Reposting a question for Ed Zitron, I'll forward responses. He asked on Bluesky and will get sub-Mastodon-tier answers:

"This is a serious question and I would be delighted if I only hear great things but, software engineers: both before and after LLMs, how often in your professional lives have you run into software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge? I hope the answer is rarely"

@ludicity 80% (and I’m likely being generous) are absolutely useless, lacking in necessary skills and basic knowledge.

@haruki_zaemon Oh shit, I didn't know you were on Mastodon!

@ludicity online? incredible common, IRL? rarely have i met someone who doesn’t have a decent grasp of the tech they’re using

@nqd Online, I think I get exposed to way more random people. IRL, I was in a bubble of mostly incompetent people (it was huge) and now I'm in a bubble of mostly competent people (it's very small).

@ludicity I worked mostly at (pen)testing and have always been astonished how basics of basics were unclear for many people (e.g. "does this code run on the client or the server?"). My opinion in summary is that the general quality of sw engineering/ers declined since managers figured out they can bill by the hour instead of fulfillment under the guise of "agile" (see "I'm gonna write myself a new minivan this afternoon").

@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.

@ludicity
pre LLM: rarely in open source, often in corporate.

Now: likely in open source, mainly as security reporters who play copy&paste monkey with our project and their LLM. Cant say anything about corporate as I no longer experience that (thank the heavens).

@ludicity asking this question speaks inexperience loudly. Incompetence is widespread in all areas of life. Even before LLMs. Especially in enterprise.

@bagder I think it's the old Gel-Mann thing, where he has assumed that people in areas that aren't his own are probably real adults, because how else would the world keep working

My sweet summer Ed

@ludicity makes perfect sense. You could of course easily be mislead into believing this based on the fact that most of the world keeps working

@icing @ludicity Yes, also this! ^^^

My open-source peers are usually technically very sounds. There were some exceptions in the past, but I could count these on one hand.

Perhaps, if you do something out of the pure joy, it is hard to stay incompetent?

@ondrej @icing @ludicity lots of peeps these days do OSS as part of their job, not for fun. They found a bug or fixed something on behalf of their employer. Enterprise style. This allows the same set of incompetence, but perhaps at a lower frequency.

@buherator @ludicity I have run into security engineers a couple of times matching that description.

@bagder @ondrej @ludicity Contributing to open source means lots of people may see your code. I‘d assume that many take extra care because of this.

The worst engineer I‘ve met kept „their“ code always close to their chest. In „their“ branch/repository, etc. 💁🏻‍♂️

@ludicity i'm a bit worried about confirmation bias here, though of course incompetence has existed and will continue to exist. the difference between a competent and incompetent engineer isn't decided by the tools that they have access to but the time they choose / are afforded to develop competency and how well they have learned-to-learn.

that said, while there isn't a quantitative difference in incompetence engineers, there is a qualitative difference in incompetent engineering. expensive AI licenses move wealth from labour to capital and give management hacks a license to demand specific things from engineers at a specific rate. some of the heaviest AI users ive seen are the junior enggs and interns, and while they werent able to answer questions about what they wrote pre-LLMs either, now it's buried in an amount of noise and unaccountability that makes it hard to catch these pitfalls during code reviews.

LLMs dont make people incompetent the moment you touch them. they change the amount of code, plausibly functional code mind you, that you can create in a given amount of time. this reduces the amount of time seniors can spend in design, reviewing, and talent building, and hinders the processes that (sometimes) build competence out of incompetence. i'm not a full-time-hater of LLMs, but i do worry about the real damage they do to enterprise engineering processes moreso than the engineers themselves.

@sassdawe @ludicity 100%, I definitely not meant to piss on sw engineers in particular, median skill isn't great industry-wide.

@icing @bagder @ondrej @ludicity that ^^

i get to look at closed, "proprietary" code regularly and i am yet to see it match even the basic quality level of the average open source project.

plus, in many cases, it's more "plagiary" than proprietary.

so exactly what LLMs are good at.