[throwaway918274]

Your mentioning of AWS devops reminded me of a story my dad, a mechanical engineer, told me. He travels a lot and works with engineers all over the world. He was talking to me about how the new "wave" of engineers (mainly in Canada and America) that he works with there is a a complete lack of people that know how to do things like manually calibrating various parts by hand.

He's had to completely rethink how they approach their industrial designs and build machines and transition to much more electronic based things with fewer moving parts, and build things they can just adjust with computers and point-and-click GUIs, because people just don't know how these old things work from a physical reality perspective. My dad was very distraught by the caliber of engineers he's seeing in the "next generation".

But that's not the only thing.

In Canada, our aging population of tradespeople are retiring in droves and we have a dearth of younger people to replace them. It's so bad, that in my province they've completely redesigned the Grade 11-12 highschool curriculum to have "fast track" paths into trades where 80% of their time is spent in coop/apprenticeship (good thing!). We have a housing crisis and we have nobody that actually knows how to build houses in our country while the federal government imports 1 million people per year with nowhere for them to live. Most kids these days just want to be "influencers".

Spelling and grammar in young people is absolutely atrocious because they are totally dependent on autocorrect; and they can't type using physical keyboards because they only ever used a touchscreen keyboard on phones and tablets.

It's not just programming being destroyed by copilots. It's an overall dumbing down of our entire civilization.

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

I have the same issue with young software engineers. We used to install every Linux distro because it was fun. Junior are now scared of the command-line.

Another example that I see all the time: I recently had to review a pull request from a junior. 200 lines of very simple C++ doing almost nothing, you can't fail that. I had to write more than 50 suggestions and comments on very basic stuff that the guy should have learned when he started coding. Yes, they must learn the ropes, but it seems like the passion is not there. We used to be passionate about coding, and all I see is people who went to private college to make money but don't enjoy what they do.

[surajrmal]

I was a hobbyist programmer installing all sorts of Linux and BSD distros on my computers since the age of 10. My first real software job still had me go through a period where I had 50+ comments on some of my initial changes because life before work doesn't really prepare you for what you need to know on the job. If they aren't learning from your feedback and constantly making the same mistakes then I understand, but it's somewhat misguided to expect folks to simply know a lot early in their career.

Heck even folks coming in with experience, but from a company with a very different coding culture or simply a different primary language can result in the same situation.

[dartos]

That’s what happens when a niche profession goes mainstream.

The concentration of passionate curious computer tinkerers is much lower.

[throwaway918274]

lol, i'm reinstalling a linux distro right now just because I want to try a new one

I work with seniors that are scared of the command line. I can somewhat understand why Microsoft might be trying to turn everything into AI Copilots because when I'm trying to explain to someone how to revert changes in a file with `git reset/checkout` they practically recoil in terror at the suggestion of using the terminal. They are married to their git guis and have no idea how it works. Best AI-ify as much as possible to keep people in their ecosystems.

[newswasboring]

> Junior are now scared of the command-line.

But are they any less productive? My experience is no. I was a command line aficionado when I entered the workforce, but I saw several people get the same results as me in a purely GUI environment. I see the same today. They get shit done and that is what is required. I feel like older devs romanticize certain parts of their workflow too much.

[CuriouslyC]

They're not necessarily dumber (maybe in the sense that they would be less able to survive on a desert island), but rather the same neural circuitry is being repurposed for other things. If anything the environment is dumber and they're just better at efficiently navigating it than we are.

[throwaway918274]

When I need to explain to other so-called seniors how to revert changes to a file with git checkout and they recoil in terror in using the command line, then yes - I believe they are actually getting dumber.

[rokhayakebe]

Most kids these days just want to be "influencers"

[sph]

No. Most kids strive to follow whoever "mentors" and teaches them.

What is sad is that this job is left to influencers. Not the kid's fault if our education system, parenting and attention economy are completely f'd up.