‘Not my cup of tea’ is the most expensive sentence in your engineering org
Code got cheap. Talking got expensive. The engineer who hides behind 'that's not my cup of tea' just announced he hasn't understood what's happening around him.
Why it matters
As AI commoditizes coding output, the market is repricing engineering roles toward communication, cross-functional judgment, and customer understanding. Engineers who stay siloed are quietly pricing themselves out of tomorrow's workforce.
The key facts
6 to knowSonar State of Code survey: 42% of committed code now written or assisted by AI (up from 6% in 2023)
Cloudflare Q1 2026 earnings call: 97% of engineering org now codes with AI tools; every production contribution reviewed by autonomous AI agents
LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2026: AI literacy tops technical skills; soft skills take 7 of top 10 spots overall
Harvard economist David Deming research: human-interaction jobs grew 12 points of US workforce share 1980–2012 while pure-math/STEM jobs lost ground
Author argues specialist silos were masking judgment gaps; AI breadth commodification now exposes the gap
Four tactical moves: reframe interview loops to test cross-domain thinking; fund coaching for willing engineers in customer-facing skills; organize by problem not by tool; kill internal-vendor ticket culture
Go to the source
CIOcio.com
Publisher excerpt: I run interviews every week. Around minute 25, I ask about customer-facing experience. Have you sat in front of the people who use what you build? The answer I get most often: “That’s not really my cup of tea.” A few minutes later, I ask a Python engineer which metrics he’d use to autoscale the…