>I heard this a lot from candidates who had only worked on software that could be described as an app.
Similar to that thinking, I made a previous comment how many developers in the "L.O.B. Line-Of-Business / CRUD" group are not familiar with "algorithms engineering" type of programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078147
Vibe coding is easiest for CRUD apps. However, it's useless for developing new scientific/engineering code for new system architectures that require combining algorithms & data structures in novel ways that Claude Code has no examples for.
I can attest to that. I was using Gemini to help with some spherical geometry that I just couldn't figure out myself. This was for an engineering system to define and avoid attitude deadzones for a system that can rotate arbitrarily.
About 75% of the time the code snippets it provided did what it said they did. But the other 25% was killer. Luckily I made a visualization system and was able to see when it made mistakes, but I think if I had tried to vibe code this months ago I'd still be trying.
(These were things like "how can I detect if an arbitrary small circle arc on a unit sphere intersects a circle of arbitrary size projected onto the surface of the unit sphere". With the right MATLAB setup this was easy to visualize and check; but I'm quite convinced it would have taken me a lot longer to understand the geometry and come up with the equations myself than it actually took me to complete the tool)
One my standard coding tests for LLM is a spherical geometry problem, a near-triangle with all three corners being 90 degrees.
Until GPT-5, no model got it right, they only operated in the space of a euclidian projection; perhaps notably, while GPT-5 did get it right, it did so by writing and running a python script that imported a suitable library, not with its own world model.
Do you have any advice for entering group 2? I graduated university expecting to at least see jobs that needed those skills at least some of the time, but the hardest problem I've worked on was a variant of the knapsack problem and it happened in my first year out.
Take a look at the data storage industry, e.g. EBS and EFS teams at AWS, pure storage, net app, etc. The people there who work on the filesystems and block data path are doing legit applied computer science. I did it earlier in my career and it felt like being at Bell Labs in the 70s and 80s.
Similar to that thinking, I made a previous comment how many developers in the "L.O.B. Line-Of-Business / CRUD" group are not familiar with "algorithms engineering" type of programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12078147
Vibe coding is easiest for CRUD apps. However, it's useless for developing new scientific/engineering code for new system architectures that require combining algorithms & data structures in novel ways that Claude Code has no examples for.