Seeing Talent

The developers I have truly enjoyed working with over the years have been the ones who can see and think far beyond the requirement in front of them. They ask probing questions, pressure-test assumptions and think through things that can and will go wrong. The design process is long and the team can remain at an impasse for weeks because the all proposed solutions are problematic in one way or another. Implementation once it begins, goes smoothly and the results are great. 

This is the kind of talent any company would want to pay for and coding is the very small subset of the skills they would be paying for. It should not have taken AI to highlight this and neither does it help that the lowest level coding jobs can now be somewhat automated - those were not jobs worth doing to begin and those who could not differentiate between the levels of caliber cannot be helped even by AI. I would argue their conditions will only grow worse. 

Companies that might have compromised on what they were looking for in the past don’t anymore, Sutton said, although some of the skill sets have changed. Companies want candidates who can go beyond writing lines of code and think critically about how to solve problems through technology. Communication skills are also desired, he added.

“The world is becoming more competitive. The bar for talent and the expectation of talent has just risen,” said Jason Gowans, Levi Strauss & Co. chief digital and technology officer.