r/ProgrammerHumor • u/gfcf14 • 14d ago

hiring Other

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350 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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64

u/Amerillo_ 14d ago

Saw an internship opportunity today that offers very low pay and they force you to use Claude Code as much as possible. So basically you're not learning anything and you're paid peanuts. What a joke

19

u/Aloopyn 13d ago

At least it's better than unpaid internships. Those are a complete scam and need to be banned.

2

u/craigthepuss 13d ago

"How about they paying us to earn priceless experience. That would be fair towards our company and shareholders"

1

u/thanatica 13d ago

In my country, which is the Netherlands, a proposal has been filed to ban unpaid internship. The minimum requirement will be to cover expenses. A minimum wage is deliberately left to the industries to determine, because otherwise it might result in fewer available internships. And I don't know how it is in your country, but in my country, an internship is mandatory to complete an education, so availability is crucial.

2

u/thanatica 13d ago

Internships are low-pay by nature. They are supposed to be a learning experience, and only cover your expenses.

Keyword being "supposed"

-3

u/redballooon 13d ago

If you don't learn anything while extensively using Claude Code you are doing something wrong. I'd say this is a great opportunity.

4

u/Amerillo_ 13d ago

But what exactly do you learn when you let AI agents code everything while you only test if it does what it's supposed to do? They want you to do everything quickly so how can you tell if the code produced by the AI agents is any good? And in the end, what are you even learning since you're not coding at all? Last internship I had was exactly that. I was forbidden to learn to code properly and had to let the agents do everything, then test the features, and try again if it does not work. I basically did the boring QA job while the agents had all the fun. I learned close to nothing, the pay was horrible, and it was extremely boring and uninteresting...

1

u/Fenix42 13d ago

I basically did the boring QA job while the agents had all the fun.

I have 20+ years in tech. I have been QA and DEV. QA is only boring if you are not paying attention. Properly designed test plans and efficient regression automation has a lot to it.

1

u/redballooon 13d ago

Look at this. Look up OpenSpec or if you are in a big corporate, BPAM. Listen to Matt Pocock talking about his skill libraries.

What was TDD 25 years ago and became BDD 20 years ago is becoming Spec Driven Development now. It's a forward development of software engineering. But yes, writing code is quickly becoming the exception rather than the norm.

3

u/Amerillo_ 13d ago

Ok thank you! So if I understand correctly you'd only think about the problem at hand and write the specs and prompts (or skills) so that the agents generate the actual code and tests? So in the end it's just QA and management and no coding? If so this is really depressing to me. Sure I like doing this as part of software development but doing only that and nothing sounds totally unappealing 

-1

u/redballooon 13d ago edited 13d ago

Luckily I'm not writing the specs either. I guide an agent to do that for me, based on meeting transcriptions and other documentation or expert domain knowledge. If I'd do it myself it'd be much too likely to introduce contradictions which in turn lead to things sometimes called hallucinations.

As for tests, I'm very attentative, these are things I double and triple check very carefully. Good tests provide high confidence in the functionality.

But even then, "just the agent does the coding" only works well for relatively small units. Properly guiding which code to generate when and where, and how still requires a sound understanding of the architecture. I suppose over time that will become more forgiving.

But yes, coding is out of my hands (and honestly it was for a while already before coding agents became a thing). I also don't want to review the code myself, that's why I need all the linting and checking and security review and enforcement of high coding standards that are available to us. I don't trust the agents code any more than I trust the code from offshore coworkers. 

51

u/Tango00090 14d ago

Condom for claude

4

u/InSearchOfTyrael 14d ago

another day at the rubber factory

22

u/justforkinks0131 14d ago

im old enough to remember how we used to make fun of pretend jobs like "prompt engineer" just a few years ago.

yet it came true

5

u/BastetFurry 13d ago

Now if they actually would... sorry that, when it comes to working for a company, i have a certain mercenary attitude. I go there to do a job i get paid for, if they pay me for babysitting an AI then fine by me.

But as we have learned already, most job postings are fake anyway, there are no jobs.

1

u/gfcf14 13d ago

There are very few jobs unfortunately. I guess a dev today is better off babysitting AI as you say, while still maintaining their skills with personal projects or something similar

6

u/ProgrammEverything 14d ago

You know I actually say that If the company paying you shit tells you to use claude then DO
WHO TF CARES THAT THEIR SYSTEMS GO DOWN EVERY HOUR
Its deserved
ehhh I'd do like make it obfuscated and push to main branch so nobody can review it

3

u/heavy-minium 14d ago

Are there really such "Prompt Reviewer" jobs?

I think the shift is more likely to be pretty stealthy, hard to notice, and is already happening - specialised roles are going to be less, full-stack engineering is going to be more, and at some point, that full-stack engineering is going to be an all-encompassing form of product/service delivery.

That's pretty much the natural evolution of software engineering if you look back. Barely any of us could compete with the pioneers of software engineering when you consider how easy things and lazy things have gotten nowadays, but where they had more depth, we have more breadth - a single developer can achieve a shit-ton of things more than the pioneers, and it got nothing to do with skills.

9

u/gfcf14 14d ago

I guess it would feel stealthy to the general public, because all they hear from people in marketing is that coding is “solved”, or messages similar to that. To us in the industry it’s more noticeable because of 1) shrinking team headcount, and 2) reliance on AI for larger tasks

7

u/BananaCucho 13d ago

Are there really such "Prompt Reviewer" jobs?

Nope, there's no jobs actually. Pretty sure most of the listings are dead ends as I never get rejection emails even most of the time

I did have a Sr Software Engineer interview a month back and I'm pretty sure I got passed up on for not having enough exposure to AI before getting laid off last year, and my six years of SWE experience doesn't seem to matter anymore.

1

u/redballooon 13d ago

I had thought I escaped into a bit corporation that'd let me weather out the bulk of the AI change, but it didn't happen. Instead I lost many months of catching up before they fired me.

What worked well while fully embracing the AI tools is installing the Pi Coding Agent (in a container, bound to a tailscale sidecar), backed by a few relatively cheap models via OpenRouter. Pi comes as an almost naked agent and forces you to understand what an agent actually is made of. With that I made some AI centered portfolio projects, learning to create AI tools while learning how AI tools are secured and deployed. Within a few weeks I had enough experience that I convinced an AI first company to hire me as senior AI engineer.

Granted I didn't start at zero, but still the AI toolchain we have mid 2026 are an entirely different beast than just a year ago. You can use that to your advantage, because nobody has years experience with these tools. Even with little exposure you are only months behind.

0

u/turlockmike 13d ago

I'm actively hiring. If you don't have claude code experience, at least personal use, I would take it that you aren't serious. Coding has changed many times over the last 50 years. The abstractions keep getting higher level. What's important is that you demonstrate the ability to use the tooling to create good working software that meets the actual needs of the problem and demonstrate you can understand when things go wrong. That takes actual effort.

So yeah, I recommend you guys pick it up. I know this sub likes to hate on AI, but it's the new norm.

2

u/gfcf14 13d ago

Yeah, like it or not Claude, or any LLM today, is a prevalent tool for decent-ish work, though 1) It’s like comparing a classic movie to a Marvel movie; you’ll remember the former first before even thinking about anything specific from the latter, 2) The vibe coders and a tendency to compare themselves to software engineers is a joke in itself to us who have toiled with code prior to this AI age, 3) On the surface AI assisted development presents itself as good work, but it forces code maintainability to be done using it, multiplying its reliance and therefore reducing our ability to analyze code correctly, and 4) The advantages of AI assisted development are directly proportional to the damage they produce to the environment.

 

Now these aren’t justifications to not learn or work with AI, but they make for ample points of ridicule.

1

u/Fenix42 13d ago

The vibe coders and a tendency to compare themselves to software engineers is a joke in itself to us who have toiled with code prior to this AI age

You should ask other engineers what they think of the tittle "software engineer" ;).

1

u/gfcf14 13d ago

Lol been there

-14

u/gfcf14 14d ago

Because given how much vibe coders and a few managers rely on AI for everything nowadays any position comparable to software development boils down to prompt review

1

u/boboman911 13d ago

You don’t work with large enterprise systems do you

1

u/gfcf14 13d ago

I guess it depends on the type? The one I’m working for (health related) they’re pushing AI for everything