I’ve been very puzzled lately by how quickly it seems that some of my social circles, as they are getting to be 40-50 years, seem to have closed their minds to new concepts in general and the youth in particular.
Concretely of course within the context of #llms, where I get so many takes that llms will replace junior engineers but not them, that kids will become lazy and not learn to distinguish truth from hallucination, etc…
These are people that came of age as the internet and cheap capable personal computers were becoming a thing, and I’m sure they, as I, heard the exact same kind of arguments back then, from the programmers of yore.
I’m so dumbfounded that I keep trying to find explanations, here are the ones I think have maybe the most probability to have some truth to them.
“neurobiological” factors (i don’t know shit about neuroanything 🤣)
You just don’t pick up stuff the way you used to, but also, you don’t hang around enough with young people in their natural habitat to remember how quick they are once interested. Of course every parent knows how fantastic little creatures are at picking up stuff, but it’s different than hanging in a programming discord with a bunch of teens who have seemingly nothing else to do.
Because you forgot what it feels like to pick up stuff as fast as they can, and instead measure rates of progress and discovery by your current standards and inclinations, your worlds boundary is very small, yet because you did so much exploring in the past, you think it is wider than the youngins’.
Which, true, young people don’t know very much, but they also have the internet and llms of today. Once they have a path to go down they can accelerate at full throttle. And they have time…
at some point, a lot of people “stop” learning. By that I mean they stop venturing out into the unknown, I afraid of the failures that inevitably lie ahead of them. This is even more conjecture and impossible to back up than the first, but I think for most people, the last few “out into the unknown full commitment” experiences are finding their profession, building a stable relationship, getting kids.
These are, besides the profession one, of course very different than intellectually throwing yourself off a cliff. For most programmers I know, learning a new programming language is a major self-learning step and horizons widening moment, but it is very different from the horizon widening that comes with thinking yourself a photographer/historian/statistician/sailor. By thinking yourself I really mean committing to the idea that that is your vocation.
So, the major intellectual commitment to their identity people make seems to be their choice of profession, so in my circle, being a programmer. I’m pretty sure that first choice sticks really heavily in peoples view of themselves, but I’m also pretty sure that even if you know something inside out, committed to it fully, after 10 years of not doing it or barely doing it, you just are not that thing anymore. But you still think you are.
For example, from age 20 to 30 I thought of myself as a common #lisp programmer. I wrote Common Lisp almost every day. I haven’t in the last 12 years written a single line of “real” Common Lisp. The kids on discord use me to wipe the floor. Who’s the “proper” Common Lisp programmer in that context?
So a lot of programmers at age 40-50 usually have become managers or leads or staff engineer or whatever and spend most of their time mentoring/leading.
That’s not programming, that’s programming strategy, and of course is immensely more valuable than the raw programming itself. But it won’t expand the strategical horizons coming from being deeply embedded in a concrete programming practice. You will not have the almost bodily experience of knowing the latest tools and libraries and ideas in the scene and what it feels like using them.
you still think you are a programmer, you know the landmarks, you know how to get from a to b, heck you are really good at getting from a to b with the minimal amount of programming.
But you think a and b is all there is and there can’t really be something other people can discover that you wouldn’t, since you are a much more experienced programmer.
But you are not a programmer, and you will be unaware that for all the a and b you discovered in your youth (unit testing, Haskell, XHR + json, Linux, arduino, all that stuff that people would scoff at in my days) there are a million more c and d out there because the world is just infinitely bigger now than it was 20 years ago.
And only someone doing something with full identitarian (?) commitment for 40, 50, 80 h a week will see those possibilities.
You can chalk it up to autism or monotropism or whatever, but I still spend pretty much every waking moment frantically hunting for c and d and committing myself foolishly to being a complete noob over and over (fun, but also a bit stressful), and it feels so dismaying coming back and saying “check out this c thing out there, dope” and hearing “that does not exist”.
Or hearing that the young people I hang with who are so much better at finding stuff out there are “replaceable”.
@mnl While I've never worked as a pure full programmer, I'm definitely in the 2) camp. With children, full time job, associated domestic tasks etc. the time I have to spend on anything else (learning new tech, playing guitar, running) is basically zero. And if I do scrape an hour or something together in an evening, I'm also so tired that the ability to concentrate on something is none existent.
@hl oh yeah tons of people like that and definitely not something I‘m criticizing, but I think it’s one of the reasons why people are like “the kids are lazy and don’t learn anything”
@mnl None taken, and I don't regard the kids as lazy, but perhaps I'm more sceptical of some technologies because I haven't personally had a chance to get my hands dirty with them, and so form my own opinion, and intuition, based on experience, and so I have no real feel for the assciated risks. Like with code generating LLMs, I /think/ when used sensibly they can be a speed improvement, especially on boilerplate - but I personally haven't used it enough to understand where the limit is.
@hl@mnl I have seen people write about how "the kids" aren't bothering to learn code and just "wasting" their time on tiktok and my feeling is - they're playing with and learning different skills, and that's OK. They're expert at audio and video editing, and developing presentation skills and all messing with all sorts of stuff we couldn't do on our home PCs in the 90s.
Let them mess with the new stuff and see what they come up with - some of it will be really good!
@mnl I'm almost 40 but I feel like I haven't gotten started yet. Just got married, no kids, feel no identification whatsoever with my job. I'm also generally very skeptical when people talk shit about "the kids". If it wasn't for the bajillion confounds, I might be a perfect natural experiment to disentangle your biological and cultural explanations. 🤷🏻♂️
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