Comment by flitzofolov
15 hours ago
Can you elaborate on this?
What are some examples of skills you think are now essential, that prior have been taken for granted or obviated in some way?
15 hours ago
Can you elaborate on this?
What are some examples of skills you think are now essential, that prior have been taken for granted or obviated in some way?
My rule of thumb is that if you’re not measuring anything you’re not engineering. It’s not the whole picture, but to me the engineering part sometimes means being able to explain (and even quantify) why one solution is better than another.
I've found coding assistants to be a huge boon for this. All of the thorough analysis that previously would've taken a bunch of tedious extra thought work to do for marginal benefit (with a well-calibrated intuition) becomes 5 seconds of thought to the the computer to build a harness and then letting it chew on that for 15 minutes. It now also takes me one command and less than a minute to get pprof captures from all the production services my team owns (thanks to some scripts I had it write), which is just something I never would've bothered to automate otherwise, so we never really looked much at it. Codex is also very good at analyzing the results, and finding easy wins vs. knowing what would be invasive to improve, and then just doing it.
Thinking of seeing if I can get mutation testing set up next, and expanding our use of fuzzing. All of these techniques that I know about but haven't had the time to do are suddenly more feasible to invest into.
Not the original author, but I would guess that understanding the domain problem and interpreting it correctly in a software solution (not code, but a product with workflows, UX, etc.), which in turn requires ability to listen and understand and ask right questions on one hand (what a user wants to achieve), and a good understanding of the technical limitations as well as human habits on the other hand (what is possible and makes sense). One can argue that AI lacks what we'd call intuition and interpersonal qualities which are still necessary, as before AI.
Read further into the comment.
Your $300k+ TC job is going away. The only way you'll make the same take home is if you provide more value.
You can be a robotic IC, but you won't be any better than a beginner with Claude Code. You have to level up your communication and organizational value to stay at the top.
Everyone has to wear the cloth of a senior engineer now to simply stay in place. If you can't write well, communicate well, plan and organize, you're not providing more value than a Claude-enhanced junior.
> If you can't write well, communicate well, plan and organize,
Why not ask the LLM to write for you? Same for planning, organization and written communication.
Seems like robotic ICs can "robotize" most of the work stack.
"If you can't write well, communicate well, plan and organize" Straw man. Pretty sure, this is the dilbert equivalent of "I can problem solve". If you are an engineer, we are making boatloads being brought in to fix the incompetence of this level of thinking. INFOSEC alone is having a field day.
Would you like to buy a bridge? Coded by Claude. One previous owner. An owner who used said bridge to go to church once a week, and vibe code in Starbucks afterwoods.
How about the skill of saving hard disk space, memory, and CPU cycles, for a start? The skill of designing simple, reliable, fast, and efficient things, instead of giant complex bloated unreliable pieces of shit? How about a simple, usable web page that doesn't drag my machine to a crawl, despite its supercomputer-like ability to process billions of instructions per second and hold billions of bytes of data in working memory?
Remember when BIOS computers used to boot in seconds, reliably? When chat clients didn't require an embedded copy of Chromium? When appliances and automobiles didn't fall apart in 6 months, costing thousands to "repair" or just needing to be thrown away and bought again?
Remember when there used to be these things called "machine shops" and "Radio Shacks" and "parts stores" that people who built things frequented? Now most people have to call AAA if they get a flat tire. Changing their own oil is out of the question. "Eww, dirty oil, on my clean fingernails?" Many couldn't tell you which end is which on a screwdriver if their life depended on it.
I'd say these concepts are pretty essential, especially for any nation entertaining delusions of waging Total War against other big and powerful nations. Wasteful and foolish nations lose wars.
Beyond engineering itself, strictly computer engineering? How many coders have no idea what goes on behind an IDE. Have not even the slightest notion how a computer works. Who thinks building a computer means watching a Youtube video and buying ready made parts, putting them together, and then think they should be employed by NASA.
To begin: Math, Linux, Devops, C, and Assembly. Not a youtube video. Not arithmetic. Learn to the point that you could be employed by any of the above as a senior. And don't fear failure. Keep doing it until you understand it.
I agree with your original post that the need for hard skills will persist, but I see it in the other direction: software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions, not deeper understanding of the stack. Those who can only solve problems locally and repeat the patterns they've seen before rather than create new patterns from building blocks are the ones who are going to struggle.
"software engineers are going to have to get better at thinking in larger abstractions" ........Math was first on my list. I don't know how else to say that.
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