The Engineer As An Essayist

Software's cheap, now. The cost of creating software has plummeted. You might think this eliminates all software jobs, if you think the pie is fixed. It's not. I think it's more likely that startups just build more stuff and offer more services just to keep up. There's a real poverty of imagination in the fears you see running around twitter and reddit; no ability to think about what's possible, only what's under threat.

That sense of under threat is in the air today in a lot of ways. Engineers especially, as they watch a machine catch up to the capabilities they've invested a lot of time into developing. Something that's maybe being glossed over or underconsidered, I think, is the type of engineer that might have a particularly hard time adapting in this new world we're entering of "agentic coding" or whatever. Consider that interacting with claude code is really just talking; using natural language to express ideas, goals, specifications. It follows that the better communicators are going to have a better time. Which, at the programming layer, is somewhat of a shift. The engineers who possessed decent communication abilities probably always outperformed their peers at the managerial level, maybe, because they were better equipped to interface with non-technical people on the perimeter of eng, but my ability to write an essay doesn't say much about my capacity to design and implement a notification system. The engineer who could actually build one, with delivery across channels, retry logic, digest batching, the queue infrastructure, wasn't necessarily the one who could articulate all that cleanly in a meeting. They just saw it, and their fluency was in the code, not the explanation. We've all worked with engineers like this. A little pedantic and a huge drag on velocity, difficult to pair program with because they don't seem interested in collaborating and talking through their progress, but their code is so clean you love them anyways.

Now the explanation is the implementation. The person who can describe "rate limit notifications per-user so we don't spam someone forty times in a minute, but batch them into digests if they accumulate within a window" without ambiguity, that's the person who ships it. Systems thinking is still the common thread. But the interface changed. The ones coming out ahead in this new world naturally think that way, and maybe have a liberal arts degree they got by writing a lot of papers. It's an interesting pivot, not one I think that's fully appreciated; an odd extension of the "learn to code" paradigm impressed upon humanities grads like myself for a decade. But who's better equipped? Technical grads often proceed through their entire undergrad without writing a single paper. Sending emails used to be their sole venture into developing their writing muscles, but now that's been deprecated with Slack. There's an irony in that building these machines is only making the ability to communicate more crucial than ever, precisely as the liberal arts have never felt more devalued. We'll start to notice it eventually, probably, but I wonder if this will trickle down to the curriculum of technical schools. Will they teach eng-inflected versions of writing courses? "Talking to AI 101: Lessons From Steinbeck"? I'm not sure.