Comment by Quothling

> However, having a high affinity with hardware is not a driver / computer science of hiring decisions from what i can see in the enterprise software world

I think the way I worded it was maybe a little too close to just being about hardware, because performance do matter a lot in the energy industry. I do think it applies to SWE in general. You mention .NET and I've met C# developers with years of experience who couldn't tell you the difference between IEnumerable and IQueryable. I've met even more experienced Python developers who don't know what a generator is. Stuff like that, not having knowledge of the tools they use. I guess you could argue that those are bad developers, but I don't personally think that has been the case for most of them. Still, you'd rather have someone who thinks about these things rather than eventually using batches once they run into memory issues.

I also think these changes are appearing faster in non SWE enterprise. As you said, product owners who are AI explorative (for the lack of a better word) are rock stars. We see this a lot in our finance and risk departments, where domain experts now write fairly decent software with AI. My team has build them tools so that they build things the same way, use the same developer setups and pull the pre-approved external packages or are offered alternative ways of doing things. A few years ago this would've been done by these domain experts "ordering" the software they needed from our SWE team, and if they hadn't already been mostly laid off due to Putin's invasion of Ukraine changing the markets, I belive they would've been now because of AI.

Because frankly, a lot of the software that gets produced in these areas, don't need computer science, until it does, and the domain experts can make the software they need so much faster than before by vibe coding it. From my perspective it's not that much of a difference in the quality of the code that gets produced. I also had to help with performance and security when we had more software engineers on staff. Though now I do it more through writing and distributing AI agent applications rather than writing a C binary or optimising the code directly.