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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from my interview with WordPress developer Andrew Norcross. Andrew stopped by to discuss the stagnant job market for web professionals and the role AI is playing in it. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit the WPMinute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:27)
Well, j ⁓ just to be clear for our audience, ⁓ you indeed had an a prospective employer tell you that you ⁓ didn't necessarily you weren't a great fit because you don't use AI.
Andrew Norcross (00:41)
Correct. I was told that I did not use enough AI in my own workflows. And this was after, you know, we all know how tech interviews go. They're endless. Yeah, so this is after talking to everybody and doing jumping through all the hoops and doing all the things and Yeah, being told that it not that I didn't do it in the tests, it was
that I personally did not use enough of it. And I was very clear throughout the entire process that I don't use it and that I didn't use it. And I explained why. You know, it wasn't it wasn't just a flippant sort of, you know, like, ⁓ You know, it was when I was on the NASA project, one of the, you know, one of the devs on the team started using Chat GPT to write code. He didn't say anything about it, didn't tell anybody about it. ⁓
And all of a sudden I start seeing all this code show up, p all these PHP files that are filled with React syntax.
Instead of class, it says class name, you the capital N and all that stuff. ⁓ because that's what the AI had produced and he j shipped it. ⁓ so that was my first introduction to it, other than some of those weird, like the Dolly image maker stuff that was showing up in the very, very beginning, you know. Yeah. you know, so I was like, All right, well this is trash. ⁓ and I ignored it for a while. Also, you know, NASA understandably was very specific about what tools could and couldn't be used, what
you know, what had access, you know, I had to use a NASA issued machine with a PIN card and, you know, VPN and all that other fun stuff. ⁓ so, you know, they were also very specific. And I again I explained all this. ⁓ and then I was like the roll after that, I dove straight into a project where I was asked to build very specific things that I knew how to build. There was no how am I gonna do this? It was these are the things we need. And I did them. So
And the stuff's not you know, I was like, I've not had the time to work on passion projects. You know, it's like the the what I see a lot of people doing is they'll throw that at a little app idea they have or you know, a little whatever to handle a thing that they want to do. And I'm like, that's cool.
Eric Karkovack (03:12)
were you surprised, you know, at at that reaction from from somebody? ⁓ or is that like kind of at the in this day and age now is that just where we are?
Andrew Norcross (03:23)
Honestly, I was incredibly surprised. And the reason being is the role was looking for someone, you know, it was heavy on the experience side. so i again it wasn't a staff engineer role. It wasn't a a situation where they're where where velocity is part of the equation. You know, like th this was looking you know, basically looking for people who could just
know how to fix stuff and build stuff without without doing the same thing twice, sort of thing. And I'm like, yeah, this is perfect. That's what I've done my whole career. so, you know, it it I was surprised because I understand, you know, again, I don't necessarily agree with, but I understand where some of the AI use comes from and and what people are, you know, using it for and what they think, you know, and what they feel it might offer them.
you know, i in the realm of s specifically in software, ⁓ I think using PHP makes that a little more difficult because there's so much more of it out there and there has been because it's such a you know, much older language. Like I think AI, you know, some of these, you know, Claude tools and whatnot are probably a lot better at things like type TypeScript that have only really existed for a couple of years. you know, same thing with React. Like there's a smaller library of examples out there, so
they probably learned a lot more current valid code examples, you know. Whereas again, some of the stuff that was scraping for PHP was fifteen years old talking about using magic quotes on PHP four. That is no longer relevant. ⁓ you know, so you know
Yeah, and that's the whole thing is that it you know, again, it was scraping GitHub, it was scraping ⁓ Reddit and it was scraping all the stack exchange sites. I'm like, those have a lot of historical code that's there for archive purposes, that's there, you know, like I have a whole slew of stuff sitting in in my own personal GitHub account that nobody should ever use. Ever. It is so woefully out of date, like to the point where some of it I've actually gone and like closed it and just gotten rid of it. ⁓
But every now and then I'm like, I know I solved this problem a certain way before, let me go look, and that'll give me a place to start to go do it better. ⁓ so again, I hoard code. You know, storage space is basically free. So but otherwise, you know, again, coming back to the question of was I surprised? Absolutely. and it can it worried, yeah, not worried me, but it really discouraged me because what I realized is
There's a lot of people that got into software development to get a paycheck now. When I got into it, there wasn't even a guarantee of a good paycheck at the time. ⁓ it was the web was very nascent industry, you know, like it was just getting going. And all of these, you know, everything was open source, a lot of people were you know, but like we weren't talking about these tech companies the way that we are, and we weren't talking about these these revenue numbers that a lot of these companies are, you know, in just in the WordPress space that they're doing now.
Eric Karkovack (06:30)
Yeah.
Andrew Norcross (06:56)
⁓ you know, so it wasn't that. It was, you know, you had you were had to be a little bit weird. ⁓ you had to want to figure this stuff out because nobody had figured it out yet. ⁓ and it dr again, it attracted a certain type of person. And at a certain point that changed to learn how to code, get a good job. And all of a sudden there's a whole bunch of people that don't necessarily have that level of passion for it. They have the skill.
But they don't have the passion for it. So when you offer them a tool that's just gonna produce the outcome that they're looking for, which is ultimately the paycheck, but you know, just like I need to ship this much code, this is what I gotta do, and this tool helps me get there. I'm like, I can't be mad at that. ⁓ you know, like it it annoys me, but I can't be mad at it. And frankly, the job market is so bad right now that anybody who has a role is doing whatever they can to hold on to it, and I absolutely do not fault anybody for that.