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by brunooliv 1226 days ago
Not to be the devil's advocate or something, but, I hope you understand that the vast majority of FAANG engineers CAN'T build any highly scalable system from scratch, much less fix bugs in the Linux kernel... So that argument feels really moot to me... If anything this just shows hopefully that gatekeeping good engineers by putting these LC puzzles as a requirement for interviews is a sure way to hire a majority of people who aren't adding THAT MUCH MORE value than a LLM already does... Yikes... On top of that, they'll be bad team players and it'll be a luck if they can string together two written paragraphs...
1 comments

I agree, people in general overestimate the skills and input of your average developer where many (even in FAANG) are simply not capable of creating anything more than some simple CRUD or tooling script without explicit guidance. And being good or very good with algorithms and estimating big-O complexity doesn't make you (it can help) a good software engineer.
That's the general issue with AI skeptics. Most of them, especially highly educated ones, overestimate capabilities of common folk. Frankly, some even overestimate their own. E.g. almost none of them seem to be bothered that while GPT might not provide expert answers in their field, the same GPT is much more capable in other fields than they are (e.g. the "general" part in the "General Artificial Intelligence").
True, the thing is there's nothing like "General Artificial Intelligence" and humans are expert systems optimized to the goal of survival, which in turn gets chopped up into a plethora of sub-goal optimization from which most probably the "general" adjective pops up. It doesn't really matter if it's "general" as long as it actually is useful. It doesn't have to write whole systems from scratch, just making the average dev 20-30% faster is huge.