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Comment by Zarathruster | Hacker News Reader

> Adding to this: it's not just that the apprenticeship ladder is gone—it's that nobody wants to deal with juniors who spit out AI code they don't really understand.

I keep hearing this and find it utterly perplexing.

As a junior, desperate to prove that I could hang in this world, I'd comb over my PRs obsessively. I viewed each one as a showcase of my abilities. If a senior had ever pointed at a line of code and asked "what does this do?" If I'd ever answered "I don't know," I would've been mortified.

I don't want to shake my fist at a cloud, but I have to ask genuinely (not rhetorically): do these kids not have any shame at all? Are they not the slightest bit embarrassed to check in a pile of slop? I just want to understand.

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> If I'd ever answered "I don't know," I would've been mortified.

I'm approaching 30 years of professional work and still feel this way. I've found some people are like this, and others aren't. Those who aren't tend to not progress as far.

  > embarrassed to check in a pile of slop

Part of being a true junior, especially nowadays, is not being able to recognize the differences between a pile of slop from useful and elegant code.

More to the point, I think part of being a senior is being able to dig up code you wrote a few years ago and say “how awful”

I do think that there's a meaningful difference between writing code that was bad (which I definitely did and do) and writing code where I didn't know what each line did.

early on when I was doing iOS development I learned that "m34" was the magic trick to make flipping a view around have a nice perspective effect, and I didn't know what "m34" actually meant but I definitely knew what the effect of the line of code that mutated it was...

Googling on it now seems like a common experience for early iOS developers :)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14261180/need-better-and...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3881446/meaning-of-m34-o...

https://khanlou.com/2012/09/catransform3d-and-perspectives/

It seems so obvious now, but it does make me thankful that my training drilled into my head to constantly ask "what is the problem I am trying to solve?". Communication in a team on what's going on (both in your head and the overall problem space) is just as important as the mechanical process of coding it.

I feel that's the bare minimum a junior should be asking. the "this is useful" or "this is slop" will come with experience, but you need to at least be able to explain what's going on.

the transition to mid and senior goes when you can start to quantify other aspects of the code. Like performance, how widespread a change affects the codebase at large, the input/outputs expected, and the overall correctness based on the language. Balancing those parameters and using it to accurately estimate a project scope is when you're really thinking like a senior.

Senior level. Still can't sometimes. Just the other day I looked over some code I wrote and realized what a pile of slop it was. I kept wondering "What was I thinking when I wrote this? And why couldn't I see how bad it is till now?" My impostor syndrome is triggered hard now.

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