Recently I gave my first ever presentation at iO. It was about what it actually feels like to be a junior developer in a world where AI is just always there. This is a write-up of that talk, including what the room said back.
US CEOs experience imposter syndrome
It’s not imposter syndrome if you’re really an imposter.
A short read, but I really got a lot out of it. One thing I’ve started losing with the rise of AI and didn’t realize until now is the communication with coworkers about current problems we’re working through. I reach out to people in the git-blame log, and others used to reach out to me. But now everyone asks the AI, so we’re even more siloed than before.
It feels less like we’re working together and more like we’re working next to each other.
The workflow was: Google it, find Stack Overflow, maybe actually read the documentation (said as a joke, but not really).
Anyone that says this is not good at their job in the first place. I (and other actually competent devs I’ve talked to about it) have always gone straight to official documentation first. Stack overflow has its place, but it is not the first place to research.
I (and other actually competent devs I’ve talked to about it) have always gone straight to official documentation first.
This is silly posturing. Anyone that is troubleshooting a problem tends to start by googling the error message, and more often than not Google will return SO hits, not official documentation.
Problem is docs are often out of date. Either old, or too new if you have to use an older version. So you can spend hours chasing your tail because what the docs and examples say works, doesn’t.
I do agree to start there, but reading the raw code if available is often times the best, and AI can do that much faster if its source available. And ofc it can be wrong in how it “thinks” it should work but so can humans when skimming quickly.
Problem is docs are often out of date. Either old, or too new if you have to use an older version. So you can spend hours chasing your tail because what the docs and examples say works, doesn’t.
I did say “first”, as in the first place you check and not saying you never have to go elsewhere.
“often” is doing some heavy lifting here. Stack overflow and yes looking at source code are useful tools, but the vast majority of the time, the “stack overflow coders” completely eschewed the official documentation when reading it would have not only provided then the information they needed but also helped then develop an intuition for how a library worked that would have served them much better.
Of course I mostly take issue with the blog presenting the experience of a “stack overflow coder” as a universal experience when it was just the experience of incompetents.
Docs rarely give you information about anything except the happy path. StackOverflow did.
Are we human, or are we Dancer?
The Google-versus-AI point in there is the one I’d hold onto. Searching made you read three wrong answers before the right one, and the wrong ones were where you learned what the problem actually was. Getting the answer straight away skips that without it feeling like anything is missing.
What I’d say to a junior is to keep reviewing the diff properly rather than reading the summary of it. Reading code you didn’t write is worth getting good at either way, and reviewing agent output gives you more practice at it than any job I’ve had before.
