ehhh. In my experience, being able to code is a necessary but not sufficient skill for a software developer. The only exceptions I've seen is having some extremely deep expertise in a niche technical field (and even then I wouldn't call that being able to code well, so much as technical domain knowledge).
When I was hiring at AWS the view for my team (RDS) was that there wasn't much difference in expectations between algorithmic coding ability for juniors and seniors. The primary technical differentiator for seniors was architectural and operational. But even more important than those was the nontechnical stuff; mentorship, being able to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly (no point in being able to architect a system if you can't communicate it in a way people understand), interacting with other teams, demonstrating understanding customer and business value, etc.
In many cases the customer and user are not the same (e.g. healthcare, Microsoft’s business, Google, et al)
- Umbrellas are about people, not rain.
- But your umbrella will keep me dry, right?
- The materials, the shape, none of it is really important.
- I'm not sure what you mean. Give me some hard numbers. How much rainfall the fabric can take? Was it built with quality?
- At the end of the day, an umbrella is just a tool.
Then I spent a few years in sales (long story) and flipped 180 degrees. Without salespeople (and the customers they bring in) there would be nobody paying our salaries and we all could just go home.
Without salespeople you can't sell software. Without developers, you can't make software. Since we all have to pay bills, selling software is of crucial importance, but that doesn't make the developers less important. It just means that the society we live in makes those who sell as important as those who make. Just like we strive to evolve software development, we should also strive to evolve the society.
I've made software that people happily used without anyone selling it to them or me earning a single cent off of it. At my age, if I had the luxury of not having to worry about money, that's the kind of thing I would be doing all the time.
Based on what the author of the article said, I would argue that he at one time felt he would have potentially been in the camp of those leading the charge against AI in the software world, but over his career he has seen that it's less about the code itself and more about what the code does.
You may be largely indifferent to the arguments raised by either side and find yourself solidly in the middle and thus this article wasn't for you. But, for those folks on either end of your viewpoint, it either attempts to sway you away from the close-to-the-heart belief that your code is special and more towards user centricity; or, it could be reinforcing what you already know.
Hope my perspective can potentially shine some light on your confusion.
Related but not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
Not having paying customers.
38127•57m ago
Enough of these code is worthless propaganda articles.
bramadityaw•40m ago