[benreesman]

I mean to be clear, I'm not drawing a conclusion from a premise: I'm making an assertion, and in fairness, that assertion is trivially false by virtue of invoking words like "anyone" and phrases like "no need". Nothing exists `forall` what I said. I'm also aware that the assertion is a flashpoint for a lot of people and extremely controversial, even when you relax propositional logic enough to admit the trivial counter-examples (intelligence is clearly not some nice, neat scalar quantity).

Nonetheless I think that everyone knows what I'm saying: which is that they're are more than enough people who can both do deep technical work and wear clothes well and work a fucking powerpoint that the industry doesn't need to resort to employing nontechnical people in roles that require both, and that outside of certain verticals, someone who knows their shit but makes iffy eye contact or stutters is still a better person to put in front of the slide deck than a slick, charismatic figure with a dim grasp of the subject matter. It's nowhere near the either/or that it is so frequently presented as, and even when presented with that either/or choice I'll take the competent nerd unless I'm selling IBM z-series boxes to credit unions or something like that.

Given that OP is on the thread I'll leave it to them to clarify the point of the article, but I will point that my reference was to a classic parody of this whole "good with people" trope that was already darkly funny long before pervasive cloud services, the vastly increased prestige in software engineering roles, exploding FAANG engineer salaries, and all the other things that have people with the right look signing up for CS classes in droves [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi25sLQ_t-k