---
title: "Interest, Taste and Expertise: Growing in post-AI Software Engineering (or anything I guess)"
url: "http://andrewbolster.info/2026/10/interest-taste-and-expertise-growing-in-post-ai-software-engineering-or-anything-i-guess/"
date: "2026-10-10T08:48:27+01:00"
tags: ["AI","Careers","Early Careers","Hiring","Software Engineering","Data Science","Cybersecurity","Trust","Expertise","Black Duck","QUB","Northern Ireland","Commentary"]
categories: ["AI","Commentary","Careers"]
---

There’s been a million thinkpieces about ‘AI took our entry level jobs, so where will tomorrow’s Seniors come from’, so I don’t want to add to them; just a short braindump from conversations I’ve been having with peers, superiors, students and teachers over the past few weeks.

You can think of this as a spiritual successor to my [‘Being a DORC’ blog](/2025/07/being-a-dorc-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/) earlier in the year.

But, it all comes down to a simple and unoriginal thought; to anti-phrase Yoda

- Interest leads to Experience
- Experience leads to Taste
- Taste leads to Opinions
- Opinions lead to Expertise

So, Black Duck were at the QUB EEECS Careers Fair at the Bernard Crossland Building this week, and as usual, we had no entry level jobs open and weren’t sure if we were going to open placements this year. This isn’t a new reality; Black Duck, (and White Hat before it) both had a kind of ‘dual stream’ hiring process, with entry level going in to service delivery roles, open to all walks and backgrounds, and then a “you already know what you’re doing” Senior or ‘Growing-Mid’ tier. I’ve gently railed against this lack of Junior to Middle pipeline, but that’s outside my scope. But, anyway, the careers fair;

There are only really 4 questions that we got asked over and over again

- What does Black Duck do?
- Do you have any (placement) roles?
- What’s the interview process like?
- What do you look for in a CV/Candidate?

The pattern was so ironclad that I’m pretty sure Ann Doris puts the students through some kind of [Blade Runner 2049](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2049) style Baseline Testing.

I’ve been thinking about that last question for a while recently… constantly for the past 3 years I guess… And it always comes down to one simple thing for me.

Show me you give a shit. Any shit. About *something* related to the job. For me, in Data Science land, I’m looking for people interested in a particular methodology, or want to look at particular quality or evaluation scoring. I want to see someone who organises their [MTG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering) decks by Colour X Mana vector magnitude, or runs [Home Assistant](https://www.home-assistant.io/) to have an LED strip count down their overdraft till the end of the month. *Something* that shows that, whatever skills the university/college/class gives you, that you *might* actually drive yourself instead of waiting for me (or some generic AI) to tell you what you think you should do next.

For cybersecurity, that means messing around with [Kali](https://www.kali.org/), going to [BSides Belfast](https://bsidesbelfast.org/) and checking out the talks (or talking yourself), going to [InfoSecNI](https://meetup.com/InfoSec-NI/) and picking locks in a pub, going to [Farset Labs](https://www.farsetlabs.org.uk/) and experimenting with RF hacking, or at least playing with [Hackerrank](https://www.hackerrank.com/) or [Leetcode](https://leetcode.com/). Have a project (official or otherwise) that you’re fiddling with on the side.

For ‘AI’; ask Claude to read this post and apply it to Agentic engineering… (And if that sounds like a cop-out, you don’t know enough about the technology yet…)

But *why*? You’ve got all the scores and ticked all the boxes and you did the Clubs and Societies thing like you were told and you’ve got a nice 1-page cover letter and your 2 years of bartending on a font-22 CV; You did everything “right”, where’s your god damned jobs?

Well; they’re gone. In 2 years, they’ve evaporated. At this point your biggest impact in the few entry level roles going around would be making sure that our onboarding documentation is still up to date.

All the oxygen in the room that would have gone to talent development, outreach, education and academic partnerships has gone into the token-machines, and unfortunately, for many manager types, the token machine does a pretty good job at what entry level folks actually delivered.

“Take this new analysis and gimme a 1 paragraph summary of it”

“Go babysit this experiment and if it goes well, write it up, if it goes badly, let me know”

“Research this low priority task that’s been on the backlog for ages and see if you can bash it out without breaking the test environment”

Those aren’t jobs any more, they’re prompts.

So, if those *jobs* don’t exist, how the hell are we gonna get any Mids/Seniors/Managers? Interest, Taste and Expertise.

It’s tempting to think of job titles as popularity contests, and sometimes they are, but really; they’re a measure of trust and trustworthiness from the perspective of the organisation, and, as I have a certain amount of experience in [my thesis](https://github.com/andrewbolster/thesis/releases/tag/v1.0), Trust is deeply integrated into Autonomy, and Autonomy is basically, can someone else realistically expect you to be able to perform a certain task without fucking it up.

The past 3-5 years of the AI/ML ‘revolution’ has brought natural language / coding ‘Performance’ (i.e. the ability to perform a given task to a given quality) into the world of the commodity; just pay the token-machine for a certain amount of Performance

[Seth Godin](https://robertglazer.substack.com/p/seth-godin-trust-stakes-work) has talked about this as the “Four Quadrants of Work” related to Trust vs Stakes, and Simon Sinek does a [good video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9CWOH8I4Ow) on Trust vs Performance, so I won’t talk about that any more.

The Universities and Colleges and Schools all taught how to *perform*, but, IMO, haven’t really prepared you for how to be Trustworthy, and in my experience, it all starts with Interest. Let’s walk it through, and I’ll let you ask Codex what the counterfactuals are;

If you are **interested** in something, you’re aware of it, you keep track of it, you’re engaged in thinking about that topic or field, so you gain *experience* in that field, even if it’s observational or with ‘side projects’ or ’toys’. From that *experience*, you find out what feels right and wrong to you, you start to see ‘weirdness’ and ‘contradiction’ beyond just whatever hype is going on, because when you try something that someone’s posting about online, it doesn’t work as advertised, or you think of a better way to do it while you’re following along. That’s **taste**.

As you cultivate **taste**, you will (hopefully) come across other people with their own *experience*; and to communicate with them, you have to process that vague brainfart of **taste** into constructing and expressing *opinions* (*Opinions* are scary because they can be the first time that any of this actually has to touch the outside world; fight through, you’ll be fine).

Your opinions can be challenged or lauded or some mix of both. Other people’s opinions can be accepted, or contradicted, or can take you on whole new directions that you’d never imagined on your own. Navigating this swirling melting pot of **taste** and *opinion* is not easy, not everyone can do it, and not everyone is recognised as being consistently good at navigating it; growing this navigational skill is you cultivating **expertise**.

Interest -> Taste -> Expertise.

Do you give a shit? Do you think about shit? Do your thoughts about shit mean shit?

Going back to entry level roles here, what does this mean? Start with your Interest; at this stage in your career, that’s the best sign of alignment you’re going to get with any organisation. Interest gets you to the top of the crowded CV pile, or might get you over the line for a job that’s a bit over your head, but more importantly, it will keep you going through the early stages of ’not being trusted yet’.

Keep on trucking, keep on being interested, and as your experience and taste develop, so will your trust.