> How do junior developers level-up to get into private Slack spaces? Where do they learn from if Stackoverflow is hostile, Reddit is hollowed out, and social squares are empty?
Books seem to still work very well. I am not even sure all this social media learning was that much positive. A lot of it was based on trend chasing, shiny object syndrome and stuff like that in a completely a-historical context. It was always funny when some star social media coder re-discovered something that probably people did in mainframes before I was born and that you can find in a lot of books.
Yeah. Honestly my advice to a junior dev right now would be:
1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube.
2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.
frankly terrible advice, especially now that this website is just AI News. If you want to be a better programmer, there are better places, but I'm not going to advertise them here because I do not want to infect them with the HN commentariat which is much too focused on trends.
Engineering fundamentals have not changed in decades. Screw trends, especially at the beginning.
Books written before 2022 are a good bet. Maybe the value of traditional education has also returned.
- Junior jobs become scarce. You either jump to senior very fast, or you are dumped out of the industry. The juniors that make it are those special unicorns that somehow learn everything about the job, including how to do it with AI, within a couple of years. There's a little bit of guidance, but mostly it's the kids who have good taste in blogs/books/videos that end up learning it all on their own. Also the kids who have the motivation to keep studying without a syllabus.
- Instead of junior devs, we just have domain experts who are crap at coding. Quants who can write a model in pandas, but when they venture offpiste, they get AI to build them a monstrosity. Working monstrosity, but if you could code, you would cry. This ends up happening in every industry: there's very few coders left anywhere outside of FAANG, everyone just does the modern equivalent of thinking Excel has solved their problem. Balls of spaghetti the size of which the world has never seen are written, hidden in various domains.
- Universities wisen up about how to teach people to use AI. Once upon a time, they used to teach you how to punch holes. Assembler was taught. Systems languages like c++. Java, JS, Lua. Kids who came out of these universities were somewhat ok for industry. Why not AI as well? There are going to be lessons learned roughly this decade that will be useful to teach the kids. What to tell the AI, what not to. How to leverage it to make the most progress.
Universities will (still) teach only part of the necessary tradecraft, but that fraction will include some basics for how LLMs can churn out dodgy prototypes. Junior/introductory roles will feature the crap-work of taking excel-esque monstrosities and making them marginally less-terrible.
Not obvious from the title, but this is a great post on why it's a terrible terrible time to be an entry-level developer right now:
* Job market sucks for junior devs due to the end of ZIRP and normalization of layoffs
* Dearth of good developer role models due to the "public sphere" getting worse (collapse of developer twitter community, rise of vacuous influencers). I'm a little skeptical about this one as I didn't really benefit much from these sources myself when getting into the industry. And there's always hacker news, which is doing fine!
* Loss of good mentorship opportunities due to rise of remote work
* AI tools are good for seniors who already know how to do things, but terrible for junior devs trying to learn. This is the forklifts metaphor. (And AI is probably not helping the junior dev job market either, although that was already bad for other reasons as mentioned above.)
I am truly worried about where the next generation of senior devs is going to come from. Some juniors, maybe 10% of them, will be fine no matter what: brilliant engineers who are disciplined enough to teach themselves the skills they need and can also adapt well to AI dev tools. I don't worry about them. But I worry about what happens to the median junior engineer, and consequently what our profession will look like in 10-20 years.
Am I the only one who, after reading the title, had to think of the funny classic "Forklift driver Klaus" short vid (which, with its very own kind of humour, shows WHY forklifts require training)?
A lot of the joke comes from the fact that the narrator uses "overly technical" terms that are common for work (safety) instructions, but are otherwise barely used in everyday speech - mixed with much more colloquial wording (also, of course, when the workers are talking).
This mixture of two very different language registers (words mainly used in technically precise work safety instructions vs. colloquial talk) is not represented in the English subtitles and thus removes a lot of fun of the original German short film.
all with you about the fact that it's even more funny just in German (i.e. without subtitles)…
but well, given that people understanding German are likely a minority here, I felt it was probably necessary to link to a version with subtitles so that it would be accessible to everyone here.
I find it at the same time bizarre and fascinating the number of people I used to work with who have become AI influencers on social media.. Some of them have gained really big followings.
Most of them were pretty middling developers when I worked with them... So I guess that tracks.
This is a terrific article the synthesize is several of the trends that have been at play the past five or six years. One interesting phenomenon of AI is that university enrollment and computer science is already falling. A lot. So if the AI promise doesn’t deliver (there are already signs), software engineering talent is going to cost a lot more than it did before.
When I think of a forklift, I think of a machine with wheels, that steers from the back. It has a hydraulic lift in the front, and you can attach things to it, like metal bars, for lifting pallets of stuff off the ground. And training is a pretty good idea because they don’t drive like cars, and it’s really damned easy to accidentally kill yourself or someone else with one.
Is this what this analogy is referring to? Because I read it and wondered - has this person ever been in a warehouse, or just seen one on TV? Or am I being dense and there is something else called a ‘forklift’?
> Or am I being dense and there is something else called a ‘forklift’?
Sort of. A drivable machine with rear steering and forks that raise and lower hydraulically with a propane engine or electric motor is a forklift, but there are other machines that can use forks to move pallets and material around.
Fork attachments exist for skid steers and tractors. There’s a piece of equipment with the trade name ‘lull’ (aka telehandler) that is a four wheeled vehicle with forks that is used to lift material.
Yeah, so are we talking about this generalized class of equipment?
Because if I am moving a load of bricks and a load of eggs from one place to another and I put the bricks on top of the eggs, how is the outcome different between hand-carrying vs forklift? And why is it the forklift’s fault and not my own?
Readit News
Books seem to still work very well. I am not even sure all this social media learning was that much positive. A lot of it was based on trend chasing, shiny object syndrome and stuff like that in a completely a-historical context. It was always funny when some star social media coder re-discovered something that probably people did in mainframes before I was born and that you can find in a lot of books.
1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube.
2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.
Well don't leave me hanging boss!
On the whole, junior dev-age people don't read books much. They read short-form stuff on screens.
frankly terrible advice, especially now that this website is just AI News. If you want to be a better programmer, there are better places, but I'm not going to advertise them here because I do not want to infect them with the HN commentariat which is much too focused on trends.
Engineering fundamentals have not changed in decades. Screw trends, especially at the beginning.
Books written before 2022 are a good bet. Maybe the value of traditional education has also returned.
- Junior jobs become scarce. You either jump to senior very fast, or you are dumped out of the industry. The juniors that make it are those special unicorns that somehow learn everything about the job, including how to do it with AI, within a couple of years. There's a little bit of guidance, but mostly it's the kids who have good taste in blogs/books/videos that end up learning it all on their own. Also the kids who have the motivation to keep studying without a syllabus.
- Instead of junior devs, we just have domain experts who are crap at coding. Quants who can write a model in pandas, but when they venture offpiste, they get AI to build them a monstrosity. Working monstrosity, but if you could code, you would cry. This ends up happening in every industry: there's very few coders left anywhere outside of FAANG, everyone just does the modern equivalent of thinking Excel has solved their problem. Balls of spaghetti the size of which the world has never seen are written, hidden in various domains.
- Universities wisen up about how to teach people to use AI. Once upon a time, they used to teach you how to punch holes. Assembler was taught. Systems languages like c++. Java, JS, Lua. Kids who came out of these universities were somewhat ok for industry. Why not AI as well? There are going to be lessons learned roughly this decade that will be useful to teach the kids. What to tell the AI, what not to. How to leverage it to make the most progress.
Universities will (still) teach only part of the necessary tradecraft, but that fraction will include some basics for how LLMs can churn out dodgy prototypes. Junior/introductory roles will feature the crap-work of taking excel-esque monstrosities and making them marginally less-terrible.
* Job market sucks for junior devs due to the end of ZIRP and normalization of layoffs
* Dearth of good developer role models due to the "public sphere" getting worse (collapse of developer twitter community, rise of vacuous influencers). I'm a little skeptical about this one as I didn't really benefit much from these sources myself when getting into the industry. And there's always hacker news, which is doing fine!
* Loss of good mentorship opportunities due to rise of remote work
* AI tools are good for seniors who already know how to do things, but terrible for junior devs trying to learn. This is the forklifts metaphor. (And AI is probably not helping the junior dev job market either, although that was already bad for other reasons as mentioned above.)
I am truly worried about where the next generation of senior devs is going to come from. Some juniors, maybe 10% of them, will be fine no matter what: brilliant engineers who are disciplined enough to teach themselves the skills they need and can also adapt well to AI dev tools. I don't worry about them. But I worry about what happens to the median junior engineer, and consequently what our profession will look like in 10-20 years.
* For those who wouldn't know it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck
A lot of the joke comes from the fact that the narrator uses "overly technical" terms that are common for work (safety) instructions, but are otherwise barely used in everyday speech - mixed with much more colloquial wording (also, of course, when the workers are talking).
This mixture of two very different language registers (words mainly used in technically precise work safety instructions vs. colloquial talk) is not represented in the English subtitles and thus removes a lot of fun of the original German short film.
but well, given that people understanding German are likely a minority here, I felt it was probably necessary to link to a version with subtitles so that it would be accessible to everyone here.
Anyways, here's the link to the vid without subtitles for those who understand German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lSBwF8ojVw
Most of them were pretty middling developers when I worked with them... So I guess that tracks.
Is this what this analogy is referring to? Because I read it and wondered - has this person ever been in a warehouse, or just seen one on TV? Or am I being dense and there is something else called a ‘forklift’?
Sort of. A drivable machine with rear steering and forks that raise and lower hydraulically with a propane engine or electric motor is a forklift, but there are other machines that can use forks to move pallets and material around.
Fork attachments exist for skid steers and tractors. There’s a piece of equipment with the trade name ‘lull’ (aka telehandler) that is a four wheeled vehicle with forks that is used to lift material.
Because if I am moving a load of bricks and a load of eggs from one place to another and I put the bricks on top of the eggs, how is the outcome different between hand-carrying vs forklift? And why is it the forklift’s fault and not my own?
> Mentor your junior colleagues, give them the space to learn and make mistakes.
I’d love to. My company stopped hiring juniors during the mini saas recession and then cursor launched. There are no juniors to mentor anymore.
Juniors nowadays are expected to perform senior work. It’s a recipe for disaster.