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Comment by rukshn | Hacker News Reader

I know some talented coders who were doing quite well before. Now they fallen into vibe coding and when I come across a bug they just introduced and I can’t seem to find the source they reply they have no idea but will have a look.

The decline in the skills are clearly visible. And they’ve only vibe coded under a year.

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Can say so for myself. Have been hitting LC lately for an upcoming interview and I have found I have gotten worse like considerably worse, after having grinded in college and barely touching it for 6 years. I had to look up how to implement topological sorting today for example and even then flubbed it.

Because it's somthing you never need to implement in any real-world job, unless that job is developing a library routine to do topological sorting.

I dont agree. The reason you are forced to learn DSA in college and is tested in LC is because these data structures and algorithms are everywhere.

You may claim that nobody ever will need to know about topo sort, but keep using AirFlow for your pipelines or storing and display a Sitemap tree on your website.

if you dont know the basics, you will inevitably reinvent in using substandard, inefficient data structures and buggy algorithms.

I have not thought about writing a sort or any kind of complex data structure beyond a dict or an array/list since my undergrad CS days which was almost 40 years ago. It just doesn't come up. If it does in your job, sure you need to know it. For most jobs it doesn't.

Agree. Topological sorting isn't a part of my job. A hash map might be the most complicated data structure I've used on the job. (Relatively speaking)

Me and another tech lead recently got into an argument with one of our "senior" devs about how to best implement logging in a new service. They started sending screenshots of text to bolster their points. When asked where that was coming from they admitted they were just asking chatgpt. It was infuriating.

I had once an incompetent manager provide a feedback on my code using ChatGPT.

This is the BIGGEST red flag of a person "faking till they make it"

I guess we could write a whole thread on incompetent managers, I used to work with a manager who's only talent is rephrasing something someone else said in a more serious way, or just telling something in a whole list of buzzwords that make him look he's talking something serious. In-fact when it can be summarized in few simple few words. Apart from that he had zero technical knowledge, and I still wonder how he came to that position

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