SWE Stop Learning - The Rise Of Expert Beginners
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
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By: Erik Dietrich
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dear sweetness
They have a lot more Business Studies qualifications than you do, watch your mouth!
@@ReedoTV Business Studies / BS (same thing)
That's where I feel like I ended up in and goddamn it feels absolutely draining. I honestly did because I like the cocepts and structure (I like understanding, analyzing and designing systems) but the amount of absolute cluelessness and lack of intuition I see are mindboggling.
I my positions mostly exists as a buffer to shield developers for the blithering incometence of clueless business analysts that are unable to put specs in writing and even more clueless clients.
@@Koroistro You've ascended to ScrumLord? Good work!
This is also something I see a lot. People compare their abilities to mine all the time, and assume they aren’t good, which is totally not the case; I’ve just had more experience. Usually, if I can get them to believe they can do it, they solve the problem just fine; they just need more time, but they don’t even attempt it because they think it’s too complicated.
When I look at a problem, I see the obstacles, but I always start with the mindset that it is solvable. The question isn’t “can I solve this,” it’s “is the solution worth the repercussions?”
This. The most important skill in a programmer's arsenal isn't their library of code patterns, or any of that - it's the hubris to assume they can do what they're going to. Not immediately, because that'll be proven wrong when they inevitably have to go look up documentation or think on it while making coffee or whatever, but that given a week or a month, they can.
Thanks ♥️
I often deal with people who don’t solve a problem simply because they don’t care about solving it well, they are absolutely fine with brushing stuff under the rug.
For me it's not so much that I don't believe it's _possible,_ I just believe someone else could do it better, hence I _should not be trusted_ with it. I can cope with failure when it doesn't matter, but it's not my right to decide what matters to anyone else.
No I don't work or study or have any hobbies, how did you know?
they should rate their thoughts on a 1 to 100 scale for its importance to getting what they want done. like 'i am not a good developer' would be rated 1 out of a hundred if the goal is to get something specific done. its not eliminate these thoughts because we dont decide what pops into our head by thinking dont think that. its to let our subconscious know that what the goal really is.
"Expert beginner" is similar to the 100 hr pilot in aviation. It's the point where confidence begins to outstrip experience and ability. You don't notice the bad habits that have set in, and don't realize the extent to which luck has gotten you through; and haven't experienced the system(s) failing. Interesting to note that "co-pilot" is the name given to our IDE AI assistants...let's not be the overconfident 100 hr pilot.
This is a real thing, it's the smash player showing up to the local thinking he's the best, because he beats all his friends and 4 stocked by the worst regular
CAUGHT
My brother used to be a ranked smash player. He decided to skip a tournament I told him about, and his friend went. His friend tells him later, "I knew as soon as I walked in I was getting first place. It was the only person using a pseudonym." Lol
At least he showed up to the local and learned something :)
Yuuuuup
Coding is probably gonna die anyways just accept it I'll probably do another career change. It's possible there will be an AI that can learn agents
Follow your curiosity. So many people seem afraid of this. If you don't know how something works, find out. I've been doing this for 20 years and have hundreds of side "projects" whose whole aim was to simply be more knowledgeable in some subject, library, or framework.
Preach, brother. Preach!
💯
I was a bit scared to read kernel code until I saw a couple of videos by LiveOverflow where he just showed the implementation of a couple of syscalls or something like that.
And it's just... regular code, fairly accesible if you know C. And of course it is, how else would the kernel have so many contributors?
Also, Arduino libraries. They often are so simple and so small that I just implement my own version if the library doesn't do exactly what I need.
do you have a github repo? i wanna see some of your side projects
@@aduhaneh1057 nah, they're all in my dropbox. For various reasons, I prefer to keep my online presence as incognito as possible. I had some bad experiences in the '90s.
One of the most terrifying things that happened to me during my career was the rockstar stagnation phase. I was so good at my niche on my supportive team that I completely stopped learning and just cranked out things that were essentially the same for 3 years. I'm working to make up for that wasted time and videos like these keep me on that path.
Not employed - graduating from CS soon - but damn I feel this bro.
Almost everyone in my school was focused on web CRUD apps and it became all I could focus on too.
I was basically making the same thing with extra steps. I got sick of it.
Even during a mandatory internship, it was mostly backend CRUD work. My turning point was when I realized that the company didn't use a web framework, and I started to wonder how that worked. So, I managed to put together a server from (almost) scratch using Kotlin.
It felt good. It felt fun. It felt like I realized what I had been missing.
Now I'm focusing more on learning stuff that always confused me or I took for granted, so I can try new stuff.
It's really taxing, but I know it'll be worth it.
Same bro. Took me 5yrs on my end :(
I’ve run into this three times in 25 years, each sucking a few years of my expertise and career advancement. I have had employers that willingly sacrifice 99% of my ability in order to maintain some mundane garbage, just because I tidy things up and keep things so ridiculously reliable. Granted, I pretty much rock at long-term, big picture, stability and disaster planning. I recently worked my way away from the old stuff, but there was ZERO time to learn or even practice NEW skills on my old team, outside of my free time. I get to work on fast, interesting, questionable code bases now but have quite a bit of time to make up to shift back to greenfield work.
"You're going to get way worse before you get better" - I went through this when I was learning blind typing. It feels bad, but it is necessary to evolve.
Been feeling this with VIM (for visual studio). I feel fine with the basic motions and now I can even use some of the cool stuff like macros, but man it was rough at first not reaching for those arrow keys and mouse. Still learning but man it’s so much cooler
How do you "learn" blind typing? Isnt it just comes naturally? You dont like look at keyboard when you type all of your life, right?
@@dmitriyrasskazov8858IKR!? I remember looking at my hands while typing when I was 8 years old, but had a class with a typing speed test in 4th or 5th grade where the keyboard was inside the desk. Years later I found out they stopped teaching typing in elementary school, and what used to be called "hunting and pecking" started to pass as typing. I've even been told it's "creepy" to type without looking at your hands.
@@dmitriyrasskazov8858 I know lots of folks who do. Not programmers, mind you, but still pretty technically minded.
@@dmitriyrasskazov8858 How do you know where the keys are when you type?
"we inherited the Brit's problems"
See!? More trouble with inheritance!
LMFAO
came here to say this, lmao
it just drives me crazy how every time Prime selects text - he doesn't include the first and last character of the selection. Every single time. I am pretty sure it's done on purpose to annoy ppl, and he specifically trained this skill to trigger ppl.
He says he likes the symmetry of it. I personally don't understand how he doesn't see the symmetry of selecting everything, but I usually listen more than watch, so I don't mind. Moreover, it's not the important bit of his videos.
cannot unsee
@@nikarmotte My brain must love asymmetry then since I always be mis-selecting
@@quantumjourney1 you just like chaos, and that's fine too. ^^
Sometimes if you include the first letter it selects a bunch of blank space and in poorly made websites, entire elements that aren't necessary, so choosing it this way consistently avoids that problem such that the full selected text is inside the paragraph
I work with Expert Beginner "Dunning-Krugers" with 15+ years of experience and I hate them.
Yeah, there's a lot of olds in the industry that just suck
This is an ironic statement. The generally accepted definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect is incorrect, and the people who use that term are essentially examples of the misunderstood phenomenon they are describing. The only question is whether or not your co-workers believe that their incorrect perception of a faulty phenomenon makes them better than you.
@@josephfcarrillo lol no, just because some people use "dunning krueger" incorrectly does not mean that you can claim that anyone who says the term must have used it incorrectly. You do not have sufficient data here to determine if the person is using it correctly or not.
low iq: these old guys suck and are dunning krueger
midwit: Actually, the real Dunning-Kruger Effect refers to a different phenomenon. This is ironic because-
high iq: these old guys suck and are dunning krueger
@@NihongoWakannai He prefaced his statement with "This is an ironic statement". @josephfcarrillo made the statement ironically so he was probably just commenting on too many people pointing out that general usage of Dunning-Kruger is Dunning-Kruger in it's general meaning since the real meaning of Dunning-Kruger is not what it's generally thought to be.
I read this article years ago after attending a session at a local developers conference. It is by far the most influential thing I have ever read, and really explained not just the problems I was encountering but even some of the problems I was creating.
There's a saying, "if you're the smartest person in the room, you should move to a different room". I think that this post really nails it that one of the problems of being the smartest person in the room is that you mistakenly think that you're the expert. I've made that mistake myself, and my biggest progressions as a developer was when new team members joined that taught me a completely new perspective. One guy in particular who stands out in that regard. I often meet the "expert beginners" when I join a project that practice "TDD", where they are so focused on writing "unit" tests that the test suite resists any significant refactoring of the code base. These people are often treated as experts in the organisation, and their views have become the "baseline truth". I've made the same mistakes as them in the past, but I learned from them. When joining a team practicing TDD, convincing these "experts", and the organisation, that they are on the wrong path is virtually impossible.
if everyone followed that advice there would be no one left in the room
I’m in the opposite environment. Mine has absolutely no TDD at all.
I completely agree that the more automated tests you make, the harder it gets to make changes.
But in my environment, practicing a little bit of it has helped me so much in being able to automate tests, and it helps me code and catch things I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Thankfully the beauty is I can choose when I feel like a test is necessary. There isn’t some manager breathing down my neck on a review asking me where the unit test is. The test is purely for my benefit alone and it’s great.
@@joelwillis2043 Sure there would, eventually you'd just stop being able to *determine* the smartest person in the room.
@@joelwillis2043 There's a solution. If each person occupies 2-3 rooms, then you can be the smartest one in one room while not being smart in another room.
An incredibly common occurence unfortunately- many people I know who are into CS aren't in it because they love it, they're in it for the money,- they're essentially soon-to-be managers who only look upon CS as "work to be done" to earn money and have a good CV.
Cs is "work to be done". Those peers won't get far because they lack the motivation to actually work on things. The life style is not worth the money at all
@@fauge7 I'm afraid it might be to the contrary- the more I see the world, the more I feel like skills are secondary to the ability to network, bootlick and manipulate your way through the layers of corporate hell. I've seen people lie, cheat and manipulate their way to glory , after all, it's only wrong if you get caught, right?
On the other hand, that means if you're learning programming because you genuinely like it, then you're already off to a better start than a ton of people who are already employed in software (because they don't actually enjoy the craft)
Passion is important, moreso than talent imo
There’s nothing wrong with that. I dislike how everyone says that you should be passionate about CS. They never tell construction workers and plumbers that they should be passionate about their work. We all gotta pay bills, feed our families, and make ends meet. It’s all about discipline in my opinion. Passions fade.
This was my biggest disappointment at uni so few people with actual passion for code
I have a coworker who clearly uses GPT and Copilot and it is incredibly frustrating to work with them.
They are not incompetent but are very close to. Their soft skills are worthless and they essentially "yes-man" me about everything I tell them.
My biggest complaints is the high volume of code they churn out (or copilot churns out, really). It's very difficult to review PRs that are over 1K loc and the author does not answer questions as if they don't even know what they wrote (because they don't). Copilot also writes code that is not in our in-house style (we use eslint as much as possible to prevent this) but its really frustrating to see ugly blocky crap code ALL over. This reminds me that using copilot and writing nice code IS a skill, you have to prompt copilot to use the right language construct for the right job and not just wing it.
Vote reject
What kind of insane place do you work that allows PRs that large?
If your other co-workers would allow it, add a git pre commit hook to fail on unfixable eslint errors.
You will cut down on this guy's output immediately😁
I think AI are a amazing tools, it just depends how and who use it... the problems you face is not GPT or copilot, it's your lazy coworkers, This kind of PRs are a real concern for the team, the company and the codebase...
"Their soft skills are worthless and they essentially "yes-man" me about everything I tell them" have you ever thought that the reason they're like that is because keeping this job and gain experience is their life thread, and they do everything possible to stay alive, even if this means not pushing back or questioning how things are done?
Trying to transfer from Mechanical Engineering into Software Engineering and seeing my peers borderline rely on AI for their apps always rubbed me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, I like using chat, especially for SQL queries, but the way my friend stated they were a "Frontend Engineer", from being UI Design while writing everything with CoPilot, and React, while knowing nothing about Javascript and Optimization blew my mind
someone at my work uses copilot/chatgpt for every bit of code. zero thought goes into it and I can tell. its very infuriating
I'd say theres a balance - the older generation of software engineers grew up hacking and building things for themselves because there was no internet to rely upon. Their problem was a lack of information. This generation's problem is the opposite - with all the training wheels you can't be too sure that you truly understand what you are doing at a lower level. If you truly understand whats going on (having done things manually, encountered and solved problems) while using such tools, I think nothing is lost. Its about being honest what you really know
I am a PolSci major. Wait till you see my Assembly code and Management hires me for my soft manipulation and fake competence skillz
There has to be a balance. Unfortunately those who dont use AI to better themselves will not survive in future
Better use it than let it take over your job
"Maintenance of a large program can be very very detrimental to skill growth." I agree that it can be, however I cut my teeth on maintaining large legacy systems. Not only did I learn more about the language and different techniques, but I also learned how to persevere in the face of frustration. I also learned what works and what doesn't. If you only do maintenance, it will hamper your skillset, but legacy maintenance can be a specialization that is highly sought after. I was bad at my first greenfield implementation, but I still brought something to the table. For example, I was on a project building a brand new product from scratch. I had trouble with getting started, but I was able to point out our tech debt before it happened that everyone else missed because I had that prior experience. Now I am very good at both.
Doing both is such an experience. And it makes you better at both.
I truly believe that if you are a maintainer, then you are in a really bright position, because you can have a side project with the latest stack, or anything really. While you’re maintaining, you sometimes have thoughts of “man this is shit, who made this”, and then you do it your way.
The greatness of it is, you either experience your better idea on how to do something and you reinforce understanding and what not, or you fall flat on your face and realize they wrote the shit code, because it’s how they had to. It’s a win-win.
Not defending AI but it's the same argument of learned helplessness people brought up against Stack Overflow, this problem is not new
Some will stand, some will fall. Act accordingly with the boys of OpenAI
The problem is that AI can be even more useful so the issues are going to become even more prominent.
AI can definitely be useful in the learning process just like stack overflow, but you also have to be willing to actually learn what the code you're copying does.
LOOL the multiple inheritance comment hit so hard. Years ago I hit a point in a project where I thought multiple inheritance was the perfect solution when things inevitably went wrong. I discovered the virtual keyword and wondered why it was not used more often..... well let's just say I found out why
breaking soLid principle? I would dive in, describe situation for me and other juniors 😊🎉
😂classic. We've all been there. I once made a really fancy dynamic table that could display and CRUD any object it was given using reflection. . .yeah it was a mess.
tell us more. Me, an undergraduate student, don't even know why inheritance is such a bad idea. But I can see how the "virtual" can cause problems hahah
@segueoyuri @SeCluDred Alright sit around it's story time.
A while ago I was trying to write a simulation project It got into me to describe everything as a class with a huge hierarchy.
Start with simobject type alright so far so good.
Add a physicalObject make it inherit simobject: still fine.
A few weeks later i have this huge hierarchy some 40 classes all derived from the original generic type or one of it's descendant.
In there is compositeObject that is a simobject that contains other simobjects.
Now I need a physicalCompositeObject on the surface easy enough.
Make it inherit physicalObject and compositeObject.
Realize that I have a problem.
Both physicalObject and compositeObject have the same parents somewhere up the hierarchy.
So one of them hide the members of the other.
Find about the virtual inheritance in C++ and think "I can fix this".
The fact that almost no one uses it should have been a warning.
but I keep going.
I add virtual inheritance to children of simobject: virtual public simobject.
now you can have a physicalObject that is also a compositeObject.
But you need to manually call the constructor of the virtual parent.
Even worse since it seem the issue is fixed you become addicted to using virtual inheritance.
Add virtual public in from of so many parents when declaring classes the whole hierarchy is a mess.
A big tangled mess.
Every use of virtual inheritance just kicked the can down the road.
Never fixed the issue as some other class down the hierarchy would need to inherit from two classes in the hierarchy.
At some point the code reuse gain from inheritance is compensated by the amount of parent you have to manually call the constructor of.
So It took me a few years to get the motivation to convert the whole thing to composition.
Working with an architect that's like this. He can't make anything working properly so we constantly have to fix the shit he leaves behind (and yes we do make clear he is causing the problems). It ranges from basic typo's to not knowing concurrency is a thing let alone knowing what to do with coupling and cohesion.
It's mind boggling how such persons don't get fired instantly but instead get promotions.
But if he is spitting out code real fast, management might get impressed.
They probably understand business very well but are average at coding. They know how to build the right thing more than they know how to build it the right way.
@@majorhumbert676took him years to setup all the clean architecture microservices. It's cargo cult programming all the way.
Could probably remake the whole system in less than a year without all the overengineering and just building what's actually needed. No way you could sell that to the business though.
But you didn't invent quad-trees, iterators, compression or calculus, you're just going through the motions of implementing them. INVENTING a quad tree, coming up with the idea of an iterator, or calculus takes a mind that only occurs a few times a generation. So I disagree that all "software is easy"; it's only easy in hindsight.
I think this a stupid argument, no one ever invents an entire thing. Technology as a concept always stands on the progress of those who came before us, otherwise progress wouldn't be possible, and even if it were it would be ephemeral. Software isn't necessarily "inventing" entire broad concepts and ways to solve problems like quad-trees, that's research. Applying knowledge that has already been invented to solve other problems is the key to innovation.
Everything looks complex if you look at the end result, but every man-made thing is a collection of small simple steps. A computer chip is an insane object if you only know that it holds trillions nano scale components
Literally from the first paragraph of Wikipedia:
"Over the past few decades, neuroscience has provided insight into learned helplessness and shown that the original theory had it backward: the brain's default state is to assume that control is not present, and the presence of "helplessness" is what is learned first. However, it is unlearned when a subject is faced with prolonged aversive stimulation"
Prime does use the term a bit figuratively to mean reaching for help without trying to solve the problem. That's definitely a real thing
@@Oler-yx7xj I know and understand that, I just want people to be a bit more educated in modern science
@norude Yeah, that's the right thing
I can definitely relate to that statement. So many times i try to do a task(be it a math assignment back when i was in uni, or a coding problem) and it just seems daunting and i don't even know where to begin. Then i struggle with it for a bit, and then it just clicks, and i was wondering why i thought it was so difficult to begin with.
@@norude None of this is science.
Very interesting. Idk how so many people jump into CS without having any passion for it.
If I didnt genuinely enjoy hacking together my dogshit lil projects I would absolutely have given up on CS many years ago, its a tuff ting to find motivation to keep competing when youre not a smart person naturally, or if you have zero talent for it. I know im never gonna be anywhere near the top level where primeagen and friends all hang out but its just too addicting.
And if I can pay the bills doing something I love then its a blessing even if comparatively im a complete smoothbrain trashpile. Im cool with it cause in my heart i know im at least *trying* to improve, and in the meantime i can poop out code that people ask me for
Oddly enough I did not get into Comp and Hacking until I was forced through it. Some people end up liking something the more time they spend with it
@@waterbloom1213that's interesting. I was always interested in it but I was a degenerate when I was younger and having ADHD didn't help. I dropped out of school for it, but interest in game development pulled me back in. In college I would do other people's homework for money lmao. I genuinely enjoyed it.
A person comparing the code I write for work with the code I write at home and assume that it was written by two completely different people. But my dogshit projects are my playground, the lack of constraints gives me freedom to move fast and try new things. At home I feel no guilt about writing an entire application that is "operated" by editing the code between runs, because I know I know better.
At work my focus was network acceleration tech R&D. At home I ping-pong all over the place, but often do a lot of digital signal processing and image manipulation. So many times there were situations where my hobby stuff led to new ways of thinking about work stuff.
nikola jokic says whats good
Prime isn't the top level, webdev is pretty far below the crazy geniuses who do actual computer science research.
why are people being so confusing about coding. "Oh you gotta build projects, Oh you gotta know these frameworks." And then me who knows a nothing about coding, well how tf can I build software projects if I don't know how to code. LIKE JUST TELL ME THE TOPICS TO LEARN WTF. THIS IS STUPID. THESE PEOPLE ARE GATE KEEPING NEW DEV. ITS SO OBVIOUS
I uninstalled and quit copilot two months ago .. was helpfull for some repetitive tasks, but brainrot does not worth it
That bowling manager advice is 100% true. It happened to me in music: before learning proper form and theory, my composition and improv peaked. Then I got super shitty for a while when learning proper fundamentals. Then I came out years later much better than I was before. It's like cacooning to become something better. I always assume the same process is needed for any skill, atleast to reach mastery.
Just like Skyrim
i felt the same for design
If you never take off the training wheels - are you a good cyclist or are you good at writing a bicycle with 4 wheels? I am still in the learning process but I avoid stuff like Copilot completely. What use is that code for me if I would not be able to get there on my own? How am I supposed to fix "my code", if I could not create it on my own?
I think it has a lot to do with how we learn. If you go through a programming course / book / tutorial and just blindly type down the code, nod and think you learned something, you are foolish. I don't write a single line if I don't know what it means. When the learning material states "don't worry, you don't need to understand that part yet" I almost feel personally attacked and challenged. And it makes me look up what it means even more. Documentation reading is vital for that of course. And if its some OpenSource library with a bad doc? Well, trial and error and find out what it does, also a great moment to learn Debugging.
I don't think the learned helplessness is any worse now than it was 20 years ago. I'm shifting careers from chemistry to cs and it doesn't currently seem more than when I started school 12 years ago. Using AI in school is considered cheating. There were always people who cheated there way through school and they suffer more when they hit the market. The people who rely on cheating to get through will still drop out halfway through when copilot cant do there entire assignment for them.
10% of the coding I do is boilerplate, the other 90% is integration crap that isn't in going to get copilot responses that work.
ive been programming for 2 years now, I have a rule I don't allow myself to use chat gpt for things I don't know for more than giving me a starting point to start learning, and I don't use any kind of editor ai like copilot to avoid brain rot
chatgpt is actually great for that, but as soon as you have a problem that requires actual knowledge and thinking, it just starts to go in circles.
Chatgpt is great to use as a search engine when you encounter stuff you don't know. Of course it's still just a starting point but helped me save alot of time when encountering some new concepts that had too much magic to be clear from code.
@@Rick104547 Yeah but I hurt my progress quite a bit while using chatgpt as a search engine for more than one prompt, since you never know if anything that it says isn't a hallucination. Soo when we add validation time to the equation it balances out the benefit. Still a great learning tool can't deny that
@@jacksoncremean1664 I used to have a habit to try and brute force a problem with chatgpt didn't go well since I noticed that sometimes for the time I wasted trying to "save" time I actually would've been able to learn it and do it myself
why don't ask chat gpt how something works. It's great for explaining things on the high level.
37 year old here. 100% yes mainstream media and teachers were all saying Google was going to cause people to not have to learn anything. It still exists to this day! Except now it's a saying of "Back then you needed to memorize facts with rout memorization. Now true skill is knowing how to find the information on the internet". It's quite literally the exact same thing but with better P.R.
The best part of this video was hearing you pronouncing my name (João), and making an effort to pronounce it correctly. You got pretty close!
Reinventing the wheel and showing it off to everyone like "this is what I'm capable of" is godlike
"I'm the humblest, number 1 at the top of the humble list"
That's a bar.
sounds like lonely island
The analogy i use is playing an instrument vs programming in midi. On a practical level, you can 'play' any instrument from extinct to fantastical and create entire arrangements by yourself with midi. It's always perfect and consistent. However, you are missing a vital tool: the feedback loop of ad-hoc creation; of improvisation and inspiration. Those things matter when you're not quite sure where you want to go but have a general idea.
To be clear, midi is just a communication protocol between sources and receivers. If the source you're using is a sequencer or piano roll, then yes there is a bit of a disconnect between the two that can make learning music difficult. However, if your source is some type of real time midi controller that responds to physical input, the feedback is much more immediate and is pretty much the same as using any other instrument. In fact, many midi controllers that that have come out in the past decade or so provide even more direct, real time control of the music you're playing than a real life piano using an extension of midi called MPE, or 'Mutli Polyphonic Expression'. Notable examples include the Haken Continuum, the Osmose Expressive E, and the Striso board to name a few. These are all midi controllers that give direct, real time control over the sound synthesizers make to an extent that would make most other instruments blush in embarrassment.
@@rahzaelfoe3288 Programming in midi, not playing a midi instrument.
You knew this before posting.
I feel like I'm 100% an Expert Beginner but, since I know I'm actually stagnated and not improving, does that mean I'm actually competent? 🤔
To be fair, I've seen a lot of engineers abuse professor and TA office hours rather than try to work through it themselves as well
I've had jobs where I felt pretty talented all around, though I focused mostly on frontend work. The thing that prevents you from succumbing to that "expert beginner" thinking is surrounding yourself with and interacting with people that are better than yourself.
I eventually found myself being the most knowledgeable frontend dev working on a react application. That lasted years. I could still feel I wasn't progressing in terms of my abilities because I was doing the same thing day in and day out.
Then I joined a large company on a huge project, my focus now shifted much harder toward backend, where I get to touch most of the stack. My other teammates have been there years. For the first time in years, I felt like I was all the way back in the first year of learning programming. There was so much I didn't know, but I needed to stand on my own two feet amongst these other backend devs. It is eye-opening... and incredibly stressful. lol
This problem started before chatgpt become popular, the main thing I saw was gamers thinking they would be good at coding but didn't actually have the passion for it and didn't want to learn.
I know many colleagues of my degree thag just want to do gamedev and I'm like 🙄🙄🙄
They struggled hard the last years.
@@notsojharedtroll23 what's wrong with people wanting to do gamedev? How is that different from someone that just wants to do webdev or just wants to do cybersec
@@NihongoWakannaiI assume that likely the problem isn't gamedev or wanting to do gamedev, it's more the fact of people that think gamedev is like “playing a game” and when a hardship or intuitive concept presents itself they dislike it or don't wanna do it?
Imo gamedev is very hard when you have to account not just code but also teamworking, design and limitations, to me that doesn't sound like a place where id like to work, maybe it also it has something to do with the people of gamedev being delusional? 🤷
(Saying this from the perspective of someone that has **talked** with people that have had classmates like this in uni, who thought CS was going to be like playing a game, as I said earlier).
It's very similar to learning how to solve a Rubik's Cube. There are patterns one can learn and apply a specific algorithm to solve it faster. But there are also algorithms which solve the cube each and every time and one only has to learn a handful of patterns. At the cost of more turns per solve. So sure one can learn how to turn fast and be better than most who know how to solve it. But you won't be able to be blazingly fast unless you've trained yourself on more patterns and their specific algorithms.
Neo: "I know kung fu"
Morpheus: "Show me"
they had (ostensibly) the same exact set of martial arts programs downloaded, and yet Morpheus was obviously more proficient. Due to his experience.
maybe this is an alternate metaphor for your blue belt thing, 33:27
Kind of the opposite metaphor since morpheus beat Neo not because the latter had bad technique, but rather because he had internalized beliefs about his own limitations that were no longer valid outside of his pod. So his problem was lack of confidence, while the broad problem at play here is overconfidence.
34:59 It's like the matrix. if you were Neo living in the hyper simulation have everything provided to to you. then one day it gets turned off for you. you thrown up, eat some bad food, sit back in the chair and someone plugs a .JSON into your brain.
Tank: "I think he likes it!",
Neo: "I know kung-fu.",
Morpheus: "Show me."
I would like to propose a name for this problem. The Tanked Neo Effect(TNE).
"AI Robs you of your experience."
AI robs ME of YOUR experience. My experience is my own, thank you.
AI is a tool like any other you just need to know how to use it.
Too bad it is UNETHICAL!
25:53 that is such a good explanation… nothing is hard when you have the foundations… it’s just time consuming.
Microservices was by far the biggest offender with the crazy tech. B2B companines having more microservices than billable clients. Then sales (for the lack of billable clients) promises the heavens and all the features. But because of everything being microservices, implementing them will either take much longer, or will be a hack job and you are yet again building a fragmented monolith, with protobuf in the middle.
technology keeps marching forward and so does our tools and jobs. This whole idea behind a student not knowing some last year technology is grounded in ignorance. Most of us could not write assembly today so I guess we are just not real programmers. AI is here to stay, its our new reality, use it like the tool that it is.
I am starting to hate developer commentary more and more, Jesus H. Christ. So much of it is neurotic, backbiting elitism, or complaining about imposter syndrome.
Ironically, about the bowling story, a lot of professional bowlers actually don't use the pinholes...
My question is how do I come up with projects that motivate me?
I am sorry but in the begining article he says most talented developers. That is BS, moving up in the world by purely by merit is very hard.
I completely disagree with the post on expert system. To me, everything is about Darwinian survival. Whatever method survived live long enough to be the expert
Is his comment about inheritance a common take, or a hot take? Currently working at my first software engineering role after college and my company loves abstraction. We have a whole stack for creating, storing, transforming, and transporting data. Almost every class I've ever written extends one of these base abstract classes. It was very confusing learning how to read code written with this stack, and even more confusing learning how to write code that conforms to it, so maybe I understand where he's coming from. So many layers of abstraction make it hard to even write a small feature. On the flip side, it does standardize things which I could see making cross team collaboration easier. Idk though, it's all I've known so far.
I’ve heard every single argument on this channel.
Some that contradicts the other
This community (not the Primagen community specifically, the developer community in general) talks so much shit about other developers. It's got me wondering how common this is in the industry (bad devs)? Am I "bad dev"?!
I'm not really even sure what types of things people want you to learn. I feel like the typical advice would be: "Go learn C", "Go build something", "Go study DS&A" blah blah blah. Okay, sure 👍.
So you learn up to a point where you're confident in each of the previously mentioned skills. Then it dawns on you that you don't actually know how to build a real production grade app. You now "need" to learn: Cloud Architecture, a Cloud service provider, containerization, some kind of web framework, various authentication protocols, maintainable software design patterns, testing frameworks, CI/CD, Networking protocols, database design etc.
That's kind of where im at right now, im not stupid enough to call myself an expert in any of these, I could definitely improve in them; and there's tons more I haven't even began learning. But i can't really picture myself having the confidence to just flat out call other people shitty developers.
I am mostly writing this comment because in this community, I genuinely can't distinguish between people being arrogant and people just stating facts (that there are a lot of bad devs).
We use "multiple inheritance" in game design all the time.
It's far more based around interface implementation than what textbook definition "single inheritance" would leave you with.
Maybe he was thinking multi level inheritance? The terms are annoyingly similar. Most people just say "composition" instead of multiple inheritance
I had "copilot pause" before copilot existed, simply because I always knew there was someone who can help me with my problem therefore why bother putting in the effort. It's destructive efficiency at its finest.
Didn't realize copilot was being used that widely, or even believed to be used that widely. Using AI as part of my programming is still something I go out of my way for if I've exhausted other avenues. Which, probably is slowing me down, but I just haven't rolled it in to being one of my default tools yet.
I see this all the times in my peers even out of software… I am trying my best not to become this :)
There are MANY bad programmers that rely on AI to solve a problem, and not use AI to help type…
I am a self proclaimed diversity hire. I am nowhere near as good as my co-workers and I definitely feel like I am here just because of my race 💀 we have 3 people in our "DEI" department.
Are you not good as your co-workers with the same years of experience and backgrounds. I am yet to meet a black or female developer that is not better than their pairs.
Nice bait
I doubt that very much lmao. Trying to fish likes are you?
Just my take on "How to stop copy pasting code"
Ask yourself, this question, why are you copy pasting code?
Is It
A.) You don't know what's happening.
B.) You know what's happening, but don't believe in yourself.
If you answer A. That means you lack fundamentals. And the thing you are doing is more advanced than you think it is.
If you answer B. That means you lack practice. Or you don't know how to judge your worth.
For me, (idk if it will work for you). Both A and B can be solved.
Here are the steps.
1.) Don't take the next step, until you learn the basic components of what you are doing.
2.) Learn the fundamentals of the things you want. Learn its properties.
(At this point you can use books or the web to know, important point here is don't look at the code)
3.) Using your current understanding. Try to implement any properties (and or flow), etc. Don't mind it if your code is bad.
Your goal here is to implement.
4.) Once you can implement something. See if you can improve on it. Go back to step 3 and implement more.
(Until you can implement all the properties)
5.) Have fun (don''t be afraid to experiment),
Do some TH-cam Video or Leetcode or challenge yourself, etc to see if you improve.
6.) Repeat Step 1 (soon you'll be doing a lot of things, without copy pasting code).
Note: I learn a lot of DS and Algo and more just by following those. Like last time I'm trying to create DFS and BFS.
I don't see any code at any point I'm doing it. I'm just looking how its properties works, its flows, and its component.
Technically my BFS is still bad since I'm still missing something. But it is ok I can figure it out.
There's also C) I don't have the exact syntax/API memorized for this thing I do twice a year, but it's faster to ask Codeium instead of googling
@@Daniel_WR_Hart That's technically A. But let's say you don't know the syntax but somehow in your brain, I think I know this, but idk the correct word or flow. That's B.
I think the only time you need exact syntax is for very exact program.
@@asagiai4965 When I made my comment I had CSS animations in mind, because it's easy to learn how it works, but I keep forgetting that it's @keyframes and not something like @animation or @frames. I guess that would be B though
@Daniel_WR_Hart I'm used to be guilty with that. I'm used to be B. The way I learned it is. Animation needs frames. Frames have timeline.
@@Daniel_WR_Hart In another note, PL or tech that have confusing terminologies or wrong use of terminology are bane of a programmer's existence.
I used to code PHP without anything fancy, just like rawdog notepad, back when I started my career on programming. Even StackOverflow was in it's infancy back then. I've accepted LSP now, but something like Copilot, I just cant fantom something like that. But at same time I think I'm something like expert beginner in this field...
I switched away from VSCode before copilot was even added. For me, reading code is way harder than just writing it, so given the error rate of tools like copilot, you still have to read & understand its output, and my problem solving speed in most situations that copilot would be any good for is near instantaneous, so there’s really no point. I can usually just type the solution faster than I can formulate a prompt, wait for the response, analyze & understand it, and tweak it so it works properly
I'm proud to have never used copilot
A component of the big picture is cognitive ability. People have different IQs. Those with higher IQ have a higher skill ceiling. Those with lower IQ have a lower skill ceiling. Genetics limit potential
"Its like life, you pick each thing up piece by piece as you go through it" -- This really hit me hard. I've always been worrying that I'm not improving enough or that I'm constantly falling behind in todays world with programming. I now realize, I dont have to go as fast as possible to catch up, if anything it'll hurt me more. Thank you prime.
dude, you should make a code review stream, it's gonna be both fun and grow some of our braincells
A better analogy for the effect of AI: it's like memorizing all the openings by name, the formalized tactics and endgames of chess, except you haven't played a single game, or made any sense of it. All you have is a messy collection of tools that you don't know how to use and what purpose they serve.
The easy way is amazing in university because it allows you to pass the exams with relatively high grades by using a mix of cramming and infering the pattern of what the Professors want you to solve. I feel like this is where the problem starts.
If you really want to learn something you have to do it through the hard way I feel like. No solutions, no copy-pasted answer, and inferring how to solve the problem on your own. This is how you properly build a skill and your problem solving capabilities.
I've always been into programming. I remember I wrote a whole funky-ass 3d graphics engine wrapped into a dynamic library. It would raster the dirtiest of triangle on a now 20 years old CPU. I learnt so much that time.
Prime are you an influencer
I think it’s funny that’s AI seems to be viewed as though it was self executing code… but windows might as well be magic from my perspective.
I disagree in the "all things are easy" part: There are three kind of stuff.... Hard, Complex, Easy.
Easy is just easy.
Complex is basically just a lot of easy things: either by sequence or by knowledge needed.
Hard? What is hard then? Things that for example need a lot of working memory! We are not talking about knowledge here, but how many stuff you keep in your head in the same moment while actively thinking about them. Some problems and paths are just hard (er).
"There nothing hard about it, it's just time consuming".. Yes and yes, could not agree more. I teach introductory Differential and Integral calculus to young students and that's what I always tell them !!! Math is not suppose to be hard, it's a tool.. you need to see the Integral sign (or differential operator) as a tool, just like a screwdriver or a ratchet :) simple as that, once you learn the technique and you practice alot you will know how to use the tool, just like a carpenter. Sure there is still challenging problem, but if you really devote yourself to learning you will find those interesting more then anything else..
And yes, totally agree with the Laplace/ Fourier transform analogy (that spoke to me haha).. when I did the first Quantum Mechanics class at uni.. ohh man .. those integrals and homework were loooonnnggg (like 10-20 pages XD), but there were not conceptually hard .. it's just that you need to carry on the calculation and apply the right techniques, like a computer would do, it's a bit unnatural for us to think like that on a piece of paper, it takes alot of focus and concentration to not miss any details. So there you go : not hard, but time consuming ... sometime it's like that ...
One of favorite professor at uni always told us : some problem are hard because of the concept and some problem are hard because of the complexity (and some are both haha !!).
(PS : sorry for my english, it's not my native language)
I liked what you said in a previous video that people are not using AI for the simple mundane problems, its for bigger problems. Myself, I dont use CoPilot, but jippity. The way I use it is to ask about a complex problem, ask for no solution (which it does not understand...) but give me resources to finding out myself (which is does sometimes).
I rather understand why stuff happens rather than "this is how to do it."
The article is so dam true.
I’m showing up at the Olympics just to see if I can bench what I think I can bench
When you say you're worried about AI's impact on problem solving, our species as a whole clearly isn't too great at it and I'm not sure that AI could do much harm. I do not believe that problem solving skills will be less developed because there's an easier solution to have it done for you, I think that more people who lack the motivation to solve problems will start solving more problems bringing up the lower end of the curve, and those driven to solve problems will continue doing so.
This might be somewhat of a toxic view but if you can make up for the lack of development of 20-30 years by just starting to work on your problem solving skills that far into the game that's not something I've ever observed, and I'm not too sure its possible on any scale that moves the needle.
HOW CAN YOU REMEMBER THINGS? Jesus fuck, I don't remember the day it was yesterday. But I mostly remember concepts... And I have aphantasia.
But yeah, specific stuff? Really hard for me to remember. Am I an AI? D:
Personally, I just want to be micromanaged and given 20 year old C# LOB projects to maintain.
Thats exactly how I felt at end of my internship. I was tasked with making a pocket process for a web based system(for transfering info from peripheral devices). I wrote 2000~ lines of code and had to read some documentations and had to implement solutions in different fields of software(like remote file access, cryptography, XML documents) andndid really a good job in modularizing and abstracting everything. But that was all I did, create or bring together some APIs only 2000 lines of code complexity. And some of the employees really liked the style of my code, so I added remainder of my time implementing pettt features all wonderfully refactored and styled(I could've watch to learn from others after finishing the project). It was only the last day I decided to watch employees that I realized their system was really complex and big(especially the data model) and that İ wasted my time playing in my puddle rather than to learn to swim in the sea.
I've been an expert beginner for my entire life
I have to say this, as a born and bred Swede. My first reaction when reading "SWE stop learning" was "WHAT THE F*** is wrong with you! If you can't compete with our education level, that's YOUR issue, not ours".
Then as that first split second passed I realised...
loved your whole schpiel at the end. particularly the sidetrack about soccer. 'soccer' is one particular form of 'football'. Other forms include rugby and American football. In Europe, soccer became the predominant form of football, so it is called simply 'football', whereas in North America, American football became the predominant form and is called 'football'. But they're all football. It's silly to claim one is _objectively_ correct, and even sillier to object to an American using American verbiage.
17:00
Just started learning to code last summer, mever used copilot. I fiddled with ChatGPT and Bard(Gemini)... they're both garbage.
I will say though, when you're just having a brain fart and can't think of something, it can be helpful for basic questions.
12:00 Thanks for saying this OUT LOUD
I'm pushing myself over that JS hump and it's so tempting to just AI everything. I've followed some tutorials to make pretty RGB nonsense and satisfy the monkey brain. Now I go back and learn the actual material.
The chat comment asking "Is Uncle Bob an expert beginner" ... holy mother of god this community.
I would lump all the "SOLID is terrible", "Clean Code is terrible", "TDD is terrible", "Agile is terrible", "OOP is terrible" developers into this bucket. Vast majority of you, I hate to break it to you, you have no idea what you are talking about. The reason it is hard for you or feels bad is that you are a beginner. Which is fine, but stop pretending.
Erik has a section on this in a follow on blog post entitled "Language of the Expert Beginner"
"Experts are Wrong
Given that Expert Beginners are of mediocre ability by definition, the subject of expertise is a touchy one. Within the small group, this isn’t really a problem since the Expert Beginner is the designated Expert there by definition. But within a larger scope, actual Experts exist, and they do present a problem-particularly when group members are exposed to them and realize that discrepancies exist."
But sure, developer 2 years out of college who has only read half of Clean Code and watched a few TH-cam videos, please tell me again why Uncle Bob is "completely wrong" about everything. I'm all ears, your God like wisdom will no doubt transform this engineering department.
Experts *can* be wrong, but you better be an expert yourself or be damn good at explaining why they are wrong and it better be an explanation beyond "well The Primeagen has a video on TH-cam, you should really watch it"
Saying "All programming is easy, it's just for loops and defining variables" sounds like "All math is easy, it's just solving equations." I love Prime, but gotta say I strongly dislike this take; feels like oversimplification. As my recent professor said: "C used to be considered a high level-language, but now it's considered low-level. We write software so differently than we used to."
In the Limetless TV show, the protagonist Brian gets ahold of a neural enhancing (brain) drug. Perfect recall, faster thinking.
At onepoint he's in a surveillance van as part of a sting operation. After drinking too much coffee(?) he runs to the nearest bathroom and crosses paths with the criminal.
A montage of Bruce-Lee and ither Kung-Fu movies play for and in Bryan's head. . .and. . .he gets his ass kicked. Theory can help but with actual practice it won't go far.
Think it's episode 5 but I can only find the follow up in utube clips.
😅 43:24 real question: why does this feel like either:
1. Artisans complaining about corporate shilling?
2. Or moderately skilled but very opinionated hacks complaining that they don't like the way others "succeeded"?
Either way it feels like gatekeeping and unhelpful to "normal" people who might actually be trying to learn about how to pathfind in a world where everyone claims expertise and experience. 😅
Hot Take [Disclaimer: I don't really know if it's hot or kinda warm take, because my perception of this is kinda established. But if enough people believe otherwise, it becomes a hot take automatically]
I kinda disagree with the logic that all of code is build on some very basic blocks, but not on a fundamental level. And I can make my argument clearer with what Prime said about differential equations.
As a Software Dev I would put myself as Junior to Mid level, as in I don't believe I'm competent enough to be in charge of complicated problems without the constant fear of blowing up to my face due to my lack of experience. But having a Master's in theoretical math I am more confident describing in terms of DE's.
While it's true that differential equations all have the same structure as what type of problem they are (it all comes down to finding a point in an infinite dimensional vector space) it's not quite easy to procure a solution no matter what (it is infinite dimensions after all), and sometimes doing complicated and novel things just to prove that a solution exist is the only way to move forwards (and sometimes even that is ineffable).
The explanation might not do much to persuade you but I believe that since this is the case for DE's (and other fields I happened to delve into) there does exist a subspace of programming that this is the case, and since even these abstract equations eventually apply to the real world I would assume that while many of those problems are straight theoretical, some eventually "leak" into real world programming.
Again I'm not experienced enough to point out where this is the case in programming, I'm just saying that if it's the case in applied forms of multiple unrelated fields in maths and physics it is not a stretch to assume that this is the case in programming.
PS: Sorry for this being too long
24:19 Well, I am right now creating my own Python3 NBT library and because I only want to have iterative conversions of the data trees to other data trees or even to/from serialized data I have to work with a bunch of loops and a custom stack. The biggest question is then how to structure that stack (for my sNBT serializer I have a 2D-stack) and what loops to use to appropriately iterate through that stack.
I got a CS degree in 2003 and my daughter got one in 2023. Neither of us had projects that were just copy and paste. Is that happening at some schools? I remember the pain and suffering of having to write code by hand on exams. "Back in my day..." 😂😂😂
"It's not hard: it just takes time" Maybe "it takes dedication" would be a better way to put it. You don't get it by *waiting* for the understanding to hit you.
"I don't understand it therefore it must be easy" is *not* you (I don't think). You say "I don't understand Quantum Chromodynamics but I know I could if I made it my dedicated goal for a year or two." This is vastly different than saying, "I've never coded in Haskell before. Let's try using that in production code on this project!"
"How do I avoid just copy and pasting the solution?"
Answer: Dont...copy and paste the solution.
Expansion: Analyze the solution, pick out the things you dont understand and do research to understand why the code is being used where it is. You should not be using code that you yourself do not understand.
This is where being a senior software engineer at a well recognized company can usually help. Sometimes even these companies make mistakes. But a really good programmer can recognize even at the beginning of learning a language what stage of the beginner->expert spectrum they are on, simply because they’ve been through this spectrum several times on other programming languages & runtimes/frameworks
I don't think that using Copilot is making your weak. It is only making your weak compared to older programmers, and older programs which are outdated
However just like calculators got introduced and you did not have to learn calculation out of your head, I could explore more calculations per minute than I would have done using head calculations.
AI is part of life and current technology, just like intelligent and syntax coloring.
It is the developers that use AI to accelerate their learning skills. You can use AI not only to make programs for you but also to explain what complex code is doing so you find better ways of doing it.
It is tempting to say, when I cut off copilot then my brain does not function anymore, yet you still rely on intellisense, compile warnings and syntax coloring.
I use AI to create code for me, and my colleagues freak out because I do that.
What they don't see is that AI generated code is for me like a pencil drawing on a painting. Then I take over and modify the pencil drawing to my level of expertise.
The end result is code that does not resemble the AI generated code but sped up my productive results.
The tricky thing is to recognize when AI code generations is making you run in circles. Then you take charge.
This 19:56 made me remember the scene of the matrix where agent Smith is asking Neo - "Why do you persist?" and Neo says - "Because I choose to!"
PS: Ref: th-cam.com/video/ztABYog5x3o/w-d-xo.html
About “one person convinces everyone how important it is to have _back pressure and reactivity_ and all the fancy words” - I have the same stuff in a much simpler situation, people talking about _modularity_ and architecture and etc. That is not a goal to achieve! Those are tools, ways to do things and improve the path to the goals. But that cannot be a milestone: in 3 quartes we achieve reactivity and synergy! That’s BS. If you turn ways to do things into goals, you’re likely in a holiwar, and your reals goals are forgotten. If people talk about such abstractions as concrete goals, it is likely they are bozos.
It's a shame nobody brought up Jason Belmonte on the whole expert beginner bowler front...
I'm not convinced this whole expert beginner perspective is insightful. People develop bad habits, sure. But that that's somehow unique to beginners? And that such expert beginners cannot escape those habits? That sounds like nonsense.
Its weird how young peoples brains work in that they need copilot or they quit. For me, a 40 year old dinosaur who programs as a hobby first and then for work, I have a hard time progressing a project if I attempt to throw a chatbot in the mix. I often have to correct and revise the output or completely rewrite it. "AI" aka LLM's are still just clever programming.
@ 1:25 no way in hell. There is SO MUCH dead weight in this field its insane. It's the main reason products are being released half-baked and experienced developers can't find work. Name and shame, kick them out of the playing field. There are plenty of other careers the liars can try to weasel a 250k salary out of.