Ever since the standard office setup went from offices or cubicles to bullpens and hot desks there is less and less time to think, and all of that is a management decision to ship things as fast as possible

Grade inflation and schools passing kids who should fail to game metrics and keep collecting student loans is a problem. I wouldnt consider hiring anybody from my alma mater who didnt score a sandard deviation or higher on the tests.

You don't need a 4.0 to graduate. And even if you got one, a lot of grades are composed of tests, not projects. You can just memorize your way through things if you were dedicated enough.

It's not really that hard to get a degree in engineering if your only goal is the degree itself.

Half of my graduating class could barely program.

The practice of software engineering is not what they teach in university.

I would say that today's graduates are IMO a bit better than a few decades ago but there are still many graduating who are just not good at writing computer software and don't really have the aptitude for that (or maybe the interest in getting good). That's what happens when the pipeline of people coming in are people who want to make money and the institution is mostly a degree factory.

I've seen it happen multiple times. Engineering degrees are no different than a vast majority of degrees in that if you are good at the read and regurgitate cycle, you can make it through. Not only can you make it through, but you can do it with a very respectable GPA. They come out with a large dictionary of keywords in their arsenal, but no idea how to put them into practice. Some are able to put it into practice and tie it all together. As they see practical examples of those keywords in the real world, it starts falling like dominoes, and at an accelerating rate. For some, it never goes much beyond keywords. The dominoes fall, but it is slow, and they stop falling for extended periods of time for them. Not many mature engineering organizations can tolerate that sort of progression rate. They usually don't last very long at any one place, until they find a company where they can blend into the background due to a combination of company culture, and low complexity systems being worked on.

OP should have put "engineers" in double quotes. Many software developers like to describe themselves as engineers although they don't have an actual engineering degree. A lot of software development resembles plumbing more than engineering, so most devs don't really need an engineering degree anyway, but they should be more honest about what they're actually doing and not try to elevate themselves with fancy titles.

You are, of course, right that the idea that someone could finish a serious engineering degree without being able to think is ridiculous.

I don't know but I can point at more than half of the people that I work with that can't think, and every time they try to, takes a whole group of people that can think to undo their mess, they all have degrees and I don't.

So what does that tell me?

Better yet, for about 30% having the LLM slop it would have yielded better outcomes, but having them slop something nets terrible slop. But at least I can reshape because even the LLM wont do something that stupid.

A degree is passing the test. Not all degree programs get into more advanced topics nor do they necessarily require that someone is able to work through how to solve a problem that they haven't seen before.

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A lot of students (and developers out there too) are able to pass follow instructions and pass the test.

A smaller portion of them are able to divide up a task into the "this is what I need to do to accomplish that task".

Even fewer of them are able to work through the process of identifying the cause of a problem they haven't seen before and work through to figure out what the solution for that problem is.

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... There are also a lot of people out there that aren't even able to fall into the first group without copying and pasting from another source. I've seen the "stack sort" at work https://xkcd.com/1185/ https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/ professionally. People copying and pasting from Stack Overflow (back in the day) without understanding what they're writing.

Now, they do it with AI. Take the contents of the Jira description, paste it into some text box, submit the new code as a PR, take the feedback from the PR and paste it back into the box and repeat that a few times. I've seen PRs with "you're absolutely correct, here are the updates you requested" be sent back to me for review again.

This is not a new thing. AI didn't cause it, but AI is exacerbating the issue with professional programming by having the people who are not much more than some meat between one text box and another (yes, I'm being a bit harsh there) and the people who need instructions but don't understand design to be more "productive" while overwhelming the more senior developers.

... And this also becomes a set of permanent training wheels on developers who might be able to learn more if they had to do it. That applies at all levels. One needs to practice without training wheels and learn from mistakes to get better.

Mate, have you never had to deal with over-confident graduates who think they've got the complete answers, but, in reality, they only have a sliver of the whole picture in their minds?