Scott Wu: recommendation

Transcript context

…I'd love your perspective there. And then two, for people that are engineers today, what skills do you think will be more and more important and then less important in this discussion of moving from bricklayer to architect? Yeah, for sure. I love this question. First of all, the question of whether you should still learn to code, my answer would be absolutely yes. I think, to a large extent, when you take computer science classes and when you learn these fundamentals, sure you're learning a little bit about how a particular language is, syntax works or something like that. But honestly, most of what you're learning really is about the ability to logically break down problems for number one. And two, I would say is just the model of a computer and a lot of these decisions and a lot of the abstractions that we've built over time. What is a database and how should you think about a database? What is a garbage collection system and how do those work and all of these different pieces? The reason I think that's important is because it's the same with a lot of these other... Arguably we've already gone through these phases in programming and I think this next one is going to be somewhat faster and somewhat bigger, but in many ways a similar flavor, which is when you work with Python today, obviously, a lot of things are already abstracted away from you. In some sense, someone from 50 years ago might already call Python. You just get to explain in English what you want and now the computer does it for you. That's great and I think it's really powerful. It's opened it up. I mean, we have far more programmers, obviously, than we ever have before because of that, but I would say certainly as you're building your skills as an engineer, it really helps a lot to understand the abstractions and to be able to peel the layers beneath. Folks will use assembly for example if they're really performance optimizing a piece of code, but also in order to build good systems and to understand these things, you certainly want to understand these abstractions of how does networking work. What is TCP/IP like exactly or what happens with this Python code when it gets interpreted or all of these details. Similarly, I think we will get to a state where, with no experience at all, you're going to be able to build some pretty cool stuff and to do some pretty amazing work just by explaining what it is that you want. But I think that, for quite some time, you really want to be able to think precisely about the details, to peel back the abstractions, to be very precise about what it is that you want to build and how. And then for skills that you think are more and more valuable for engineers, where should engineers today be leaning more and more into versus like, "Forget this. I don't need to think about this anymore"?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.