This quote stuck out to me as well, for a slightly different reason.

The “tenacity” referenced here has been, in my opinion, the key ingredient in the secret sauce of a successful career in tech, at least in these past 20 years. Every industry job has its intricacies, but for every engineer who earned their pay with novel work on a new protocol, framework, or paradigm, there were 10 or more providing value by putting the myriad pieces together, muddling through the ever-waxing complexity, and crucially never saying die.

We all saw others weeded out along the way for lacking the tenacity. Think the boot camp dropouts or undergrads who changed majors when first grappling with recursion (or emacs). The sole trait of stubbornness to “keep going” outweighs analytical ability, leetcode prowess, soft skills like corporate political tact, and everything else.

I can’t tell what this means for the job market. Tenacity may not be enough on its own. But it’s the most valuable quality in an employee in my mind, and Claude has it.

There is an old saying back home: an idiot never tires, only sweats.

Claude isn't tenacious. It is an idiot that never stops digging because it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'. Chain of thought's whole raison d'etre was so the model could get out of the local minima it pushed itself in. The issue is that after a year it still falls into slightly deeper local minima.

This is fine when a human is in the loop. It isn't what you want when you have a thousand idiots each doing a depth first search on what the limit of your credit card is.

This is a major concern for junior programmers. For many senior ones, after 20 (or even 10) years of tenacious work, they realize that such work will always be there, and they long ago stopped growing on that front (i.e. they had already peaked). For those folks, LLMs are a life saver.

At a company I worked for, lots of senior engineers become managers because they no longer want to obsess over whether their algorithm has an off by one error. I think fewer will go the management route.

(There was always the senior tech lead path, but there are far more roles for management than tech lead).

Why are we pretending like the need for tenacity will go away? Certain problems are easier now. We can tackle larger problems now that also require tenacity.

Fittingly, George Hinton toiled away for years in relative obscurity before finally being recognized for his work. I was always quite impressed by his "tenacity".

So although I don't think he should have won the Nobel Prize because not really physics, I felt his perseverance and hard work should merit something.