"They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in."

This is it.

Evolving into a developer role was more or less directly proportional to the effort you put in. Before AI I used to ask applicants to the department I oversaw whether they have a GitHub Account with a project to show, and bonus, which they are immensely proud of, no matter what.

You had to grind and hustle, no shortcuts, and no amount of stackoverflow.com copy and paste could save you.

And that leads me to two problems for the disguise of one: effort. This not only means reading and redoing simple exercises to complex projects, but committing to it instead of doom scrolling or TikTok frenzy.

I reserved weekends for certain technical books and was frustrated, that there was so few time and so much book left.

AI gave instant gratification a new dimension. It is horrible until AI gets as good as a perfect project from a prompt or we need to abandon it.

Poor young guys, the joy of tuning out is over either by design or habit.

And make no mistake. I don't blame them. We are all victims and perpetrators at the same time but on a different level.