"AI native" college graduates are hitting the workplace -- and, as experts warned, bosses are finding their performance disappointing.
  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    we hired one of these a few months ago.

    poor guy graduated last may and he was willing to accept our shit pay; so must have been desperate.

    i used to think that people were being elitist when they decried vibe coding, but having to review his PR’s and see the contributions from his peers at our sister organizations have made me realize how of a much of a thing it truly is! lol

    my boss wants to squeeze out as much work out of him as he possibly can before it inevitably leaves for better pay, but i suspect the return might not be all that much worth it. lmao

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPM
      0·
      3 days ago

      Having used LLMs for development extensively, I’ve come to realize just how important it is to have deep knowledge of the problem domain to use them effectively. If you don’t understand which algorithms are correct, what data structures make sense to model the problem, etc., then you have no way to evaluate what the LLM spits out. And it seems like universities are doing a really poor job adjusting the curriculum to ensure students actually learn fundamentals, and are able to apply them. I recall even back when I was in the university there was already a trend where the focus was primarily on coding and getting people ready for the industry rather than the theory part. And theory is really the part you need to be learning.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 days ago

        I think a huge problem here is that AI removed a lot of the incentive to hire juniors. The “churn” of writing code is mostly solved, so senior engineers can now rejoice in perfecting software architecture and guiding/babysitting the LLMs to do the rest. Even if someone does hire a junior, they usually end up using an LLM themselves the output will be useless vibecoded shit, but a lot more of it than what the junior could type themselves, which wastes a lot of time for senior folks and is overall useless. Together this means that bosses will avoid hiring anyone without experience even harder than before.

        However this also means that in 10-20 years when the current gen of senior engineers retire, there may not be anyone to replace them. No matter how much theory you learn (which I agree everyone in the profession must do), experience is priceless in software development.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOPM
          0·
          3 days ago

          This is another example of how capitalist incentives lead the whole system to ultimately undermine itself. Nobody cares about what happens in 10-20 years, the only thing that matters are quarterly profits. So, nobody wants to invest in training new experts. And this has been going on long before LLMs as well, it’s just that this tech makes the problem even more acute.

      • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        i had always presumed my understanding of theory was weak because of my formal education in microelectronics – instead of computer science – plus my self-taught/ad-hoc education in implementing software for IT applications, and that this was the primary reason why some colleagues and management displayed a clearly resentful professional tolerance toward me while i was getting paid to be a software engineer.

        but having to review actual vibe coding for the first time in my life; plus that earlier episode of piefed’s bad security practices; has made me realize that they only directed that bile at me because i was proud to be a dirty “pinko” (their words). lmao.

  • Maeve@kbin.earth
    0·
    4 days ago

    As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are coming to the office with alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through the list of humanities grads instead.

    “We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.

  • arotrios@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Add co-workers to this list, because we’re the ones that have to retrain them when they inevitably fail.

    As a Gen-Xer in the workforce since the 90s, this is the first era in which the new talent coming in has a lower level of technical savvy and critical thinking skills than the previous one. And it’s not just a knowledge gap - it’s an ambition gap. In a lot of cases, Boomers are easier to work with than Gen Z, because for all their idiocy, they have the ambition to dig for the answer and work shit out eventually.

    Gen Z just kinda seems to gives up once the easy answers aren’t available.

    Unrelated question - We got X. The kids got Z. Why aren’t we calling Millennials Generation Y?