From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.
I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.
You’re more or less admitting that you’re playing trendy tech lottery. Which is fine, but maybe not generalizable to the whole industry.
I don't know about that, and I am 100% biased so take what I say with a grain of salt. My position is very much this: you may not trust coding agents to make code changes, but if you're not willing to treat them as a research aid or have them work for you, you're pretty much saying they can't help you work more efficiently.
I'm working on a Show HN post that includes:
https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep
It's a fork of BurntSushi/ripgrep. What I hope to show with it is that you don't have to use coding agents to code. They can be used to surface knowledge that's buried in documents, issue comments, PR discussions, and other places.
Believing coding agents are trendy would be like saying search was trendy in 1998. They're not going to change the world the way Anthropic wants us to believe, but they will shape how humans develop software. And I think for the better, since AI is capable of processing information at scale to help you move forward.
want a Flutter developer who is unusually strong at directing AI-driven software delivery. This is not a traditional "write the code yourself" role.
Why?
If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?
I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h".
I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.
So in the same interest of helping post-grad job seekers, do what you've gotta do to get yourself paid, but maybe don't presume that vibe_that_works speaks for every hiring manager.
Not to disagree of course that time is limited, but in my experience, optimizing it this harshly leads to poor results, because eventually, you just get leapfrogged by reality.
Hyper-optimized systems are brittle and can't really adapt to the market changing.
But yeah, I guess they still need developers. Just doesn't sound like a fun job :D
So let me take this a step further. You want to meet your boss' boss for 10 minutes to present them something. 10 minutes of his time are an equivalent of more than 20 hours of your time. So if your initial idea was to "take maybe 1-2h" to prepare for this -> You are underprepared by at least one order of magnitude.
Which might not be ideal, because "orging for the sake of org" to my understanding consumes significant resources not going into building products/marketshare/shareholder value.
But then again, I'm no hiring manager in such a structure, so this is probably just an uninformed take.
But why?
Most of my most fulfilling experiences in tech have come out sitting down and hashing out a problem with someone else (including with managers/leaders).
It sounds like a miserable org if I am not expected/allowed to have an actual back and forth conversation with my boss. If I'm employed to be on a team working on an aligned common goal, why would I not use that collective skill and experience to my fullest advantage?
You're describing a coding sweatshop. What is the point of any discussion at all then? If the "boss" can't carve out enough time, that's their own problem. Letting that stress propagate to the team is plain bad leadership.
I know you might think some of these candidates don't have other much better choices to find work, but they absolutely do.
But that sounds more like "evasive" is the problematic attribute and not "long winding".
Which does show up at the same time often, true. But not always.
That’s a bit ironic, given the typical output of LLMs.