If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology.
On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity.
You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough.
Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
Those levels bake in the expectation of "codez real gud" at FAANG/MANGA/whatever style tech companies since the technical complexity of their operations is high and a high skill bar needs to be hurdled over to contribute to most of those codebases and make impact at the scale they operate at.
One's ability to reverse a binary tree (which is a BS filter, but it is what it is) hasn't been an indicator of ability in some time. What _is_ though, is the wherewithall to understand _when_ that's important and tradeoffs that come with doing that versus using other data structures or systems (in the macro).
My concern is that, assuming today's trajectory of AI services and tooling, the need to understand these fundamentals will become less important over time as the value of "code" as a concept decreases. In a world where prompting is cheap because AI is writing all the code and code no longer matters, then, realistically, tech will be treated even more aggressively as a line item to optimize.
This is a sad reality for people like me whose love for computers and programming got them into this career. Tech has been a great way to make a wonderful living for a long time, and it's unfortunate that we're robbing future generations of what we took for granted.
You give way too much credit to the average mid level developer at BigTech. A lot of the scalability is built in and they just built on top of it.
There are millions of people that can code as well as you are I and a lot cheaper if you are in the US. Thousands of developers have been laid off over the last three years and tech companies keep going strong - what does that tell you?
I’m just as happy to get away from writing for loops in 2026 as was to be able to get away with LDA, LDX and BRA instructions once I could write performant code in C.
And how are we robbing future generations? Because some of us (not that I can take credit for any of it) move the state of technology from the 1Mhz Apple //e I had in 1986?
Fundamentals will become more important as the industry bifurcates into a small but irreplaceable pool of software engineers who do know the fundamentals and an ocean of dime-a-dozen LLM operators.
> Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”
Your entire comment is this specific strawman - no one, and I mean no one, is making this claim! You are the only one who is (ironically, considering the job you do) too tone-deaf and too self-unaware to avoid making this argument.
I'm merely pointing out that your value-prop is based on a solid technical foundation, which I feel you agree on:
> If not the technical person, then who? It’s a lot easier for a technical person to learn how to talk the language of the business than a business person to have a deep understanding of technology.
The argument is not "Oh boo hoo, I wish I could spend 8 hours a day coding for money like I used to", so stop pretending like it is.
There is an entire contingent of comments here who miss translating requirements into code.
Even the comment I replied to mentioned “being a BA” like the most important quality of a software engineer is their ability to translate requirements into code.
It's that the erosion and atrophying of the fundamental skill that made you (or, in this case, the GP) valuable is a matter of concern, because you (or GP, as the case may be) are willingly embracing the fact that you will be no more valuable than the average office office worker, and so can expect that compensation will drop to match.
As an example, moving to Python from C was was moving to a higher level of abstraction, but it still didn't jettison the need for actually knowing how to program!
Moving to LLMs from Python does jettison any need to know what an object is, what "parse, don't validate" actually means, etc.
If the problem you are solving with the LLM doesn't need that knowledge, then that job doesn't need all those valuable programming skills anyway, and thus you are no more valuable than the average clerk toiling away in the middle of some organisation.
I guess the entire thing is I like building working systems.
I love talking to business folks, I love when I can do that “git init”. I love that new AWS account smell and molding a complete architecture.
Now I can do a lot more if it by myself. It was a time problem before - not a knowledge problem
What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation. They can pay someone a lot less than me (or any American - I’m in no way bragging about comp) to code.
Companies don’t pay my employer the bill rate they charge for me based on how well I code. While I’ve been expected to produce production level code as part of my job across 5 companies in the past decade not a single one asked me to write a line of code as part of the interview. They were much more concerned about ability to get things done.
Ironically, even the job at BigTech that landed in my lap was all behavioral (AWS ProServe). I damn sure didn’t get that job because of my whopping two years of AWS experience at the time. Most of my answers for “tell me about a time when…” were leading non AWS projects.
I’m not bragging - I’m old. My competitive advantage should be more than just my coding ability.
> What has made me valuable for 30 years is an ability to go from business goal -> to working implementation.
Look, it seems we are at about the same level of industry experience. I'm not even a f/time programmer anymore, and haven't been for some time (technically, I'm a professional problem solver, I suppose).
I am saying that, while I don't need to delve into details (unless it's a hobby project), what makes me valuable (in a similar position that you have, except that I don't write a line of code) is the current ability to program.
I (and you, no doubt) would be useless in the type of position that you are in if you didn't sweat blood earlier in your career getting things right while programming.
What I am saying is that my entire value proposition is built on a high skill level in programming. Letting those skills atrophy is, in my opinion, devaluing myself.
I hate to sound like a broken record. But I consider my skillset at 51 all of the things I said that involve getting from signed contract to happy customer at the end. I’m actually slowly working on moving even further up and becoming halfway competent at pre-sales.
You cdn substitute customer for “the business”.
When you step back “the code” is the smallest part. Once I learned how to take a holistic view of the entire system - I specialize in AWS architecture + app dev - including how to deal with people.
In enterprise dev - no one cares about the code - they care about functionality. They never cared about the code. In large tech companies they have to care about the code.
As a manager though, I bet you understand the architecture, the politics, the business, the security posture, the financial implications, etc of everything you are responsible for.
Wouldn’t you agree that your skillset is more valuable than your coders? Again with the assumption that you aren’t working in BigTech or equivalent where every optimization is at a scale that it matters.
On the enterprise dev side of the industry where most developers work, I saw a decade ago that if I were just a ticket taker who turned well defined requirements into for loop and if statements, that was an undifferentiated commodity.
You’re seeing now that even on the BigTech side knowing how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard is not enough.
Also if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, their leveling guidelines above mid level are based on scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity - not “I codez real gud”