2w ago

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent

Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent | Loudwhisper

My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.

Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.

This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?

I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.

77 comments

I think its actually that most people generally don't really understand most things beyond the minimal level necessary to get by. Now that the tech industry isn't just a bunch of nerds you're increasingly more likely to encounter people who are temperamentally disinclined to seek understanding of those details.
I went through hiring several times at several companies, being on the interviewer side.
Typically it's not the talent pool as much as what the company has to offer and how much they're willing to pay. I referred top notch engineer friends, and they never made it past HR. A couple were rejected without interview because they asked too high of a salary, despite asking under market average. The rest didn't pass HR on personnality or not having all the "requirements", because the really good engineers are socially awkward and demand flexibility and are honest on the résumé/CV, or are self taught and barely have high-school graduation on there (just like me).
I've literally seen the case of: they want to hire another me, but ended up in a situation where: I wouldn't apply for the position myself, and even if I did, I wouldn't make it to the interview stage where I'd talk to myself and hire myself.
Naturally the candidates that did make it to me weren't great. Those are the people that do the bare minimum, have studied every test question (without understanding), vibe code everything, typically on the younger and very junior side. They're very good at passing HR, and very bad at their actual job.
It's not the technology, it's the companies that hire that ultimately steers the market and what people study for. Job requirements are ridiculous, HR hires engineers on personnality like they're shopping for yet another sales associate, now it takes 6 rounds of interviews for an entry level position at a startup. VC startups continue to pay wildly inflated wages to snatch all the top talent while established companies are laying off as much IT staff as possible to maximize profits.
- I'm here from /all so I can confirm this is happening in non-tech too. Not too long ago, I interviewed to be a product photographer for an industrial manufacturer, and the people who were interviewing me knew nothing about the job I was interviewing for.
  They couldn't tell me what camera they used in house, they couldn't tell me what editing software they used, they couldn't tell me about the lights, they couldn't tell me anything. It's like if the interviewers said you'd use 'computers' but couldn't tell you which OS they were running.
  
  You were at screening level #1. When I applied for work in Manhattan in 1988 it was like that: 9/10 jobs you applied to weren't the actual employer, they were agents building a pool of candidates to be able to present to the actual employers at a moment's notice if the employer should ever actually call asking for candidates.
  Today I bet it's rare to get hired without at least 3 screenings before you actually meet the people you might be working with.
- I totally agree with you, but I don't think this is the specific case. Most of the rejections in our case (which I can see) on the preliminary screening were based on lacking CV skills. Which is stupid in its own way, but at least makes sense assuming we are looking for those skills specifically.
  For the rest, the company is a remote company paying good salaries for the European market, I would say slightly above market average in many metrics.
  I will sift more into the rejections, but from what I have seen, almost all those who had the screening phone call made it to the interview (I.e., rejections were mostly cv-based).
- I have the opposite experience, when I was doing interviews I just skipped the very obviously underskilled people (which, IIRC were in the single digits) and interviewed pretty much everyone.
  For context, I'm the main architect and dev of the company I was hiring for. Most of the candidates were horrible.
  
  In 2006 I had a hard time finding C++ programmers in a university town. 9/10 who responded to the ads were just clueless. Of the remainder, we had a simple test - here's sample code in an IDE that draws a straight line on the screen (you'll be doing graphics programming in the role) - take that code and turn it into a program that draws a sine-wave in the same space... Everyone put computer graphic on their resume's, expressed confidence in their ability to perform in the role, deep former experience, but 5/6 who passed the clueless test couldn't manage that, given unlimited time and resources - the computer has internet access and a browser window open right there beside the IDE- USE IT!!!
  Sadly, today we'd probably have to shut off the internet access aspect, or make the test much more difficult. Even AI can draw a sine wave.
  
  A lot of this has to do with recruiters. I've been interviewing for a few years at my company such with as many different sets of recruiters, from recruiting firms to our corporate recruiters, to ones we hired ourselves. Our corporate recruiters handed over garbage candidates who we could often tell wouldn't work out after the first 10 min of the interview, whereas the other two groups of recruiters would do a good job filtering so we'd get than a 50% hit rate on our first round. Unfortunately, we promoted our recruiters once the need for talent dropped (or they moved on to a recruiter firm), and now they're unwilling to go back to recruiting.
  The quality of your recruiter matters quite a bit, so you'll want to find someone who is experienced hiring a certain type of person so they know what to look for.
- now it takes 6 rounds of interviews for an entry level position at a startup.
  I think it was 1996 vs 2002... 1996 we advertised in the Miami Herald for an engineer and got about a dozen applicants, 3 worth interviewing, none worth hiring and had to continue to search through personal networking to fill the role. 2002 we placed a nearly identical ad in the same classified section of the same paper, but by this time the Miami Herald was "online." We even added the line "only local candidates will be considered." Within the first week I had over 300 resumes on my desk, half of them from far afield - even overseas, so they were easy to sort... Still, plowing through the remainder, after about 50 quick scans I found one former employee of a company we did regular business with for over a decade, the question to his ex-manager was "if you had the chance, would you rehire him?" That yes shot down the rest of the applications dead - we just didn't have the resources to even read all the applications, much less sort or answer or interview them.
  I can only imagine the flood of candidates applying for every opening today. Take your resume, e-mail it to 30 recruiters, they each apply to 30 positions for you...
- Isn't the solution to train people to get past HR? I know it would infuriate me to have to do this but HR needs to be treated as an obstacle. Remember when personality tests first started appearing. There were people teaching how to give the answers HR wanted.
  
  That's what's happening, and it's diminishing the quality of candidates - dramatically. Getting past HR isn't a valuable skill except for getting hired.
I'm reminded of when my boss asked me whether our entry test was too hard after getting several submissions that wouldn't even run.
Sometimes prospective employees are just shit.
- I got asked the same. I simply pointed out the test is a reproduction of last week's bug that took down prod at 2am and got paged to fix, and is therefore as realistic as it gets of what they'll need to be able to handle.
  It's always DNS, everyone should know that.
  
  It’s always DNS, everyone should know that.
  It's not DNS. There's no way it is DNS. It's not technically possible for it to be DNS.
  And it's always DNS.
- Ahaha yes, that might be the case, but I started to lose hope if the top of the applicants (out of hundreds of rejected!) all exhibits this behavior. I can't help but feel that now we are looking for people with a mindset and skillset that is simply disappearing in the industry.
  And as I said in another post, I perfectly acknowledge that if I stopped reading and investigating stuff on my own, I could absolutely keep my job by just mindlessly administering a few services and rephrasing CIS benchmarks...
- Our entry test should have been dead simple for anyone applying to the position. Position: C++ computer graphics programmer, 1-2 years experience implementing technical graphics displays in C++ language. All resumes submitted, of course, claimed this and more. All interviewees, of course, professed great confidence in their abilities. 9/10 candidates, when presented with "the test" failed spectacularly. The ones who passed, generally, did it in less than 10 minutes - with a couple of interesting quirks which revealed their attention to and/or willingness to follow directions. The failures ranged from rage-quit and stomping out without a word, to hours of pleading for more time to work on it - which, in principle, we granted freely, but after 30 minutes if they didn't have it they never got it.
- Ours is really simple, like something any somewhat competent engineer could complete in half the time we provide after going through the tutorial on the framework's website. Yet so many people fail, even when they claim to have years of experience with the framework.
  There are a ton of terrible applicants out there.
That is technically correct in a way, but I'll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.
Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.
Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!
So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.
- Mind you that my take and experience is specifically in the context of security.
  I struggle to make the parallel that you suggest (which might work for some areas) with a security engineer.
  Say, a person learned to brainlessly parrot that pods need to have setting x or z. If they don't understand them, they can't offer meaningful insight in cases where that's not possibile (which might be specific), they can't provide a solid risk analysis etc.
  What is the counterpart to this gap? Because I struggle to see it. Breadth of areas where this superficial knowledge is available is useless, IMHO.
  
  Because a security engineer focused on cloud would rightfully say "pod security is not my issue, I'm focused on protecting the rest of our world from each pod itself.". With AWS as example: If they then analyze the IAM role structures and to deep into where the pod runs (e.g. shared ec2 vs eks) etc. then it would just be a matter of different focus.
  Cloud security is focused on the infrastructure - looks like you're looking for a security engineer focused on the dev side.
  If they bring neither to the table then I'm with you - but I don't see how "the cloud" is at fault here... especially for security the world as full of "following the script" people long before cloud was a thing.
  
  Yeah I can see that.
  However, you are now arguing a different point than I am getting from your original post. Maybe my fault in interpretation ofc, but the main difference (in my view) is:
  You say "incompetent" and "less skilled" as general statements on senior engineers. Those statements are false.
  You also say "missing the skills you are looking for" which is obviously true.
  And the implication that before cloud, people developed the specific skills you need more naturally - because they had to. This makes sense and I believe it.
- That being said, I am genuinely frustrated by how little people know or care about the plumbing these days. :D
  I am so fucking tired of seeing someone spin up 3 cloud databases for what could be a 40k in-memory hashtable.
- I disagree. On paper that sounds good, but I firmly believe good engineers are curious, so they'll learn a lot more than necessary to do the job.
  For example, when I worked at a company that designed antennas as a software engineer (built something tangentially related), I didn't need to know anything about electrical engineering, but I was curious so I asked a ton of questions and now I know a fair amount about EE. These days I work in a very different domain and still ask a ton of questions to our domain experts. In my own field, I look into all kinds of random things tangentially related to the tools I use. In each case, that curiosity has come in handy at some point or another.
  In each role, I can tell who's there to clock in and clock out vs who is genuinely curious and looking to improve, and it's the latter group who tend to produce the best work and go on to great roles after leaving our company, while the 9-5 warriors who just focus on the requirements tend to do pretty mediocre when it comes to advancement.
  When I hire, I look for that curiosity because you never know what you'll need to know to fix a prod issue quickly. My esoteric knowledge about SSH helped keep my team productive for a few days when IT was being slow revolving our issue, and likewise we've had quick resolution to prod bugs because someone on the team knew something random that ended up being relevant. That's what I mean when I say I look for a diverse team, I want people with different strengths who all actively seek to improve so we'll have a good shot at handling whatever comes down the pipe (and we get a lot of random stuff, from urgently needing to embed 3D modeling tools into our reporting app to needing to embed complex C++ simulation code or rewrite Fortran code into our largely CRUD Python app).
  Most of these cases of "focus on one niche" are often symptoms of lacking curiosity and just wanting to tick boxes to quality for a role. I'd much rather someone miss a few important boxes but tick a lot of random ones because they're curious; they'll take longer to on-board, but they'll likely be more useful long term.
  I don't work in the security space, but I think the same applies to most technical fields. Breadth of knowledge in an individual provides depth of knowledge in a team.
  
  Yeah I don't think we actually disagree much here. :)
  I think my angle is just slightly different? I see that ease of access (eg cloud) make it possible for a lot more uncurious and clock-out people to enter the field and pass as competent. To be honest, even the modest introduction of auto-formatting editors are easy to see as good and useful, but I also feel that they allowed shoddy work to look passable at first glance. AI will make this a lot worse.
  But as for the actual people who have it in them to be competent, people that were always there and still are, cloud is not going to make them worse.
  
  now I know a fair amount about EE
  But, did you ever use a Smith's chart to assist in antenna design / analysis?
The main factor, IMO, is that everyone wants good engineers but good engineers don't change jobs that often.
Meaning most of the candidates you interview will suck in one way or another.
And everyone calls themselves "senior" nowadays.
- Everyone calls themselves senior because that's the only type of position recruiters look for.
  I'm a mid level dev, but I'm encouraged by recruiters to apply for senior positions because their clients are actually looking for a range of levels
  
  Yeah, that's true, everyone thinks they want a senior where usually someone who's not a straight up junior is more than enough. And a fast learning and motivated junior is the best you can get, IMO, though those are pretty rare as well.
- Exactly. We don't hire "junior" positions, because all the midlevels are juniors, all seniors are mid-level, and seniors don't apply. I'm a senior and a recruiter found me, I didn't apply (at least not to this company).
- I think 4 years experience gets the "Senior" title in our company now. I can understand having 3 years experience and being frustrated when you can see how much better you are at your job than your "more senior" middle managers, but... there are plenty of things that you continue to learn in your first 10-20 years of experience, and having diversity of experience brings even more value that's rarely acknowledged in any ranking scales - actually the ranking scales usually reward stay-put loyalty over diverse in depth experience, and that's just backwards in my experience. Although, I have also known plenty of "job hoppers" who got around from place to place every year or two and it was clear after working with them that was because they didn't really contribute adequate value anywhere they went.
That has been my experience with security people, too. They are button pushers and copy pasters. But I don't think it's cloud computing causing it. They were like that before clouds.
- Yeah, they are frequently just parroting things like CVE notices as highlighted by a fairly stupid scanning tool.
  The security ecosystem has been long diluted because no one wants to doubt a "security" person and be wrong, and over time that has made a pretty soft context for people to get credibility as a security person.
Nah brah, knah waddahma? Running my own Nextcloud instance is basically what drove me to become a linux novice.
I used to be a windows gamer. Now I run my own home-LLM server for the self hosted cloud assistant.
People should try, it's fun!
- Juat as a reality check:
  What you and me consider fun isnt fun for most outside of the lemmy techie bubble.
  
  Haber most people reconsidered what they consider fun though?
  They're missing out!
I'm a very good engineer, but so much of my time is consumed fighting with Tekton pipelines and migrating testing frameworks and versions I barely have time to write code. But that's because I can figure that stuff out when I have to. All the code is written by the people who can't figure that stuff out.
Why this isn't two separate jobs I can't understand. Let me do some stuff I'm good at rather than constantly fighting with things I'm not?
- This hits the nail right on the head. The point of cloud services is to take away all the overheads of building and delivering software solutions that have nothing to do with the actual business problem I'm trying to solve.
  If I want to get a new product to market, I want to spend most of my time making my core product better, more marketable, more efficient. I don't want to divert time and resources to just keep the lights on, like having to hire a whole bunch of people whose only jobs is to provision and manage servers and IT infrastructure (or nurse a Kubernetes cluster for that matter). Managing Kubernetes or physical tin servers is not what my business is about. All this tech infrastructure is a means to an end, not the end itself.
  That's why cloud services is such a cost efficient proposition for 98% businesses. Hell, if I could run everything using a serverless model (not always possible or cost effective) I'd do it gladly.
  
  This is quite a trite argument from my point of view. Also, this is from the perspective of the business, which I don't particularly care about, and I tend to look from the perspective of the worker.
  Additionally, the cloud allows to scale quickly, but the fact that it allows to delegate everything is a myth. It's so much a myth that you see companies running fully on cloud with an army on people in platform teams and additionally you get finops teams, entire teams whose job is optimizing the spend of cloud. Sure, when you start out it's 100% reasonable to use cloud services, but in the medium-long term, it's an incredibly poor investment, because you still need people to administer the cloud plus, you need to pay a huge premium for the services you buy, which your workforce now can't manage or build anymore. This means you still pay people to do work which is not your core business, but now they babysit cloud services instead of the actual infra, and you are paying twice.
  Cloud exploded during the times of easy money at no interest, where startups had to build some stuff, IPO and then explode without ever turning a single dollar of profit. It's a model that fits perfect in that context.
- I somewhat disagree here, but also somewhat agree.
  In my org, we get a lot of requirements that require very different skillsets. For the first 2-3 years, our task list was mostly CRUD stuff with some domain specific logic, but otherwise a boring web app. In the last 1-2 years, we have:
  ported a Fortran simulation to Python
  embedded a C++ simulation in Python
  created a 3D UX for our previously 2D only app (lots of 3D logic on both FE and BE)
  implemented a machine learning algorithm to train our simulations
  If I hired only for the work I'd seen in the past, we'd be completely unfit to handle this workload since we'd mostly have people who are really good at building CRUD apps (so DB optimization and quick UX building).
  On the flipside, we cut off huge swaths of work so people don't need to wear too many hats. We have:
  dedicated devOPs - handles everything from trst pipelines to prod deployments
  dedicated QA - manual and automated app-level testing - devs still do unit testing
  dedicated product teams who handle feature requirements and documentation
  dedicated UX team to produce designs for FE engineers to implement
  So our devs only need to worry about development, but they also need a broad skillset in that domain, from everything from local tooling to working in different domains. We hire a diverse set of candidates, some with a heavy math background, some with design experience, and some with low level programming experience, because we never know what projects we'll get or who will suddenly leave the org.
  
  If I understand the gist, I'll just say I'd like my job to be some stuff I'm good and some stuff that challenges me. When I do nothing but challenge myself, imposter syndrome sets in. When I do nothing but the stuff that I'm good at, it gets really boring. I need to find a better mix than I have been.
Or maybe it's just a different skill set
- Not when the skillset is essentially outsourced and you are left consuming the product of that skillset.
  Understanding is nonnegotiable in security, IMHO.
  You can't fail to understand how signature attestation works, if you are implementing it, to make one example I made in the post. Otherwise you end up verifying the signature in the CI (like that person claimed it should be done) and waste the whole effort. You can definitely still outsource the whole infra and scripting to Github, but you still need to understand. The problem is that when you can outsource everything, at some point understanding becomes an extra step.
I'm not in any way, shape, or form an engineer so I don't really understand the exact details of your post.
However, you post reminded me of a really good episode of a podcast called Hidden Brain. In it the host, discusses the topic of knowledge with a cognitive scientist.
At one point, they talk about how sophisticated technology has gotten that people don't know how to solve problems if that technology brakes, especially since technology is getting so good that it makes fewer mistakes. They use an airplane as an example in which an experienced pilot forgot how to get out of a nosedive and crashed the plane. On a smaller scale, the host mentioned that he has a hard time navigating if his phone's GPS doesn't work.
Its a really interesting listen if you have the chance.
- Thanks, indeed I think there are many parallels with other areas. I will check it out.
nah, I was incompetent long before cloud services.
interviewing senior security engineers
Or maybe senior security engineers from 10 years ago were somewhat different from (wannabee senior) security engineers today?
Did you ask them to write 0xD6 in decimal? 😃
- That's the thing! I think it wouldn't be conceivable that your "principal engineer" (real position for one of the people) doesn't understand the basic theory of the stuff they are implementing. Now it feels you can instead work years and years just shuffling configuration and pressing buttons, leading to "senior" people who didn't gather actual years of experience.
  I don't want to pretend I am outside this logic. I am very much part of this problem myself, having started my career 10 years ago. I do despise cloud services though (if anything, they are super boring), so I tend to work with other stuff. But I could 100% just click buttons and parrot standard and keep accruing empty years of experience...
  
  You want to hire the "guru", not the "principal". You want to actually ask him to write 0xD6 in decimal, and if he dares to answer "Seriously? Come on now, that's boring", then you hire him on the spot.
  But you can't hire only gurus. You need normal seniors, too. Build a normal team around one guru. Maybe build one ultra advanced team around 2-3 gurus, if you really need to invent new and hardcore difficult stuff.
  
  I agree with your lack of affection for cloud services, but I think your view might be a little skewed here. Does a senior mechanic need to understand the physics of piston design to be a great mechanic, or just gather years of experience fixing problems with the whole system that makes up the car?
  I'm a Senior Systems engineer. I know very little about kernel programming or OS design, but i know how the packages and applications work together and where problems might arise in how they interact. Software Engineers might not know how or don't want to spend time to set up the infrastructure to host their applications, so they rely on me to do it for them, or outsource my job to someone else's computer.

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