As AI increasingly takes over coding tasks, some industry veterans have started to prioritize other skills. However, Cisco executive Liz Centoni says the advice “learn to code” is still relevant in tech today.
“There’s some foundational elements that help train the way you think around how to solve for problems,” the executive vice president and chief customer experience officer said in an interview with Business Insider.
Centoni, who was a software engineer early in her career and made several transitions during her nearly 25 years at Cisco, said her coding skills have helped her “decompose” the everyday “boring problems.” She said one of her strengths is being able to look at a problem, break it down, bring in data, make a hypothesis, and test for it.
“And maybe nobody wants to talk about the boring problems, because it doesn’t make the news,” Centoni said. “But the reality is that we have boring problems that have lots of data underneath it. It has thousands of employees who work at it.”
That doesn’t mean you need to get a degree in computer science, Centoni said. In fact, Centoni said that foundational concepts like coding need “brought forward” to address today’s challenges because the world isn’t just solving linear computer science problems today.
“We’re solving for, you know, where it can be structured, unstructured data as well, where we need a tool, where we need an agent to continue to learn and think for itself as well,” Centoni said.
The Cisco exec said that thousands of employees work on those types of “boring problems,” and that includes a lot of repeatable workflows. In tackling those kinds of problems, employees need to know how to look at the available technology, whether it’s machine learning or generative AI, and know when and where to apply it. Centoni said that “hands-on knowledge” in those scenarios is “super valuable.”
“There’s some basic concepts you need to understand,” Centoni said, adding that she’s looking for people who can solve them with “knowledge of the tools that are out there.”
Centoni added that coding isn’t the only valuable skill — being able to think creatively is also vital. That requires learning more than simply educational background, she said.
“I want someone in there who’s sitting with the subject matter experts who can not just understand the problem, but look at how can we creatively craft a solution,” Centoni said.
Additionally, she said understanding business problems is also a key skill so that employees can connect business use cases with technology to create efficient solutions.
“We have 20,000 people in our organization today,” Centoni said. “How do we reduce the friction in their lives? And so I think somebody who can connect both a business use case and the technology, that’s very valuable to me as well.”
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