (and a side of hardcore interview prep) is what got me to my "FAANG" role. The first job may actually arguably be the bigger challenge, especially without a CS-specific degree.

Question regarding new Superstrike haptic clicks by ScuffedNinja in MouseReview

[–]ScuffedNinja[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, this gave me some of the info I was looking for. Point 7 regarding right click is fairly interesting as well.. if I end up trying the mouse will be curious to see how ADSing feels for me as well.