If you are a strong generalist with an entrepreneurial spirit, I think I would be aiming at getting hired by a small company where you can provide a buttload of value or looking at starting something where you have domain experience outside of software.
This rings true. It is the best time ever for small teams. A big team is potentially several smaller teams, so this can be a force multiplier for them too.
Another force multiplier for reorganizing larger teams, be willing to consider smaller teams starting with single contributors.
What this is the worst time for: slow adaptation.
For what it's worth, I've heard this at jobs before, and I've never worked at Valve (or as far as I'm aware with anyone who worked at Valve previously). I think it's probably more common than just something they say.
The Job of the engineer is to be really good with the tech not business.
-formal verification
-computational fluid dynamics
-control theory
-materials science
-graphics
I think what I’m suggesting is: consider being more than just a software engineer. Become a software engineer with expertise in other fields. Or a software engineer AND a fluid simulation engineer. This might not make sense for someone who currently works at say a business SaaS company, but how much longer are those jobs going to be around?
But this is also a great time to be building your own business, in which case you may want to develop business related skills.
I reckon moving forward software will became an applied tool to the applied sciences. I mean, it always has been, but the barrier to entry has lowered for the easily verifiable, and that is programming, and not the problem being solved
I spent two days learning about quaternions to fix a buggy spaceship moving in space, when an LLM could have done it for me in seconds. A great use of my time: now I understand quaternions and I have levelled up in my knowledge, which makes me more confident to tackle larger problems in this space.
Codyu.
https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...
Coding gives the edge in creativity
Is this true though? Will the models get better and better? I'm not a hater, but Sonnet/Opus generates terrible code albeit mostly functioning code.
All these things (code, prose, sketching) are about thinking through making.
The point is if you let something think about x for you you will become worse at thinking about x.
Is that true? I'm not quite as confident as the author, but it seems plausible. I've seen a number of managers who used to write code try and fail to drive Claude as well as even the junior engineers reporting to them.
To find the same for machine code you'd need to start at 65 or older.
However, I would strongly disagree that people are no longer writing/using assembly. I was writing a bit of assembly the other day, for example.
Come on over to the game emulation, reverse engineering, exploitation writing, CTF, malware analysis, etc. hobby spaces. Knowledge of assembly is absolutely mandatory to do essentially anything useful.
'performance stuff'. i try to solve it in C for a bunch of reasons; others readability is one. almost never need to do more than a short macro of assembly embedded in C.
the actual most use of have for assembly is "what is happening here.." and need to ask the debugger for the assembly for some deeper understanding.
Some years, did these things 5 times, so maybe 20 hours. Other years, never.
As far as "sit down and write some assembly to solve problem X", the answer is never. (except when X is right in the middle of the above items)
