Comment by CrulesAll
15 hours ago
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.
Computer science is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced maths.
The AI can already do that part.
The abstraction that matters going forward, is understanding why the abstraction chosen by the AI does or doesn't match the one needed by the customer's "big picture".
The AI is a bit too self-congratulatory in that regard, even if it can sometimes spot its own mistakes.
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> I don't know how else to say that.
Yep, exactly. The failure to realize that you mean different things when talking about "larger abstractions" is exactly the kind of miscommunication that software people will need to navigate better in the future.
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Ah, I think “Math” as a single word on its means many different things to many different people, I didn’t interpret in quite the same way. But I see what you mean.
I’m not sure that my colleagues who I think of as “good at math” and “good at thinking in larger abstractions” are necessarily the same ones, but there’s definitely a lot of overlap.
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