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I'm a Software Engineer and I think the author is probably right that many Software Engineers are misguidedly placing too much weight on their ability to read and write code. The valuable part of Software Engineering isn't PARSING a solution into code and back again, taking into account all the idiosyncrasies and edge casey bugs of any given language chosen for the implementation. Of course that is a discrete and impressive skill, but it's no longer terribly valuable. The valuable part of Software Engineering is "given this problem, what's an elegant, efficient, testable, scalable, maintainable, observable solution?". Most of CS is already a solved problem, so even that is mostly a matter of assembling those solved-problem pieces together and choosing the flavor of how it's expressed. (for me, it's pure functions, for others, it might be OOP) AIs are pretty good at that too, so it seems to me like the Software Engineers role is now to cultivate taste (what, in a perfect world, systems SHOULD look like) and balance it with pragmatism. (what does the system/business/time/resource constraints look like TODAY) |