>Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant
You are probably not an engineer, since you should understand GPT makes programming harder, not easier. You won't necessarily make something easier by making it more high-level. Following your logic, you could conclude introduction of C made Assembler engineers redundant or that introducing Python left C engineers without a job. This is not true, using GPT to code is leveraging a natural highest-level language for the job, which is certainly leading to trouble, because it's not the best tool for the job – people specifically invented new languages so it's easier to express the business algorithm, all the attempts to make coding look easier by making it more as natural language failed, and the thought of GPT would suddenly change something? It is naive and ignorant, doing code is a pure thought process and fingers have long learned to tap it out by heart with the usual syntax without falling for the trap of ambiguities and inconsistencies in natural language. You just can't build reliable things with the prose, you do it with stricter rules of expression in mind
I stepped into a project at work to help out knowing almost no typescript and wrote angular http routines that just worked in a few hours with chatGPT. first we started with any and then we built out an interface and it helped me use the map function in http to build out a result array without any intermediate array creation.
I 100% would not have written the code as well as it came out with gpt's help.
Of course, GPT remains the best (after real human teacher) learning/discovery tool available nowadays, so it summarised (luckily for you, not hallucinated this time) some information together to get your job done. However, one could use his tooling documentation manuals to get the same job done in the same amount of time without prior knowledge? A senior engineer would just do it as fast as his fingers can type without the need to learn it prior. Oh, also he will be able to maintain it!
That’s exactly my point. The current scenario where someone can just go into a 3 months javascript bootcamp won’t be enough.
In my team, there is a grad dev doing bare minimum work. He has no initiative and struggles to understand basic requirements. I need to break down the task so much that I’m almost doing the work. In a few years, with better tooling/copilot/gpt, I will be able to just “finish” the job myself, and this kind of dev is made redundant.
Maybe this kind of dev is not common in FANG, but I met several, from small to big companies, in my over 10 years software engineer career.
>That’s exactly my point. The current scenario where someone can just go into a 3 months javascript bootcamp won’t be enough.
Realistically 3 months of any bootcamp was never enough.
>In my team, there is a grad dev doing bare minimum work. He has no initiative and struggles to understand basic requirements.
This kind of person has been around all over my 25+ year career, starting in the dot boom. "You should get into programming because of the money!" This is the result. With programming, you have to have an almost unhealthy obsession with it to be successful. These people get weeded out during the crashes, in which we are in the midst of.
Your case sounds like this - we have an engineer assigned to our team, we don't like his performance, and we can't do anything about it. Kind of a dead end which is bad for business. I prefer strong teams which were assembled by team leaders and members, not by business. I think the biggest problem in tech hiring is who makes the hire, it's pure luck if you don't have a ton of comprehension in the field and just assign someone as a business owner. The second biggest problem is that the wrong people don't get churned in the first few weeks So hire ONE senior engineer who will get stuff done in a way you like, – let him do the rest of the team hires, give him the responsibility to fire those who don't fit in the first few weeks. Voila, you have a self-sustained, well-communicating, and motivated team of people who get stuff done in a way you like.
You are probably not an engineer, since you should understand GPT makes programming harder, not easier. You won't necessarily make something easier by making it more high-level. Following your logic, you could conclude introduction of C made Assembler engineers redundant or that introducing Python left C engineers without a job. This is not true, using GPT to code is leveraging a natural highest-level language for the job, which is certainly leading to trouble, because it's not the best tool for the job – people specifically invented new languages so it's easier to express the business algorithm, all the attempts to make coding look easier by making it more as natural language failed, and the thought of GPT would suddenly change something? It is naive and ignorant, doing code is a pure thought process and fingers have long learned to tap it out by heart with the usual syntax without falling for the trap of ambiguities and inconsistencies in natural language. You just can't build reliable things with the prose, you do it with stricter rules of expression in mind