61–70 of 304 posts
You never really could. If you hear of a (very) succesful software engineer with horrid soft skills they’re a 1%er chance wise
I’ve been hearing this since the 90’s.
So I opened this article to find out at the very beginning, that author put's a lot of money to AI providers... So probably also used it to write this article. So, according to the rule "text which is not worth of spending time on writing is also no worth of reading" I closed it.
I found out that the author of a blog post paid a maid to clean their house, and sends their laundry out. Therefore, the blog post was written by the maid, or one of the laundromat employees. So I closed it.
But would you read their blog post on laundry tips?
No - it's just as easy for you to send out your own laundry.
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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.
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.
In a team environment, half of the job is communication. That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news. But to be honest, I usually don't care to write properly into an LLM prompt. An LLM will ignore grammar and form and just extract the essence. If I make an actual mistake I will notice quickly and fix it. If I'd send slack messages like that to an peer, they'd either mock me or simply th…
> That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news.
Even a decade after Word Lens had demonstrated augmented reality live translation through a smartphone camera, I was amazing people by showing them the same feature in Google Translate.
Similar anecdotes about Shakuntala Devi, even in 2018 I was seeing claims about her mental arithmetic beating a supercomputer (claims that ignored that this happened in 1977 and the computer was already obsolete at the time), even though my mid-2013 MacBook Air could not only beat her by a factor of 150 million, it could also train an AI to read handwritten numbers from scratch in 0.225 seconds, and then perform inference (read numbers) at just over 6,629 digits per second*.
You say "old news", I say this discussion will be on repeat even in the early 2030s. And possibly even the 2060s.
* Uses an old version of python, you'll need to fix it up accordingly: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/03/16-10.44.18.html
I don't think it has ever been the case that you could neglect soft skills. You will hear this over and over, in every area of every business: people become successful by adjusting their behaviour to what works for the business. Sometimes this is called being a slick politician, sometimes it is called avoiding getting bogged down in politics. But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical thing…
There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the next ticket. While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.
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You’re right but i have always preferred people who can do a little more. Nothing against the socially awkward and conflict avoidant nature in many of these friends, but people who push back and fight to communicate their views and passions often got our team better outcomes than someone who just turns up and does the work they’re asked to do.
As long as it is not opposite set of skills (talks a lot without knowledge to back it up so essentially using charisma to convince people to do the wrong thing most of the time) then yes, a lil bit of negotiation can save you a whole lot of work in the long run (XY problems being one example)
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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?
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, com…
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.
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There are plenty of devs who do nothing beyond taking a Jira ticket scoped by others, implementing it, and then grabbing the next ticket. While they may not have been very successful, they did have a place.
Is this genuinely common? I’ve only ever seen that level of hand holding extended to new grad hires.
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I think this is kinda sad. I always thought coding was so beautiful for creating a (good paying) job for socially awkward people on the spectrum who pre-coding was considered dorks and went into idk what but probably some unsatisfying job. It seems like we're heading back to that which makes me sad and worried about the highly functioning autistic population.
I am sorry but is being employed a job or a daycare? Not only this is extremely patronizing towards all people on spectrum, but at the same time extremely hurtful statement for people who are treating employment as a job(ie - most of population). And what are you going to say to people who are stuck in low-end jobs?