alt Hacker News> 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.
> It's a pretty high moat getting into stuff like simulation software
I'm currently working on a simulation/game about space and orbital mechanics. I have a lot of software experience, I know how to build large projects and architect my code, and I know how to to test the end result to ensure I'm getting what I want. But I also don't have a strong math or physics background. In my experience, Claude (Opus 4.6+) has had no issues writing any simulation or game related math code. And the key thing is, I don't need to have a PhD in astrophysics to verify interactively and visually that everything is working as I expect to. I just have an interest in space, and a basic understanding of the physics involved.
> it's often applied mathematicians and physicists turned devs that work on this stuff.
It's true that this has been the case, but I also would not have been able to implement what I'm doing now without these models (at least without dedicated a huge amount of time on learning all of the physics and math). So I think this domain specific knowledge is becoming less of a moat than people realize. At least that's my perspective on the specific area I'm working on, but I don't have a hard time believing it extends to other domains, provided there is ample information about them online to have trained on.