The bar is higher

Speed of execution, a willingness to experiment, agility, taste, an understanding of the needs of the people and organizations around you.

These are things that will become increasingly necessary for engineers and tech workers in the future. We’ve sort of been living life in easy mode thus far, with some exceptions. I got started when just having a pulse and a relative understanding of how to write a for-loop in Python was enough to net you an $80k/year job. Thirty market crashes later, we landed in the Singularity and now shit is getting harder.

You don’t get to coast into a software development role anymore. You have to know what you’re doing and know how to do it fast and at scale. I think in some places, coding agents have made it easier for slopdevs to get their foot in the door, but from what I’ve seen, the expectations are higher. You have to have a solid solutions architecture capability to understand The Full System, because you’re not working on a tiny part of it anymore. You’re building it form scratch or maintaining it.

In cyber security, things are still lagging behind, but not by too much. A massive increase in vulnerabilities, exploits, malware and incidents, from a baseline that was already extremely high relative to hiring and headcount, means that you better be able to hit the ground running as a junior.

Now that AI is very good at building, the To-Do list apps, personal resume sites built from React or static HTML and some passable CSS and basic web scraping blogs aren’t going to cut it. That’s 2 prompts worth of work, and hiring managers know that. I’m betting good money that the expectations for resume-building side projects tomorrow are going to look like indie hacker full-stack web app startups of yesterday. The bar is high because the work has changed.

What you’re proving now, to hiring managers, your peers, higher ups, the market, the media, whoever, is not that you know how to code. You just barely need to know that now. What you’re proving now is that you know how to understand. You know how to build technology, not just an app but an idea, into something fleshed out and meaningful. You’re proving that you have the agency and speed of execution to go from an idea to an MVP in a very short period of time, and then the understanding to iterate on bugs, feature requests or new ideas.

You’re proving taste, not just the taste required to have good or interesting or novel ideas, but the taste to execute on those ideas… tastefully. The coding part of design is solved. Centering a div is not something you’ll need to know how to do anymore. The taste part of design is not solved, and if you decide not to solve it yourself, you’ll churn out the same vibecoded slop UI as everyone else. Ask me how I know, and I’ll point you at my very own sites.

You’re proving an understanding of the world and the environment around you. Rebuilding Moltbook is a pointless effort unless you simply do not understand the world and environment as it exists. Rebuilding a coding agent without explaining what problems that Claude Code or Codex have that you’re fixing is a fruitless effort outside of a resume project. If you’re working on AI infrastructure, you need to be able to explain what problem it is that you’re solving and that you understand, deeply, the gap you’re trying to fill.

The bar is higher. A lot of the discourse I’ve heard about it amounts to very little more than whining that all of a sudden one of the most historically overcompensated classes of knowledge worker, the software engineer, is now being held to higher standards than writing for loops or React components.

Go meet the bar, or shut up.