Why Should We Hire Software Engineers

Content Me: Fullstack software engineer, specialized in security and UX, 10 years of experience with plenty complex microservice projects Also me: Google how to put double quotes inside a quote string in javascript

Content CANDIDATE 1: 6 YEARS AT LAST POSITION AS FULL STACK DEV - IMPLEMENTED SEVERAL PROJECTS FROM THE GROUND UP ACROSS MANY TECHNOLOGIES CANDIDATE 2: 1YEAR AT AMAZON OR GOOGLE WORKING ON A TINY SUVER OF ONE PIECE OF A HIGHLY SPECIALIZED SYSTEM

Content ME ON STACKOVERFLOW Will you please listen? I'm not A DUPLICATE MODS HE IS A DUPLICATE!

The evolution of coding assistance in one perfect Ninja Turtles reference! Remember when we all relied on Stack Overflow's cryptic answers from grumpy experts who'd rather tell you why your question was stupid than actually help? Those were the dark ages. Now we've got ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseeк, and Gemini—fully grown AI assistants ready to solve our problems without judging our intelligence or demanding we read the documentation first. The student has become the master, and Master Splinter (Stack Overflow) is now just tagging along while his former pupils do all the heavy lifting. The circle of life for programming knowledge—from "marked as duplicate" to "here's 5 different solutions with explanations."

Remember when we thought we'd train AI to help us write code? Top panel: cute little AI cub learning from the wise software engineer master. Bottom panel: six months later, that same AI has evolved into a towering beast while we're still sitting there with our legacy code knowledge from 2019. The career progression timeline has been dramatically compressed. Took me 15 years to become a tech lead. Took AI about 15 minutes to make half my StackOverflow contributions irrelevant. But hey, at least I still know how to exit Vim. For now.

The eternal dance between developers and regex—a cryptic language that might as well be ancient runes. When ChatGPT spits out a working regex that looks like someone headbutted a keyboard, what do we do? Copy-paste that mystical incantation and back away slowly. It's the modern equivalent of summoning a demon—you don't need to understand the Latin, you just need the spell to work. And when it does? Pure dopamine. That smug satisfaction of solving a problem without actually understanding the solution is programming at its finest. Future you will hate present you when that regex breaks in six months. But that's a problem for future you, who is, quite frankly, a bit of a buzzkill anyway.