u/oceaneer63

Years ago, I was driving up Interstate 80 in California in the Sierra Nevada mountains towing a sail plane (glider), when I pulled into a gas station to refuel. There on the curb sat a hitchhiker, carving a piece of wood with a big knife.

Now, sail plane trailers look strange. Very long and skinny for the fuselage and folded wings. A tail fin sticking high up in the back. The hitchhiker asked me what it was, and I explained. So, still holding the big knife he asked me for a ride. I normally pick up hitchhikers, but hesitated a bit first thinking how dumb it would look if I got robbed after picking up a hitchhiker with a big knife. But I said yes, yet asked him to put the knife back in his pack first.

So we drove on, talking. He was heading to the Midwest to see his sister, having experienced some trials and tribulations on the road and needing a break. It was already getting up on midnight somewhere past Reno when we came up on the Interstate exit to the glider flying club where I'd spend the week learning about cross-country flying while camping. But it is desert country and I didn't want to drop the hitchhiker in the dark in the middle of nowhere. Thinking it over, I asked him if he might want to go with me and camp there for the night; I could return him to the Interstate the next morning.

He appreciated the offer, but first there was a problem to solve. The hitchhiker had quite an odor to him, all along I had to discretely keep a window open on the drive. And since glider flying isn't a cheap sport, this club was a little fancy and participants were generally professionals in their 40s on up. I would be just a guest there, would I be crossing boundaries?

So, I took the hitchhiker to a 24-hour Walmart, asked him to select some new clothing for himself and he walked the near empty aisles under the suspicious eyes of the attendants. Later that night we both pitched our tents at the club.

The next morning it was time to go to the lively clubhouse, it would the first day of camp. The hitchhiker was now presentable, having taken a shower in the campgrounds bathhouse and wearing the fresh clothing. But I still had some trepidation of how he might be perceived among the members.

Sure enough, several known faces welcomed me and then immediately asked who this guy was. I said, "Well... its a hitchhiker... he's on his way to the Midwest to see his sister... I didnt just want to drop him at that dark exit in the middle of the night".

Soon, laughter erupted! Several asked the hitchhiker questions, told stories about their own time hitchhiking decades earlier. Food was offered to the him and a jolly good time was had by all.

Soon it would be time for classes and flying to start, and for me to return return the hitchhiker to the Interstate. But he had one request first. Could he possibly sit in the cockpit of one of those gliders? One of the guys with a particular fancy flying machine said yes. And soon the hitchhiker was sitting in the cockpit on the tarmac with just the biggest grin on his face.

Hello, this is a story to share some insights from the hiring perspective that I hope might perhaps provide some guidance for some of you juniors and students terrified by the job market and AI.

I run a small hardware tech company. It is really quite small fluctuating around ten employees and contractors. We are in the underwater technology field building instruments such as satellite tags for fish and shark. Underwater acoustic recorders that are used to study whales and their migrations. New gear for 'ropeless fishing' for pot and trap Fisheries.

We are known to be very innovative and have been around for over 30 years. But, as probably most small businesses we are also quite resource constrained and have to run a lean operation.

I am the technical founder and CEO, and as such heavily involved in all engineering aspects, including having coded much of the firmware that runs on our devices. I know C very well, and C++ somewhat. But until recently had no experience on Android or in Kotlin which is the basis of our tablet and phone based apps. We use them in particular for the ropeless fishing, and they are quite involved, involving both BLE communication with a deck box, and virtual gear marking and sharing (GIS) including a Firebase database for sharing and a further link up to an industry database for gear mark sharing among fishers that employ different manufacturers gear.

So, the story is this:

Our senior SWE, working remotely from overseas, developed all those Android apps as well as Windows / C# stuff and more. With over a decade of experience, my working relationship with him was very cool and productive. Us both being technical we quickly developed a language full of jargon that let us efficiently exchange concepts, talk about details, task things and more. I provided the overall vision and detailed specs. He converted the specs to code and together we tested the new capabilities. It went on for five years and our results became quite well regarded in our industry.

Now, some nine monts ago our developer became unavailable for personal reasons beyond his control. I didnt have the skills to continue with the coding, but dreaded taking on a new developer who would have to go through quite a learning curve now matter how senior and experienced. I interviewed a little, but that just emphasized that dilemma.

So, after having dabbled a little bit in AI already on the embedded side (where I am competent), I decided to give AI a try to make progress on these apps. Sure enough, even though I hardly ever had studied a line of Kotlin before or even installed Android Studio, it worked great! The AI of course understood the whole code base instantaneously. And after I pointed out a certain obscure bug or described a new feature needed, the result was there right away. Gemini would give me some blocks of Kotlin code to replace here or there, I would study it a bit, paste it and try. Not only that, but in the process I also got to know the developers code quite well. And it was good and well structured. But also contained obscure bugs that did result in sometimes odd and sporadic failures that were quite intractable, hard to pin down if it was some issue on the embedded side or in the app or something entirely else such as in Firebase. But these bugs were also very human. I understood from my long embedded experience how difficult it can sometimes be to hunt down a sporadic bug in a large code base.

So, I realized that the AI was in many ways a superior developer for me to partner with than realistically any human developer can be.

But here comes the pivot....

All the while this was happening, I was also working on another one of our systems. This one the acoustic recorders that are used to detect and track whales. I needed to upgrade the acoustic data processing pipeline which consisted of a bunch of console apps with .csv and .wav exchanges between them that a poor marine biologist would have to wrestle to track the whales. Now knowing a little more AI already, my approach was a central Python script that provides the GUI and manages the dataflow through the pipeline. And C++ console apps invoked by the pipeline manager for the heavy acoustic data computations. Yet, having to attend to many other tasks, the project got too big for me.

So, one day walks in an intern candidate. I didnt have anything in mind really. And the intern, a college student, had bounced from a business track with a little coding exposure (Python), to biology and now a start in Mechanical Engineering. But as we talked about whales in the ocean, and how the calls from a hypothetical whale named Humphrey would bounce around our water filled office as Humphrey traversed it, I realized something! That intern was good at visualizing all sorts of concepts in the underwater world by us just discussing them! I never even sketched anything...

And so, I realized with some trepidation that maybe, just maybe, this intern who didn't even have a CS education beyond some basic Python was just what we needed for this software development job. That his basic understanding of coding would allow him to inspect and understand Python and C++ code enough to know when the AI was going off the rails. And that his real asset was really that he learned quickly in this specific domain, i.e. the physics of underwater acoustic sound propagation and its application to whale tracking.

And so this is the lesson that might apply to many of you. CS knowledge is important for software development in the AI age. Its what allows you to work effectively with the AI and let's you avoid pit falls and maintain good code structure which a vibe coder might be oblivious to. But it should be just one part of your education. The other part should be this domain knowledge. Domain knowledge in whatever field really interests you. It could be dentistry or accounting. Rocket science or agriculture. Medicine or architecture or, well, maybe whales in the ocean.

And so I think the future for you as a junior CS could be very exciting. Because rather than staring at a computer screen while translating someone else's domain knowledge to code, you are the one who gets to merge the adventure of the domain with the structure of coding, creating products that are both effective and reliable.

Best of luck and I hope you will have a great career!

...my buddy and I were hitchhiking. It was a small country road and cars were few. After about four hours, a car finally stopped! We ran up, excited, asking for a ride. The old driver seemed grumpy, but finally growled "All right, but first get that darn horse off the road!". Astonished, we looked behind us and standing there calmly on the road was a horse. He hadn't stopped for us at all! The driver had stopped for the horse!

The year was 1984.

Oh boy oh boy! I might really get a 300L Rally within the next week or two! I had a Yamaha XT250 before, using it for trail rides on the weekends and my California central coast mountain road commute during the week. So, I decided on the Rally for the bigger tank on the trails, and the windshield to prevent me from turning popsicle on the sometimes cold, cold late night commute back home. Thats our weather here. Warm and sunny during the day, but the marine layer moves in at night and you end up shivering despite a full motorcycle suit and layers.

So, I wonder does the windshield actually make a big difference with that? It should deflect the air flow up and over you. But does it really work out that way? Do you think it will be more comfortable than my old but belived Yamaha XT250?

I have two German Shephard dogs, and frequently take one to work with me... when I am driving. They are about 90 pounds, so somewhat compact German Shephards. I wonder if anyone has figured out a practical and somewhat save way to carry a dog that size on your bike? My commute is mostly a mountain road, about 25 miles total.