Ask HN: How do you differentiate yourself at a software engineer nowadays?

[jmoosh34]

This question has come to my mind more and more often, specially on the age of AI

For context, I'm a senior software engineer, around 10 years of experience or so, but only on web applications.

My present, and longest working project, is highly integrated on AWS and it touches a high amount of services, iot, db via rds, sns, event bridge etc.

However, all of these for me seems to be able to be highly automated on a couple of years, if not by AI, just by common Architecture knowledge and some reading of the documentation.

With that in mind, if I were to ask for a new job next year, how do people differentiate from the next engineer in the interview? Specially knowing that, that might be the high factor for your salary

I would love to hear some opinions

[jack_sunsetless]

Knowing how one specific system really behaves. Docs only get you part of the way. Recently I spent a lot of time running an old Microsoft API side by side with its replacement, and a good part of the differences aren't written down anywhere. AI reads docs well, but it can't know what's missing from them.

[spottedmarley]

An entirely new job? Or do you mean a new job as a different type software engineer? I'm afraid that in these days of AI software development the major differences between two capable software engineers is their AI skills and, perhaps, their physical appearance so, brush your hair, dress nice, smile and dazzle them with your ability to steer coding agents.

[jmoosh34 → spottedmarley]

Yeah, more like the same role on a different project

[turtleyacht]

As the candidate, ask good questions:

An Engineering Leader's Behavioral Interview Template (2025) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799184

[jmoosh34 → turtleyacht]

This was actually a great read!

[andsoitis]

Put yourself in the shoes of someone hiring a software engineer. What do you think you would be looking for?

[jmoosh34 → andsoitis]

So my main guess is on basically being able to map business requirements into business logic, but that is also hard to grasp on an interview.

[andsoitis → jmoosh34]

What about system architecture, tradeoffs, handling ambiguity, judgment, communication clarity, domain expertise, testing strategy, etc.?

[jmoosh34 → andsoitis]

Yeah those are great points actually