This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
To be fair, most never could. I've been hiring junior devs for decades now, and all the ones straight out of university barely had any coding skills .
Its why I stopped looking at where they studied, I always first check their hobbies. if one of the hobbies is something nerdy and useless, tinkering with a raspberry or something, that indicates to me it's someone who loves coding and probably is already reasonably good at it
Nevermind how cybersecurity is a niche field that can vary by use case and environment.
At some level, you'll need to learn the security system of your company (or the lack there of) and the tools used by your department.
There is no class you can take that's going to give you more than broad theory.
I am not a professional coder, just a hobbyist, but I am increasingly digging into Cybersecurity concepts.
And even as an "amature Cybersecurity" person, everything about what you describe, and LLM coders, terrifies me, because that shit is never going to have any proper security methodology implemented.
On the bright side, you might be able to cash in on some bug bounties.
Im in uni learning to code right now but since I'm a boomer i only spin up oligarch bots every once in a while to check for an issue that I would have to ask the teacher. It's far more important for me to understand fundies than it is to get a working program. But that is only because ive gotten good at many other skills and realize that fundies are fundamental for a reason.
This isn't a new thing. Dilution of "programmer" and "computer" education has been going on for a long time. Everyone with an IT certificate is an engineer th se days.
For millennials, a "dev" was pretty much anyone with reasonable intelligence who wanted to write code - it is actually very easy to learn the basics and fake your way into it with no formal education. Now we are even moving on from that to where a "dev" is anyone who can use an AI. "Prompt Engineering."
"Prompt Engineer" makes a little vomit appear in the back of my mouth.
I could have been a junior dev that could code. I learned to do it before ChatGPT. I just never got the job.
No wonder open source software becomes more efficient than proprietary one.
This post is literally an ad for AI tools.
No, thanks. Call me when they actually get good. As it stands, they only offer marginally better autocomplete.
I should probably start collecting dumb AI suggestions and gaslighting answers to show the next time I encounter this topic...
It's actually complaining about AI, tho.
There are at least four links leading to AI tools in this page. Why would you link something when you complain about it?
to play the devil's advocate: this can be done to exemplify what you complain about as opposed to complaining about an abstract concept
Oh lol I thought it was a text post, I didn't even click the link and just read the post description.
The "about" page indicates that the author is a freelance frontend UI/UX dev, that's recently switched to "helping developers get better with AI" (paraphrased). Nothing about credentials/education related to AI development, only some hobby projects using preexisting AI solutions from what I saw. The post itself doesn't have any sources/links to research about junior devs either, it's all anecdotes and personal opinion. Sure looks like an AI grifter trying to grab attention by ranting about AI, with some pretty lukewarm criticism.
that s the point of being junior. Then problems show up and they are forcing them to learn to solve them
All I hear is "I'm bad at mentoring"
There is only so much mentoring can do though. You can have the best math prof. You still need to put in the exercise to solve your differential equations to get good at it.
You get out of education what you put into it. You won't be an artist from the best art school if you do the bare minimum to pass. You can end up as a legend of the industry coming from a noname school.
And some sort of "no one wants to work any more".
I know young brilliant people, maybe they have to be paid correctly?
The problem is not only the coding but the thinking. The AI revolution will give birth to a lot more people without critical thinking and problem solving capabilities.
apart from that, learning programming went from something one does out of calling, to something one does to get a job. The percentage of programmers that actually like coding is going down, so on average they're going to be worse
This is true for all of IT. I love IT - I've been into computer for 30+ years. I run a small homelab, it'll always be a hobby and a career. But yeah, for more and more people it's just a job.
That's the point.
Along with censorship.
I could barely code when I landed my job and now I’m a senior dev. It’s saying a plumber’s apprentice can’t plumb - you learn on the job.
You're not learning anything if Copilot is doing it for you. That's the point.
That’s true, it can only get you so far. I’m sure we all started by Frankenstein-ing stack overflow answers together until we had to actually learn the “why”
100% agree.
I dont think there is no place for AI as an aid to help you find the solution, but i dont think it's going to help you learn if you just ask it for the answers.
For example, yesterday, i was trying to find out why a policy map on a cisco switch wasn't re-activating after my radius server came back up. Instead of throwing my map at the AI and asking whats wrong l, i asked it details about how a policy map is activated, and about what mechanism the switch uses to determine the status of the radius server and how a policy map can leverage that to kick into gear again.
Ultimately, AI didn't have the answer, but it put me on the right track, and i believe i solved the issue. It seems that the switch didnt count me adding the radius server to the running config as a server coming back alive but if i put in a fake server and instead altered the IP to a real server then the switch saw this as the server coming back alive and authentication started again.
In fact, some of the info it gave me along the way was wrong. Like when it tried to give me cli commands that i already knew wouldn't work because i was using the newer C3PL AAA commands, but it was mixing them up with the legacy commands and combining them together. Even after i told it that was a made-up command and why it wouldn't work, it still tried to give me the command again later.
So, i dont think it's a good tool for producing actual work, but it can be a good tool to help us learn things if it is used that way. To ask "why" and "how" instead of "what."
Of course they don't. Hiring junior devs for their hard skills is a dumb proposition. Hire for their soft skills, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to work hard and learn. There is no substitute for good training and experience.
