Programming as a career

Is it worth (re)learning front end development in 2023 or will it all be replaced AI soon?

Take home challenges have always been a part of some interviews as long as I've been in the field.

Sorry to hear that Vinnie!

I had an actual post apocalyptic nightmare last night where Javascript stopped working.

Front End development involves knowing what users and business analysts want when they can't tell themselves - it'll be the last thing to go!

This dropped on the AI thread, but certainly pertains to this one. If anything, more so. Worth watching even if just the first 15 min.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhCl-GeT4jw

i'm glad he likes nick bostrom because it means i don't need to take him 100% seriously.

I think he's clearly right about the general trend and mostly right about the speed at which programming norms will change to have AI do the heavy lifting. The offsetting trend will be how many more lines of code will be incorporated into every day real world processes.

I thought it nice of him to start (with uncommented code samples) by making sure that we know he's a bad programmer - the "the tests are easier to write than the programs" is a similarly brave declaration that he should be let nowhere near CS students.

It sounds like his vision is that software development will go through the following phases:

1) AI writes the code, humans still read it

2) AI writes the code, humans can no longer understand it

3) There is no more coding as such. The AI is the only program you need. It does it all.

who codes the coder?

Yes, that's a simplification. There will still be people coding the AI. But will be a tiny, very specialized workforce. Much smaller than the current legions of software developers. Roughly the size of the workforce that designs CPUs nowadays.

In line with that, a lot of this handwringing and prognostication over AI seems to be an inversion of the enthusiasm people had for increasingly higher-level languages allowing civilians to not deal with lower-level code but... C and assembler are still being taught decades later--we still use Fortran!

but that'll free us to use our time for art etc.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67302048

"Elon Musk tells Rishi Sunak AI will put an end to work"

future be like the Federation in Star Trek

yeah, I tend to think of this as just another iteration of making an even higher-level language, albeit this one is probably going to end up being a higher step than in previous instances. I think there will continue to be cases where a very specific and detailed logic will be required and this will still have to be written in detail one way or another by a human, even if it's just very specific English language sentences, but that's still programming.

xp

Are C and Assembler still being taught, or is it just that there's still jobs in those skills because of legacy codebases? I mean, you can still learn C on Pluralsight, I suppose...

I spoke with someone who graduated university a couple years ago and they did an assembly class, but it was more to learn how the processing works at the most basic level rather than anything intended for some kind of practical application (which was already the case 20+ years ago when I was in school).

I don't know if C is still taught by itself, but C++ is still taught and you kind of get the basics of C with it.

I assume that you'd need C if you wanted to get into OS/Unix stuff? I also heard that NASA uses C? And lots of embedded devices?

As for assembly, doesn't that get used in heavy duty graphics programming (i.e. video games)?

Not as much anymore. It's all fairly abstracted down to frameworks and licensed engines. And a lot of the GPU stuff is via both frameworks and drivers.

So there's some low-level programming being done but it's being broadly reused because very few studios will build their own engine from scratch rather than licensing Unreal or Unity.

i don't think many large engineering orgs are writing new userland code in C proper.

os/device level is another matter.

but C++ will never die, partly through legacy systems, but partly because it's what e.g. pytorch and tensorflow are implemented in. and C is a prereq for most C++ dev work.

the closer i've got to ml platform and infra, the more jobs i see that i can't apply to because i don't know c++

modern c++ is actually pretty decent. i picked it up on the side over the past year or so since qt in c++ is the only option for desktop linux applications (lol) that doesn't make me want to walk off a cliff.

i think everyone should give it another look, esp if it's preventing you from applying for cool shit

I've got back into c++ recently, and loving it. sadly not for any career aspect, i don't think I could handle the pressure of applying it to in a job.

So, uh, do I need to start thinking about a third career?

I've been thinking the same lately, or maybe going back to my second career. My job search is lasting much longer than I hoped

But at least I got a story from it. I recently applied for a position where they had me take this homegrown multiple-choice online assessment which was straight up hilarious - couple questions flat out had no correct answer, couple more ambiguous, and several arcane code questions where they ask what the output would be but you can just execute the code in a browser and see the correct response. They scheduled me for an interview and then I saw they have literally the lowest rating on Glassdoor I've seen: 1.6 out of 5. Thought about cancelling but deciding to just do it for the practice. Place looked awful and all work is onsite. Company owner asked me a few things illegal to ask during an interview. Backend is a software I've never heard of that was apparently discontinued in 2007. They were even hesitant to tell me the benefits when I asked - turns out they have no PTO or sick days for one year, no insurance for three months! They did send me an offer that's at the very bottom of the range I was asking but I decided not to bother going further, I feel like there's no guarantee they'd even pay me

smdh JS:

-1 % -1
-0

Fortunately -0 === 0 but still: lol

unary+ converts an array or boolean to a number
double negation converts an array to a boolean

+[] == 0
+!![] == 1

the video silby linked eons ago that's mostly about javascript still pops into my head
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

saw somebody yesterday claiming

"2" + "2" - "2" = 20

which i guess works if + on strings is append but - is subtract

I've started looking again (thankfully a voluntary search this time), but I've been whiffing pretty badly so far. Just 3 phone screens, and nothing beyond that (though I'm not applying every day), and one thing that I've noticed is that I hate the "walk me through a complex project you've worked on" prompt. Maybe this is confirmation bias but I feel like every time I get asked that, the interviewer is at best unimpressed with my answer. What exactly do they want to hear? (Obviously that depends on whether it's an HR person vs. someone on the tech side, but I don't think I've success with either.) If I'm being honest with myself, I don't think I have any impressive projects in my career, but maybe I'm not being generous to myself?

Imo the point of that question is to demonstrate some combination of: you are good at explaining something, you have done actual work, you made technical decisions, you worked effectively in a team, you worked effectively with limited direct supervision, you worked effectively with legacy code. It’s not to dazzle the interviewer with like “I wrote full self driving for Tesla!” Just pick something from the most recent gig that you can explain what you did and what the impact was.

For a phone screen, I don't really know what they'd be looking for. Probably some combo of impact and your importance to the team? I've never been asked that question on a screen

But in a technical interview, I've struggled a bit with that question. The only project I've worked on that truly felt complex was in a 16-developer team but I only worked on a couple parts of it in depth and I struggle to explain the project in full

I should mention I did finally get a senior SWE job late last year which I'm still working in now. So far so good: place is a bit behind in tech stack but the people are good to work with and open to improvements. Very relieved to be out of the search for now

I tend not to ask candidates variants of "toughest challenge" or "hardest bug", but if I were to, here's what I would look for:

- Level of technical depth in at least one area engaging with the problem. As you engaged with it, what things did you bring to the table to help break it down? A decent understanding of databases? A clear understanding of how mobile a11y works? considerations around network protocols, latency, errors? Nuances and tradeoffs in web frameworks? Etc

- Field of view: How aware were you of how your work fit into the bigger picture, either with your teammates, your management chain, or other "crossfunctional stakeholders"/non-programmer types? Did you see flexibility in requirements where none was necessarily obvious, bring insight to others or learn insight from others that helped you resolve the challenge?

- What would you have done differently in retrospect, or what did this challenge teach you about how to engage with other challenges in the future?

Not all of everything needs to be present, and a lot somewhere is better than a little everywhere. But that's what I would look for.

One challenge is that the person evaluating you may know absolutely nothing about the domain you were working in. I am fortunate to have a pretty diverse background, but I see this sometimes when I get folks who have very specific experiences that I do not (working on network switches, or non-consumer systems, etc)