I run interviews every week. Around minute 25, I ask about customer-facing experience. Have you sat in front of the people who use what you build? The answer I get most often: “That’s not really my cup of tea.”
A few minutes later, I ask a Python engineer which metrics he’d use to autoscale the service he just described. “That’s more of a DevOps question.”
Two answers. Same excuse. There’s a border, and the candidate has decided everything on the other side belongs to someone else.
Before tech, I captained a warship. 20 people, 30 months at sea. Out there, you master skills that have nothing to do with your specialty, because a ship where everyone stays in his lane and nobody talks to the next station is a ship that sinks. “Not my cup of tea” doesn’t exist at sea. So, when I hear the border excuse in an interview, I don’t hear a preference. I hear a ceiling the candidate built himself.
The market flipped, and the candidates didn’t
LinkedIn’s Most In-Demand Skills report put communication at number one for 2024, second year running, above every hard skill on the list. Its Skills on the Rise report for 2026, built from a billion member profiles, puts AI literacy at the top of the technical side, while soft skills take seven of the top ten spots overall, including conflict mitigation and public speaking.
None of this is new, either. Harvard economist David Deming showed it back in 2017: between 1980 and 2012, the jobs that run on human interaction expanded their slice of the American workforce by 12 points. The loner jobs built on pure math, plenty of STEM in there, lost ground. AI didn’t start the fire. It poured fuel on it.
Meanwhile, the skill we spent 20 years paying a premium for is getting commoditized in real time. Developers themselves put the figure at 42% of their committed code now being written or assisted by AI, up from 6% in 2023, per Sonar’s State of Code survey. At Cloudflare, 97% of the engineering org now codes with AI tools, and every production code contribution gets reviewed by autonomous AI agents. That came from their Q1 2026 earnings call, not a keynote. Companies can hype a keynote. They get sued over an earnings call.
A large slice of what a mid-level engineer did in 2019 is now a prompt and a review. I don’t need to convince a CIO of that in 2026. The invoices already did.
The typing got cheap. The judgment didn’t.
To be clear, nobody commoditized deep technical understanding. What got cheap is the typing. And the moment typing got cheap, judgment got expensive. Somebody still has to decide what deserves to be built, what gets skipped and which team burns its budget on which problem. A model spits out options all day long. It won’t pick one for you. That call needs a human who understands the whole board, and those humans are exactly what the silo never produces.
Which is why that ceiling from the interview room is so loud. An engineer who caps his own understanding in 2026 is announcing he hasn’t understood what’s happening around him.
Code got cheap. Talking got expensive. Nobody repriced their career.
So, what’s rare now? The engineer who can walk a VP of Sales through a tradeoff without once mentioning the stack. The one who can take an angry customer’s call, all 40 minutes of it, and stay curious instead of defensive. Every year my interviews surface fewer people who can pull off either one. No study backs this. My notes do.
How we got here
Covid killed the hallway and we buried it with a hybrid policy. The arguments at the whiteboard, the “got a sec?” over someone’s shoulder, they all migrated into Slack. Problem is, nobody can grab your shoulder in Slack. You can go dark for a whole day, and the tool calls it focus.
Then the productivity religion redefined talking as a waste. I’ve read the books; some of it is right. But a whole generation absorbed the gist without the nuance, and the gist is: every human interaction is an interruption. A customer call is somebody else’s job.
We made it worse ourselves. Twenty years of interview loops built around algorithm puzzles selected, at scale, for people who perform best alone with a screen. Then we act surprised they’d rather be alone with a screen. And we split teams by tool instead of by problem. Python people here, Kubernetes people there and when a request landed on the seam, we invented a word for the seam. DevOps was supposed to be a culture. It became a tag you put on a ticket, so it stops being yours.
And at some point, the teams inside the building started acting like strangers doing business. The team next door stopped being colleagues and became “a service we consume.” You file a ticket, you wait for the SLA, you never hear a human voice. With an outside provider, fine, that’s the deal. Inside one company, on one platform? That’s two crews on the same ship passing notes under the door. Somewhere along the line we decided a 10-minute conversation costs more than a three-day ticket loop.
That’s on us. On CIOs, on CTOs, on CEOs, on me.
The perfect colleague
Then AI showed up as the perfect colleague. Never interrupts. Never needs the context twice. Never has an opinion you didn’t ask for. Never makes you feel stupid for asking. Available at 2 AM, and I have tested that more times than I should admit. And it’s addictive in a way nothing in this job has been before. You open the IDE, you describe, the thing appears, you push, you describe the next thing. Hours go by. Nobody interrupted you, and nobody disagreed with you. Feels like the most productive day of your career. Some days it is. I feel the pull myself, and I have been managing people for more than 22 years.
Thing is, it compounds. Communication is a muscle, and the reps used to come for free: the standup, the design argument, the customer who called because the ticket wasn’t clear, the product manager who wanted it explained again. Every one of those reps now has a substitute that doesn’t talk back. Reps drop to zero. Muscle goes. The next customer call feels harder than the last one, so you avoid it a bit more, so the muscle goes faster. Nobody decides to get worse at talking to people. It happens one quiet, very productive day at a time.
Twelve months of that and a senior engineer who used to run design reviews can’t hold a room. He won’t notice. His manager will.
So, we need generalists now?
Wrong conclusion, and I hear it from CIOs weekly.
We don’t need generalists. We need people willing to level up. To combine pieces, they never had to combine, because for 20 years the org chart did it for them. The barrier has never been lower. It used to take a course and a colleague with spare time. Now it takes a model and the willingness to ask. The excuse is gone.
Does that make you less of a specialist? Of course not. It makes you a better one, because the silo was constraining your understanding, and you couldn’t see it from inside.
The autoscaling question. Which metrics actually drive scaling for the service you wrote, and why those? People park it one desk over. A software engineer should own it, because every answer depends on the code he wrote. A senior should have known before I asked.
AI made breadth cheap. The specialist’s excuse died. The specialist didn’t.
The ones who ignore all this won’t get fired. Nothing that dramatic. Their work will simply dry up around them. The product manager who used to bring them questions now asks the model instead. Fewer requests land on their desk. Their salary stops moving. Then one day they test the market, search for “Python developer” openings, and find the titles changed while they weren’t looking. Firms now ask for web engineers, people who own the whole picture, front to back. Nobody sent a memo. The market repriced the role quietly, while they kept their head down in their lane.
The customer border
Not long ago I had a problem with a flight and spent days trying to reach my airline. Every path led to a bot. No phone number for a human anywhere, and my case was the one in a million the flows were never built for. I ended up driving to the airport to talk to a person at a desk. Think about that. I build conversational AI for a living and even I couldn’t find the human. The bots handled the million. The airport desk handled me.
Years around customer experience taught me to admit this out loud: there are moments a customer needs a person. When the system is down at 11 PM and the quarter closes tomorrow, nobody wants a knowledge base. They want a human who owns the problem and says so. You can’t prompt your way through an angry customer. And you can’t force people to stop feeling human when things go wrong. Sentimental beings, all of us. That need is not going anywhere.
I know exactly where the bot stops and the human starts, because that handoff is the product I build. The engineer who never sat in the escalation queue designs that moment from a spec sheet. The one who sat there writes different code. Different priorities. Fewer features nobody asked for.
The bot gives you the answer. The customer gives you the problem you didn’t know you had. Only the second one compounds into judgment.
Customer-facing is not sales
Part of the resistance, and I see this in interviews constantly, is a misunderstanding. Engineers hear “customer facing” and think sales. They picture memorizing everything, defending the firm with skills they don’t have, performing some salesy theater. Wrong on every count. Customers reward honesty. They respect the engineer who says, “I don’t know, let me check” and actually comes back. And customers idolize the tech people who visibly care about their problem, because that is rare.
I watched it happen recently. In a QBR, the quarterly review we run with customers, one of them asked for a technical representative in every meeting going forward, next to the project side. I added an architect to the rotation. The customer loved it. The architect gained more. He was doing this work already, just never in front of the people paying for it. Now he had to structure his thinking, prepare and answer live questions with no editor between him and the room. He leveled up within a quarter. The runbooks existed before. The documentation existed. What changed was one man willing to step out of his comfort zone and take pride in his work in front of the people who use it.
So, should engineers run customer sessions? The willing ones. And here I’ll argue with an earlier version of myself, because I used to think you assign this like a watch bill, the duty roster of a ship. You can assign exposure. You can’t assign mastery.
On my ship, the officers who grew into command were never the ones I had to push toward the bridge. They were the ones already up there off duty, asking about the next qualification. Same in engineering. Introvert is a personality. Unwilling is a decision.
Four moves, starting Monday
Change the interview loop. Add one round where the candidate explains his system to someone outside tech and gets interrupted with naive questions. Then ask him something one desk over from his specialty. Watch the reaction. The reaction is what you’re hiring.
Coach the ones who raise their hand. Some engineers struggle in front of customers, know it and want to fix it. Give them real budget: training, shadowing, a debrief after every session. Film review, like athletes do. Nothing you fund this year will return more.
Stop persuading the rest. If someone needs a campaign to see why this matters, he will never put in the work the skill demands. Nobody masters a craft he was talked into. Spend that energy on the willing.
Organize by problem, not by tool. If a customer request always needs two teams and a handoff, fix the org chart, not the request. And kill the internal vendor act. One platform, one crew.
The part nobody wants to hear
Communication was never a soft skill. We just called it that while code was the expensive thing. Code isn’t expensive or scarce anymore. What’s left is the muscle we let atrophy and the border we let people hide behind.
AI can accelerate everything except experience. Sitting with a human who’s frustrated with your product still takes reps.
Find the ones who want the reps. Bet on them.