When the inexperienced move to become rare and on the frontier, sure they get an advantage but the field doesn’t get the benefit, they do. This is why the early days of Node were awful. So many jr devs (that’s being generous, mostly designers with a base knowledge of js) were jumping from writing front ends to entire stacks. They won, the stacks lost.

Experience matters and it’s an advantage, that’s not a reason for new people not to compete but rather one to understand that context and use it to help them grow.

If you've actually mastered that quadrant - why would you be an engineer? Learn fundraising too (which in this environment is super-easy if you're AI-related, I've heard multiple reports of people in their 20s being offered $5M+ in seed funding if they start a company that has "AI" in the name) and make them acquire you. If you've got management and sales skills your startup might even succeed before they acquire you.

Ironic article that describes 'AI Engineering' as the frontier skill that separates you from the crowd. No - in this era of workslop everyone and their grandmother is an 'AI Engineer', being the one guy who can read the spec and debug the kubernetes yaml is actually going to separate you from the rest.

There are some good kernels of wisdom in this article but it goes a little too LinkedIn-influencer style with the extreme proclamations.

> Swarms of others have been developing expertise with technologies that emerged last decade for… at least a decade. It’s already their superpower. It’s unlikely to become yours, too.

I agree that juniors should be open to experimenting with new technology, but they shouldn’t ignore the basics. It’s true that you’re probably not going to become the premier React expert and rise to the top of the field, but that’s not a good goal to start with anyway. Knowing some core technologies well is basically mandatory so you have something to build upon.

It’s also key to being able to get a job. Being the junior who doesn’t have much foundational knowledge but has a bunch of surface level frontier AI experiments they don’t really understand in their GitHub portfolio is not a good place to be, but I’m seeing more and more junior applicants like this. They follow articles like this and think that learning anything that isn’t extreme cutting edge is a waste of their time. The result is a junior who doesn’t really have a good foundation of the basics, but also doesn’t really have the skills necessary to understand the frontier AI work they’ve been trying to get on to their resume.

So exploring and experimenting is good, but don’t neglect the mature technologies. Those mature technologies are what’s going to get you the job. Don’t become the person with the “AI engineer” resume who can’t do simple interview questions to demonstrate basic understanding of the boring things.

another article singing the praises of asking an LLM to write code

The 'western front' was a lot more like the ending of Blackadder than a place with a lot of rapid innovation, from my understanding of history.

Highly AI generated article, including the whiteboard image.

the main thing "rare" engineers would have in common is that they think for themselves and dont need preachy blog posts with ambiguously sexist AI graphics to tell them how.

The Western Front has a different context in Europe, the trenches of WW1. I'm not sure what it means in the American context but maybe it's referring to the westward expansion and colonisation?

"Your employability is higher if you get good at doing things that few other people are good at doing."

There, I just condensed the entire article into one sentence.

It seems contradictory to move to new and rare technologies with clear customer outcomes.

Would it be wrong to say the advice is to hype chase, lean into new stuff and bail quickly when it's not working out?

At least the advice about how the goal is to serve the customer not the tech is good.