To be fair I don't think someone should get fired for that (unless it's a repeat offense). Kids are going to do stupid things, and it's up to the more experienced to coach them and help them to understand it's not acceptable. You're right that it's not ok at all, but the first resort should be a reprimand and being told they are expected to understand code they submit.
And how do you propose filtering them out? There's a reason why college students are using LLMs, they're getting better grades for less effort. I don't assume you're proposing selecting students with worse grades on purpose?
I think what the junior did is a reason to fire them (then you can try again with better selection practices). Not because they use code from LLMs, but that they don't even try to understand what it is doing. This says a lot about their attitude to programming.
One way to filter them out, relevant to this thread, would be to let them go if they brazenly turned in work they did not create and do not understand.
I understand the point you’re trying to get across. For many kinds of mistakes, I agree it makes good sense to warn and correct the junior. Maybe that’s the case here. I’m willing to concede there’s room for debate.
Can you imagine the fallout from this, though? Each and every line of code this junior has ever touched needs to be scrutinized to determine its provenance. The company now must assume the employee has been uploading confidential material to OpenAI too. This is an uncomfortable legal risk.
How could you trust the dev again after the dust is settled?
Also, it raises further concerns for me that this junior seems to be genuinely, honestly unaware that using ChatGPT to write code wouldn’t at least be frowned upon. That’s a frankly dangerous level of professional incompetence. (At least they didn’t try to hide it.)
Well now I’m wondering what the correct way would be to handle a junior doing this with ChatGPT, and what the correct way would be to handle similar kinds of mistakes such as copy-pasting GPL code into the proprietary code base, copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow, sharing snippets of company code online, and so on.
> Also, it raises further concerns for me that this junior seems to be genuinely, honestly unaware that using ChatGPT to write code wouldn’t at least be frowned upon.
Austen Allred is selling this as the future of programming. According to him, the days of writing code into an IDE are over.
Responding to the link you posted:
Apparently, the future of programming is 100 hour weeks? Naive me was thinking we could work less and think more with these new tools at our disposal.
A free training program with a promise of a guaranteed high paying job at the end, where have I heard that before? Seems like their business model is probably to churn people through these sessions and then monetize whatever shitty chatbot app they build through the training.
No, their business model is getting placement fees for whoever they graduate from the program.
Considering this was a sponsored link on HN, endorsed by Y Combinator, I'd say you have a ridiculous threshold for labeling something a "scam", except to the degree that the companies committing to hire these people are pretty unlikely to get whatever they were hoping to get.
