jabloczko

Why focus on PHP?

I've been at this game long enough now to recognize that it's more valuable to think of being at a "layer" of the tech stack. In your case with PHP I'm guessing you're part of the web stack. There are plenty of languages for which you'd have plenty of pre-existing web experience that would make it easy to develop in. I'm mostly in the web stack as well and I've used several different languages at different companies and really never cared.

There's a difference between chess.com and USCF ratings.

What I've noted is that GPT is really good at things that have really good documentation.

The example of kube-tf in this repo is a perfect example. The Kubernetes documentation and all of Hashicorp's documentation is excellent. GPT will have infinite examples of good code to stitch together code for the task in this example.

Now I've been running a private cloud at work on the OpenNebula platform, which has documentation that is definitely lacking. I tried to ask GPT to write some basic code in Python such as "Give me a list of VMs from the OpenNebula API in a powered off state that have a start time older than 30 days."

What I noted was that it would spit out code that looked correct on the surface, but would not run. It would take a decent amount of me modifying the code until I got my desired result. Since there was no documentation, I was just reading through the OpenNebula packages themselves to understand what to do.

The nice thing, though, is that it was a great starting point. Much in the same way I might take a code snippet from StackOverflow and modify it to suit my own needs.

I listened to a great podcast titled "The Trouble with AI" on Making Sense with Sam Harris. One of the key takeaways I grabbed from it was that GPT is an LLM not an AI. What it is very good at is predicting the next correct character or word in a sequence based off of other examples. But it does not actually fundamentally understand what it is outputting.

In order to demonstrate, open up a session with ChatGPT really quickly and ask it a single digit multiplication question. Such as "What is 3 multiplied by 4?" and you will see a correct answer.

Next, ask it something a bit larger, like "What is 12366 multiplied by 981632?" and you will get an incorrect answer but one that looks pretty close to correct. Validate with a calculator yourself.

The reason being, as an LLM it doesn't actually understand multiplication. Instead it has just seen 3 multiplied by 4 countless times in the data it ingested when it was being "trained", but never has seen larger number examples of multiplication. Not that it knows multiplication in the first place.

GPT is fantastic, but as of right now it needs to be used as a starting point towards knowledge or something concrete. I wouldn't trust it as an authoritative source on anything quite yet. It is fantastic for generating a bit of code and then allowing the developer to tweak that code until it actually works.

For me, this article doesn't seem to provide much insight at all.

All of these qualities would be expected of any person, who is more experienced than some other people, in any field. An experienced foreman is more independent than a day labourer.

What about something like: "A senior developer is more able to reason about interactions between separate, but related systems." Or: "A senior developer is more able to dig into the lower level bytecode of a Java application to debug a performance issue."

While my examples might not be perfect, at least they make an attempt of being much more concrete.

I'll reply to your comment because it's the most aggressive. Glad to see another grumpy-wumpy internet commenter.

I fully agree that I, by necessity of my lack of experience, have made mistakes and lost efficiency. I have engineered things suboptimally. I have cut corners to get some feature out the door. But I also recognize that the business I work for cares about earning money, not about making nice software. My managers like me because "I get shit done."

> I must ask, though, what is this magical company?

In terms of my company. I work for a company with ~250-300 devs. The total employee count is in the high 400's. It is not a unicorn. The yearly revenue is something like 50 million USD, and we operate at a break-even in terms of profitability.

I work on a team of 4 overworked sysadmins. I would say the team's "product" is managing the production application + all dependencies (way too many dependencies...), an ETL pipeline, and VDI. At least this company has an IT team to deal with stuff like printer/WiFi/laptop issues.

> And I'm very curious how much you're paid.

My salary is 82.5k CAD with ~1.5 years of experience.

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And as a reply to most other people commenting on the parent. Yeah, mentorship is probably the best way to develop a career. I think it really is a luxury, though, and probably very few companies do it right. I wish I could have gotten some guidance, but I didn't. I'll just make do with what I've got. It's worked so far.

I am struggling to phrase this comment in a non-abrasive way. Please read on charitably.

I, similarly to the author, was hired into a position without necessarily having a huge amount of skills. The reason I was hired was due to me showing an aptitude for being able to be dropped into a new situation and find my own way out of it. My hiring experience was baptism by fire. There was no onboarding, just JIRA tickets and some architecture diagrams.

My team races at a million miles per hour, and frankly doesn't have the time to hand-hold a juniour as they learn the ropes. I was put on pagerduty and started putting out production fires within 3 weeks of being hired. With no prior experience.

That is not to say that my team didn't help _at all_. However, I distinctly recall trying to limit my questioning to daily stand-up, and only asking further questions if I was very stuck on some proprietary technology (because Google searches can't help you with in-house tech.) My manager during performance reviews would heap praise on me for being so green and yet so low-maintenance.

Now at this point I'm programming, doing "infrastructure as code" in the cloud, and working on baremetal hardware. Coming from basically nothing. Allow me to brag a little bit. I'm proud of myself.

It is stressful, there are long hours involved, but the experience hardens one for sure.

Maybe I'm just experiencing a sort of Stockholm syndrome. Maybe I was put into a terrible situation and just accepted it as normal, even good. Experience is subjective like that.

I'll post mine because I know there are other juniours reading this who feel like shit when they read how much other people are making. All cash denominated in CAD. I have no degree for what it is worth.

- 2017: Internship, $3k /month

- 2018: Sysadmin, 70k/year

- 2019: Raise, but no promotion, 82.5k/year

I tried to interview in January for some software dev positions, but failed on the coding portion of the interviews. I'm studying hard to learn to program and hopefully by the end of the year I'll be able to interview for some $100k jobs.