this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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I wish we could say the students will figure it out, but I've had interns ask for help and then I've watched them try to solve problems by repeatedly asking ChatGPT. It's the scariest thing - "Ok, let's try to think about this problem for a moment before we - ok, you're asking ChatGPT to think for a moment. FFS."
Critical thinking is not being taught anymore.
Has critical thinking ever been taught? Feel like it’s just something you have or you don’t.
Critical thinking is essentially learning to ask good questions and also caring enough to follow the threads you find.
For example, if mental health is to blame for school shootings then what is causing the mental health crisis and are we ensuring that everyone has affordable access to mental healthcare? Okay, we have a list of factors that adversely impact mental health, what can we do to address each one? Etc.
Critical thinking isn't hard, it just takes time, effort.
I have the impression that most people (or maybe it's my faith in Humanity that's at an all time low and it's really just "some people") just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.
Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with it's ever popular simple explanations of "Deity did it" and "it's the will of Deity")
In my mind, it's really just entitlement. Something along the lines of, "well, I don't know the answer and why should I have to know if someone else is going to figure it out."
In a tired way, I understand it. Everyday I just want some of my time back for myself. If I'm always the one who has to work through all the problems for my ideas just to be ignored then I'm just going to be perpetually frustrated. So if my ideas are half baked and the solutions i barf up aren't to your liking, well, figure it out yourself.
Not to say that I am this way. I don't get frustrated when my ideas are ignored. I do get frustrated, though, when others eat up half baked ideas knowing they are just that.
Sorry, if what I've wrote so far has gotten a bit confusing. I'll wrap it up and say, it's entitlement. People don't want to think for themselves because it's time consuming. They think the world should order itself in a way that fulfills their needs with minimal effort on their part. Except, to understand how the world would be ordered for that to be reality, they can't comprehend because no one has really figured that one out. So they fall back on god and gods an easy out because, duh, he's god.
Critical thinking, especially Skepticism, does not make for good Consumers or mindless followers of Political Tribes.
British primary schools used to have something called 'problem solving' it was usually a simple maths problem described in words that required some degree of critical thinking to solve. e.g. A frog is at the bottom of a 30m well, it climbs 7m each day but in the night it slides 3m back down in its sleep. You can't just calculate 30/(7-3) because it doesn't account for the day the frog gets over the top and thus doesn't slide back down in its sleep.
Not the most complex problem but pretty good for kids under 10 to start getting the basics.
Nah, it's something you're lucky enough to learn coincidentally or you don't. And if you found out too late in life, you might be too stubborn to learn it at that point.
I had a chat w/ my sibling about the future of various careers, and my argument was basically that I wouldn't recommend CS to new students. There was a huge need for SW engineers a few years ago, so everyone and their dog seems to be jumping on the bandwagon, and the quality of the applicants I've had has been absolutely terrible. It used to be that you could land a decent SW job without having much skill (basically a pulse and a basic understanding of scripting), but I think that time has passed.
I absolutely think SW engineering is going to be a great career long-term, I just can't encourage everyone to do it because the expectations for ability are going to go up as AI gets better. If you're passionate about it, you're going to ignore whatever I say anyway, and you'll succeed. But if my recommendation changes your mind, then you probably aren't passionate enough about it to succeed in a world where AI can write somewhat passable code and will keep getting (slowly) better.
I'm not worried at all about my job or anyone on my team, I'm worried for the next batch of CS grads who chatGPT'd their way through their degree. "Cs get degrees" isn't going to land you a job anymore, passion about the subject matter will.
Outsourcing killed a lot of the junior and even mid-level career level opportunities in CS and AI seems on track to do the same.
The downside is that going into CS now (and having gone into CS in the last decade or so, especially in English-speaking countries) was basically the career equivalent of just out of the starting line running full speed into a brick wall.
The upside is that for anybody who now is a senior techie things have never been this good because there are significantly fewer people at that level than there is need for such people, since in the last decade or so a lot of people haven't had the chance to progress in their careers to that point.
Whilst personally this benefits me, I'm totally against this shit and what it has done to the kids entering my career.
Yup, and that's why I'll discourage people from entering my career, not because it's a bad gig and it's going away, but because the bar for competency is about to go up. Do it if you're passionate and you'll probably do well for yourself, but don't do it if you're just looking for a good job. If you just want a good job, go into nursing, accounting, or the trades.
I think it's even worse than just the bar for competency going up: even for a coding wizard going into the career, it's a lot harder to squeeze through the bottleneck which is getting an entry level position nowadays unless they have some public proof out on the Net of how good they're at coding (say, commits in open source projects, your own public projects, or even Youtube videos about it).
This is something that will negativelly impact perfectly capable young developers who have an introvert personality type (which are most of them in my experience, even in domains such as Hacking) since some of the upsides of Introversion are a greater capacity for really focusing on on things and for detailed analysis - both things that make for the best programmers - and self publicising isn't a part of the required skillset for good developers (though sooner or later the best ones will have to learn some "image management" if they end up in the Corporate world)
I'm a bit torn on this since on one side salesmanship being more of a criteria determining one's chances of getting a break at the start of one's career as a developer is bad news (good coding and good salesmanship tend to be inverselly correlated) but on the other side a junior developer with some experience actually working with other people on real projects with real users (because they contributed to existing open source projects) has already started learning what we have to teach fresh-out-of-Uni developers to make them professionals.
Eh, I think that's overblown. As someone involved in hiring, we go through a ton of crappy candidates before finding someone half-decent, and when we see someone who actually knows what they're doing, we rush them through the process. The problem is that we're not a big tech company, we're in manufacturing, but we do interesting things w/ software. So getting on at one of the big tech companies may be challenging, but if you broaden the scope a little, there are tons of jobs waiting. We've had junior positions open for months because the hiring pool is so trash, but when we see a good candidate, we can get an offer to them by the end of the week.
We don't care too much about broader visibility (though I will look at your code if you provide a link), we expect competency on our relatively simple coding challenges, as well as a host of technical questions. We also don't mind hiring immigrants, we've sponsored a number of immigrants on our team.
As an introvert myself, I totally get it. I got my job because a recruiter reached out to me, not because I was particularly good at following up with applications. And that's why I tend to tell people to not get into CS. I encourage them to take CS classes if they're offered, but not to make it a career choice, and this is for two reasons:
I see. That does change the idea I had about things a bit.
It's been a while since I was last hiring.
I wasn't aware that the problem nowadays in the West (or at least the US) was an excess of people who don't really have a natural skill for it choosing software development as a career.
That kind of thing was one of the main problems with outsourcing to India maybe a decade ago: the profession was comparatively very well paid for the country so it attracted far too many people without the right skills resulting in a really low average quality of the programmers there - India had really good programmers just like everywhere else but then had a ton of people also working as programmers who should never had gone into it, so the experience of those having to deal with outsourced programming in India usually was pretty bad (I remotelly was a technical lead for a small outsourced team in India from London, and they were really bad whilst, curiously, the good programmers from the Indian Subcontinent I worked with had emigrated from there and were working in London and New York).
Yeah, there was a huge spike in demand for software engineers in the mid-2010s or so, and a massive explosion during COVID, so a lot of less qualified people were handed jobs as long as they could write very basic Python/JavaScript. But after the drop in tech demand after COVID, companies realized they overhired, so they did a ton of layoffs, mostly shucking those low-skilled employees (at least in the first round or two).
Maybe it's different in my area, but we have a ton of applicants whose only dev experience is a bootcamp program, and they apply for a full-time position when many aren't even qualified for a part-time intern position. They would utterly fail to answer most of our questions, and not make any progress on our (relatively simple) programming challenges. We have a mix of theory (i.e. OO principles, ACID, etc) and practical questions (e.g. concurrency vs parallelism in JavaScript or Python, duck typing, etc). CS grads with little practical experience would fly through the theory, but fail on the practical questions. Bootcamp "grads" would fail miserably at theory, and maybe get half of the practical questions, but then fail on the challenge. Dedicated hobbyists and passionate CS/bootcamp grads would do okay at theory (esp. if we change terminology) and fly through the practical questions and coding challenge.
It's pretty easy to weed a lot of those out in our first round, but the sheer volume of terrible applicants makes hiring super time-consuming. I mostly do second round interviews now (my boss, the director, has the thankless first round job), but I've done my fair share of first round interviews as well. I was involved in interviews almost 10 years ago, and I remember there being a lot fewer bad applicants then (i.e. of 5 applicants, 2 were hirable; now it's like 1 in 10, on a good week).
To be fair, I don't work for a tech company, so we're not really anyone's first pick. My company manufacturers things, and our software wing is pretty new and IMO really interesting (we do a lot of complex modeling), but it's not a place most would think to apply for, which is probably why we attract more desperate people. Then again, my last company was similar and much less visible (had something like 30-40 employees, current company has hundreds locally and thousands globally), yet we got better applicants. The main difference here is time, the CS programs at local universities have a ton more enrollment (some are actually turning away people now), whereas when I went it wasn't very popular, and I don't recall bootcamps really being a thing.
As for India, they have a lot of great talent and their IT/programming programs are super competitive (i.e. something like 5% of applicants get in, and only 40-60% of grads get jobs). However, the common thread I've seen is that Indian developers are very reliant on requirements, and they'll build pretty much exactly what you specify (i.e. if something seems off, they won't raise concerns). A lot of this is cultural, and I've heard horror stories from my Indian coworkers about managers telling them to do ridiculous things because of what a client said instead of pushing back. For example, my coworker spent well over a week re-implementing a standard Android behavior because the client specified something slightly outside what was possible through standard APIs, but probably would've preferred the 5 min solution. An American dev would just ask the customer and probably end up doing the 5-minute solution. Maybe these are isolated incidents, but I've seen similar behavior in different projects. If you know this upfront, you can get a good result with regular checkins and small adjustments as you go, but a lot of people don't understand that.
As it stands, since we can't hire good devs here in the US, we've been forced to hire outside firms to fill our ranks. We now have a team in Europe and another in India because we can't find the proper talent here, and not for lack of trying. And I don't think our expectations are out of whack, I just think the good devs already have good jobs and the less qualified devs are the ones getting laid off. We have hired a few good devs in the last few years (not rockstars, just solid devs), so it's not like everyone who lost their jobs aren't qualified, there just seems to be a lot of unqualified people.
Thanks for that very complete view of things.
Things are quite different since I last was doing hiring, which was pre-COVID.
Yeah, my experience leading a remoted team in India also showed the importance of cultural awareness and good requirements: I ultimately got into the habit of, after the big meeting with the boss were all the work was given to the various teams, get my guys individually on the phone (so that they feared not "losing face") and carefully coach out of them any questions or doubts since otherwise they wouldn't voice them and just end up implementing something they misunderstood or which wasn't explained correctly and indeed they also needed very detailed requirements which was a problem because the senior guys on the other side who ended up having to write said requirements could pretty much have done the job themselves in that time.
This was a big Investment Bank and some top level manager in NY decided to create a division in India to outsource work to, but it definitely didn't get the cream of the crop over there and the career structuring there was so shit that the few good techies we got would quickly end up as (bad) managers - their pay scales followed the stupid idea that "nobody can be paid more than management" so good mid level techies had to become junior managers to earn more, and they invariably were crap as managers.
Your experience echoes my own with our team. That said, I think we got a pretty good set of devs on our team, and I think a big part of that is my boss being Indian and worked at the org we hired, so he understands the culture there and how to get a better deal. The net result is that the teams we hired are pretty reasonable and work alongside mine (we actually hired two teams and had them "compete," and we kept the better one).
And that's not even getting into how flooded the sector is with the hundreds of thousands being laid off for the past few years
And that's what I'm blaming the low quality of applicants on recently. We looked for almost two years for a FE lead, and then they ended up being super toxic a few months in (they blew up in a meeting w/ some remote teams that came to town to visit). Even decent junior devs are hard to find it seems.
So it seems a lot of these layoffs are cutting out the less skilled devs, but given that we've been able to hire a few great people in the last year, there is some good talent getting caught in the cross-fire as well.
Altering the prompt will certainly give a different output, though. Ok, maybe "think about this problem for a moment" is a weird prompt; I see how it actually doesn't make much sense.
However, including something along the lines of "think through the problem step-by-step" in the prompt really makes a difference, in my experience. The LLM will then, to a higher degree, include sections of "reasoning", thereby arriving at an output that's more correct or of higher quality.
This, to me, seems like a simple precursor to the way a model like the new o1 from OpenAI (partly) works; It "thinks" about the prompt behind the scenes, presenting only the resulting output and a hidden (by default) generated summary of the secret raw "thinking" to the user.
Of course, it's unnecessary - maybe even stupid - to include nonsense or smalltalk in LLM prompts (unless it has proven to actually enhance the output you want), but since (some) LLMs happen to be lazy by design, telling them what to do (like reasoning) can definitely make a great difference.
And that's why I'm the one that fixes the PC when it breaks... because even good programmers may even consider the pc to be magicboxes if they've never turned a screwdriver in their life...