[yusufnb]

At my work I interview a lot of fresh grads and interns. I have been doing that consistently for last 4 years. During the interviews I always ask the candidates to show and tell, share their screen and talk about their projects and work at school and other internships.

Since last few months, I have seen a notable difference in the quality and extent of projects these students have been able to accomplish. Every project and website they show looks polished, most of those could be a full startup MVP pre AI days.

The bar has clearly been raised way high, very fast with AI.

[josiahpeters]

I’ve had the same experience with the recent batch of candidates for a Junior Software Engineer position we just filled. Their projects looked impressive on the surface and seemed very promising.

Once we got them into a technical screening, most fell apart writing code. Our problem was simple: using your preferred programming language, model a shopping cart object that has the ability to add and remove items from the cart and track the cart total.

We were shocked by how incapable most candidates were in writing simple code without their IDEs tab completion capability. We even told them to use whatever resources they normally used.

The whole experience left us a little surprised.

[smoe]

In my opinion, it has always been the “easy” part of development to make a thing work once. The hard thing is to make a thousand things work together over time with constantly changing requirements, budgets, teams, and org structures.

For the former, greenfield projects, LLMs are easily a 10x productivity improvement. For the latter, it gets a lot more nuanced. Still amazingly useful in my opinion, just not the hands off experience that building from scratch can be now.