[leoh]

You have a pretty negative take. There are fewer software engineers with the skills you mention. But it's kind of the wrong question. Without these skills, individuals are still capable of offering tremendous value to tech companies. I work at a solid company with a great team. Those with solid CS fundamentals have certainly been profoundly helpful when designing systems that need to be performant and reliable. But other, passionate engineers with liberal arts backgrounds have added insane value to the product as well. It's about curiosity, intelligence, and thinking about what's needed to get the job done.

[kayoone]

Could not agree more. For a product company, having software engineers with diverse backgrounds can be a lot more valuable than having only super strong CS theorists (but you should have them of course). As long as the engineers are intelligent, passionate and productive, diverse backgrounds can only be a good thing. Now this is probably different for research oriented careers, but most of us are building products for customers in some form or another.

[moron4hire]

I actually doubt that there are fewer software developers who have those skills. The software industry has grown by leaps and bounds every year for decades. I suspect there are more than there were even 15 years ago.

What has also happened is that tools have improved at roughly the same rate, and the tasks to which we apply software development have also grown exponentially. So there are jobs that exist today that did not exist 15 years ago, and they just don't need these skills.