Comment by elendilm
10 hours ago
"So the most valuable person in this new world is the one who has both skills because they can verify at both layers. They know the generated code is sound and they know the answers it produces are true."
This has always been true since the dawn of programming.
Cannot agree.
Whole TFA doesn’t take into account reason why software development was actually so valuable.
Single specialist in any domain is not that valuable. You may charge $200 for hour of his time sure. But to grow company you now need N specialists.
What software was doing was not making specialist obsolete replacing a specialist by encoding his knowledge - well many tried to do so but failed even in 80’s “expert systems”.
What software was doing was making it possible to structure specialist work, make it possible for a single specialist to serve more customers at the same time, make it possible to hand over work in a structured way to junior specialists, making it easier for senior to take over edge cases and spot check work of those junior specialists.
This setup allows company to not being tied to number of specialists to grow, this setup allows company to charge less per customer but take over more of the market share.
Whole premise that now each specialist will waste time dabbling in AI software development is ludicrous, especially if each specialist would be building his own tooling somehow.
That sounds more like the extractive setup of corporations like IBM, where return/specialist must be maximized against the number of clients that can be juggled simultaneously.
Whereas in larger technology firms, yes that happens to some degree, but only with the highest level specialists such as PEs, fellows, etc.
They are already so wildly profitable and valuable by the simple nature of computing itself: it scales second only to money with regards to compounding effects. Once you have software someone can use, it scales near infinitely to more users, thus value is extracted from the work of a single specialist for all time. No need to complicate it with trying to abstract work juniors can do (and fail) and then have seniors correct. What would they be doing in non-extractive firms?
Yes, but most people (especially a large portion on HN and Reddit) do not internalize it.
A SWE who has always worked in DevTooling companies will always be preferred by DevTooling companies over a generalist. A SWE who has always worked in AdTech will always be preferred by AdTech companies over a generalist. etc etc.
Software fundamentals - though useful - are table stakes skills at this point. No business wants to deal with the headache of on-ramping employees who have never worked in a specific domain or industry because it takes too long for a generalist employee to build the intuition needed to understand that segment of the industry.
> Software fundamentals - though useful - are table stakes skills at this point.
I'm having a difficult time even seeing what we're talking about here. I see "seniors" in our industry that don't know what I would call the fundamentals of programming or software development; apparently not all fundamentals are created equal.
And therefore there will be a huge knowledge gap as companies refuse to hire anyone who hasn't worked in the field for 5+ years and people who want to work in that field but haven't don't get hired.
Not really. Most people continue to remain in a specific domain from their internship days, and professional networks develop.
Historically, startups were the traditional path for a generalist to build domain expertise because most startups couldn't be picky with talent, but the market has changed.
In all honesty, too much fat did develop in the tech industry over the last 6 years. Traditional hiring pipelines (eg. Limiting early career recruiting to grads from top 10-20 CS/ECE/EECS programs nationally along with Vets and some grads from decent regional programs) still net good calibre talent worth their weight in gold, but others just aren't working out.
2 replies →
> No business wants to deal with the headache of on-ramping employees who have never worked in a specific domain or industry…
The usual sickness. If you don’t train people to become specialists and just expect them to fall from the sky, it’s only a question of time until you run out of specialists.