I Asked Microsoft’s CEO How To Get Hired (Satya Nadella)

So, as the CEO of Microsoft, in this world of AI, if I'm a beginner, just want to break into tech, what's your number one piece of advice? Just getting real fundamentals on sort of software. If you're a software engineer, I think still matters a lot. To me, having the ability to think computationally, because even if you get the levels of abstraction, right, like this morning, one of the demos I did was even I could go and fix a bug because it was assigned to me by just assigning it to a co-pilot coding agent. Except I was thinking about it, it was a pretty cool issue, right? The issue was, hey, do a filter, which was basically a percentile. Creating a feature. Yeah, creating a feature. But then I said, oh, man, this is like, you know, I could, you know, recount what is a SQL query, right? Group, you know, case when, right? That is basically it. So, the fact that I knew what it would do, and it was going to take out some of the drudgery, right? And, of course, it didn't even say, hey, go do this with a dummy cache and the Redis cache, right? The classic staging cache. Some of the incantations some of us has to put through, you know, put up with to get some software done. Yeah. You know, the joy of some of the software programming is gone. So, I kind of feel like all of us are going to be more software architects, right? So, in some sense, if you think about it, right, you know, we said, oh, we've got to be first software engineer, and if you get a lot of experience, you'll be a software architect. I wonder whether we, the path to being that software architect gets feeded up. That level of abstraction is at least what I'm most enthused about. Like, being on the design front and letting the AI do the work. Right, but the design with a real understanding of the system, right? To your point, that's the architect. And so, that's, I think, what's going to happen. So, I would say for any student, anyone getting in, get the fundamentals right. Don't just vibe code. You know, vibe coding, yeah, yeah. So, I just feel like, you know, if you're just saying accept, accept, accept, and you don't have an understanding. Like, even, by the way, like, if you do a markdown, right, which is, you could say, hey, the markdown for an agent is not like a classic read me. You want it to really make sense to the other human who comes in, but you kind of have to even instruct the agent properly, right? So, therefore, I think thinking like a systems engineer and like an architect, I think it's still important. We still need our baseline. 100%. Perfect. Thank you so much for this. Thank you so much.