# Engineering teams need broader customer, communication, and AI skills

DevFeed: [Engineering teams need broader customer, communication, and AI skills](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/not-my-cup-of-tea-is-the-most-expensive-sentence-in-your-engineering-org-58598.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.cio.com/article/4225109/not-my-cup-of-tea-is-the-most-expensive-sentence-in-your-engineering-org.html>)

Author: Marios Fakiolas

Published: 2026-09-23T12:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [CIO](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/cio.md>)

Topics: [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>), [DevOps](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/devops.md>), [prompt](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/prompt.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-tools](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-tools.md>), [careers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/careers.md>), [careers-hiring-it-jobs-it-management-it-skills-and-training](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/careers-hiring-it-jobs-it-management-it-skills-and-training.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [contributor](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/contributor.md>), [developers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developers.md>), [devops](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/devops.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [hiring](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hiring.md>), [it-jobs](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/it-jobs.md>), [it-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/it-management.md>), [it-skills-and-training](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/it-skills-and-training.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that engineers who avoid customer-facing work or responsibilities outside their specialty limit their effectiveness. It says communication, AI literacy, and other soft skills are increasingly important as AI makes code typing cheaper while leaving technical judgment valuable.

## Source 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 service he just described. "That's more of a DevOps question." Two answers. Same excuse. There's a border, and the candidate has decided everything on the other side belongs to someone else. Before tech, I captained a warship. 20 people, 30 months at sea. Out there, you master skills that have nothing to do with your specialty, because a ship where everyone stays in his lane and nobody talks to the next station is a ship that sinks. "Not my cup of tea" doesn't exist at sea. So, when I hear the border excuse in an interview, I don't hear a preference. I hear a ceiling the candidate built himself. The market flipped, and the candidates didn't LinkedIn's Most In-Demand Skills report put communication at number one for 2024, second year running, above every hard skill on the list. Its Skills on the Rise report for 2026, built from a billion member profiles, puts AI literacy at the top of the technical side, while soft skills take seven of the top ten spots overall, including conflict mitigation and public speaking. None of this is new, either. Harvard economist David Deming showed it back in 2017: between 1980 and 2012, the jobs that run on human interaction expanded their slice of the American workforce by 12 points. The loner jobs built on pure math, plenty of STEM in there, lost ground. AI didn't start the fire. It poured fuel on it. Meanwhile, the skill we spent 20 years paying a premium for is getting commoditized in real time. Developers themselves put the figure at 42% of their committed code now being written or assisted by AI, up from 6% in 2023, per Sonar's State of Code survey. At Cloudflare, 97% of the engineering org now codes with AI tools, and every production code