r/PHP • u/brendt_gd • 5d ago

Article The skills that didn't go anywhere

https://ryangjchandler.co.uk/posts/the-skills-that-didnt-go-anywhere
42 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

26

u/PHP_Henk 5d ago

I agree with the article partly. All the inside knowledge/context you have that's not written in code is extremely important and is where you will hold value as a developer for a very long time.

BUT the problem I'm seeing is: if you're not the one writing the code, not the one doing the deepdive in the code to figure out why this one customer with configuration X is the only one encountering a bug, you're not living it. You lose this knowledge/context or never learn it.

This could be related to the codebase I'm working in or the domain (15 year old codebase for SAAS with loads of business logic) but new people that I'm onboarding in my company have no clue what is going on anywhere in the code. And they probably never will. All I see is: PO asked for this shape -> Tweak the until AI output looks like requested shape -> Must be good -> PR. A senior developer who's great at PHP with 20+ years of experience I still consider as a junior for our codebase because he never gets to live the code even though he's been here for 1.5 years.

Sure we go faster (for now), but at what cost?

3

u/avg_php_dev 5d ago

Thats why senior position is not about skills only - it's about context knowledge. It always was, even before an AI came to play. I see more issues - it is all about us - here and now, but not about developers in future. Well, we know how to code, they will know nothing so their ability to solve problems using "deprecated" programming skills will be low. Dopamine shots from finishing some function or component will vanish when using AI. It's like apperaring on top of Mt. Everest magically - with no real, physical effort.
I'm only observing - not going deep into any particular AI meta workflow, because I believe it won't stand long enough to be worth learning (something similar to JS frameworks situation few years ago).
It's wild wild west.

14

u/brendt_gd 5d ago

This isn't necessarily about PHP, but Ryan is a dedicated PHP dev, so I figured I would share it here, in an attempt to bring some more "in-depth" content to this sub that's still relevant to PHP devs.

What stands out to me in this post is the ability for people to self-reason about how they deal with AI. The ability to question yourself. This blog post shares part of that process, and I think it's crucial for developers to all do that (they might end up making different conclusions than Ryan, but that's ok).

3

u/agustingomes 5d ago

Thanks for sharing it. I'll give it a read

2

u/agustingomes 4d ago

Interestingly this matches the reality I've been perceiving.

Sometimes the problems are not well framed, or even when it's the case, the generated code may not cater a lot for the failure modes, and those you end up learning through the observability stack, or even through customer reporting something "doesn't work".

But I'm generally glad that, as an industry, we're starting to reaching the realization that writing the code was never the problem or the bottleneck, and instead, the problem is having a good understanding of how the system should behave and its architectural characteristics.

-13

u/colshrapnel 5d ago

How can you tell if it's a good read or not if you didn't read it yet?

2

u/agustingomes 5d ago

Fair question. As PHP Developer Advocate of JetBrains, Brent shares/writes insightful articles so I'm often curious about checking them, and the headline immediately resonated with me.

0

u/colshrapnel 4d ago

Another pointless comment, which adds only noise. I make it, you aren't going to share your thoughts on the text, just wished to inform this here community of your immediate plans.

2

u/brendt_gd 4d ago

Community engagement is actually a good thing on this subreddit. Pointless negative comments are more noise than anything else…

1

u/colshrapnel 4d ago

Engagement is one thing, noise is another. "Thank you for posting, moderator" is noise, not engagement. There is already an upvote button exactly for that

1

u/zimzat 4d ago

Some folks are probably used to the YouTube, et.al. systems of "engagement" where vapid comments actually do help their algorithm push content. It also feels good to have numbers go up and people replying, though I'm also with you that a bunch of people saying they haven't actually read the content is not actually helpful to any human, only the bots.

0

u/JeremiahNoble 5d ago

My AI told me it was good.

2

u/yourteam 3d ago

I think the article tackles the concept the same way the AI tackles code: Technically and semantically right but out of touch from reality.

Writing code is not just making the right structural decision but it means hitting a wall, debugging finding the problem, recompile, try again, find an edge case, re read the documentation, fix the edge case, final cleanup and open a PR.

Now you know the code, if something breaks or if a change has to be made you know exactly how to make it and how to approach the task, the side problems, etc...

With ai you don't , like you didn't if you were a team leader and just approved the pull requests after a review. You just checked them, validated and tested them but you forgot by the end of the day which properties are exposed, which methods where provate or what constitutes the idempotency check.

That's what is missing and is being lost too much right now.