It's a good point, and I keep hearing it often, but it has one flaw.
It assumes that most engineers are in contact with the end customer, while in reality they are not. Most engineers are going through a PM whose role is to do what you described: speak with customers, understand what they want and somehow translate it to a language that the engineers will understand and in turn translate it into code. (Edit), the other part are "IC" roles like tech-lead/staff/etc, but the ratio between ICs and Engineers is, my estimate, around 1:10/20. So the majority of engineers are purely writing code, and engage in supporting actions around code (tech documentation, code reviews, pair programming, etc).
Now, my questions is as follows -- who has a bigger rate of employability in post LLM-superiority world: (1) a good technical software engineer with poor people/communication skills or (2) a good communicator (such as a PM) with poor software engineering skills?
I bet on 2, and as one of the comments says, if I had to future proof my career, I would move as fast as possible to a position that requires me to speak with people, be it other people in the org or customers.
It assumes that most engineers are in contact with the end customer, while in reality they are not. Most engineers are going through a PM whose role is to do what you described: speak with customers, understand what they want and somehow translate it to a language that the engineers will understand and in turn translate it into code. (Edit), the other part are "IC" roles like tech-lead/staff/etc, but the ratio between ICs and Engineers is, my estimate, around 1:10/20. So the majority of engineers are purely writing code, and engage in supporting actions around code (tech documentation, code reviews, pair programming, etc).
Now, my questions is as follows -- who has a bigger rate of employability in post LLM-superiority world: (1) a good technical software engineer with poor people/communication skills or (2) a good communicator (such as a PM) with poor software engineering skills?
I bet on 2, and as one of the comments says, if I had to future proof my career, I would move as fast as possible to a position that requires me to speak with people, be it other people in the org or customers.