My mom was an English teacher and an electronics tech later in her career. I explained to her how LLMs are requiring a lot of technical writing and documentation up front and devs that haven’t tried that approach or hate that can be quick to dismiss when the output is bad. Her reply, “Oh so the humanities do matter!’ Hire juniors with a left brain right brain mix.
We have to be careful not to anthropomorphize them but LLMs absolutely respond to nuanced word choice and definition of behavior that align with psychology (humanities). How to judge that in an interview? Maybe a “Write instructions for a robot to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” exercise. Make them type it. Prospects who did robotics club have an edge?
Can they touch type? I’ve seen experienced devs that chicken peck its painful. What happens when they have to write a stream of prompts, abort, and rephrase rapidly? Schools aren’t mandating typing and I see an increase (in my own home! I tried…) of feral child invented systems like caps lock on/off instead of shift with weird cross keyboard overhand reaches.
We have to be careful not to anthropomorphize them but LLMs absolutely respond to nuanced word choice and definition of behavior that align with psychology (humanities). How to judge that in an interview? Maybe a “Write instructions for a robot to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” exercise. Make them type it. Prospects who did robotics club have an edge?
Can they touch type? I’ve seen experienced devs that chicken peck its painful. What happens when they have to write a stream of prompts, abort, and rephrase rapidly? Schools aren’t mandating typing and I see an increase (in my own home! I tried…) of feral child invented systems like caps lock on/off instead of shift with weird cross keyboard overhand reaches.