As a forward-deployed engineer, my primary job is listening to customers. The results are very rewarding. Software engineers can feel far removed from customers, because they often can't see their impact.
Many of them say that AI's ascendance is already reducing demand for human researchers who can write code or do basic data analysis - tasks often handled by graduate students, postdocs or those without graduate training. Obsolescence of some basic roles in areas such as computer modelling "is not even in the future. It's happening now," says Xuanhe Zhao, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, because "AI is doing this much better than entry-level scientists".
