> If the author's vision of the future is correct, then competent software engineers are safe. Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

I think this is true in some things and less true in others.

It's a pretty high moat getting into stuff like simulation software because the people working on numerical methods overwhelmingly have PhDs and it's a mixed skill set. Domain expertise here requires you to know maths to a high level. Even mechanical engineers often struggle here; it's often applied mathematicians and physicists turned devs that work on this stuff.

I worked on a fairly gnarly signal processing thing a while back that required bringing together knowledge of physics and software and maths and I found explaining it to people was tricky as their eyes glazed over at some point because their knowledge typically only covered one part of those.

How is "without being able to really put it in words" a mark of experience? Surely an engineer should be able to justify why an architecture should be arranged the way it is!

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