You nailed it. At the beginning of my career I thought that success and value to the organization was all about technical skills.

30 years later I now understand that most successful projects need people with modest or average technical skills and outstanding communication skills.

It doesn't matter if you have super-genius engineers; if the business people don't really understand the problem that they're trying to solve then you're going to end up with a crap solution (may shiny, fast, and beautiful, but still crap).

I think I saw a comic years ago detailing a discussion that went something like this:

A: Eventually we won't need programmers people will just tell the computer what they need and it will generate the code for them.

B: True, there's actually already an industry term for a specification that's detailed enough to generate a working program from.

A: Oh, what is it called?

B: Code.

IME, this is the number one reason outsourcing (whether on-shore or off-shore) fails for many projects.

We've been prompt engineers all along.

When I was new, I saw one of my more experienced colleagues ask a few questions that together saved the company more than $1 mil each year. ChatGPT might be a threat to automate some low-level tasks or help eliminate bugs, but it is nowhere near ready to evaluate the context of a system, understand its history, or think* through the consequences of a major business decision.

* or think at all, in any meaningful way.

True, so true.

We work as translators. We translate intentions into actual descriptions.

The same is true in technical sales. Obviously you need a sufficiently technical background to be able to _do_ stuff, but the primary value you bring is probe further than "we want to do X". The prospect / customer has mayybe done what they are asking twice, you've seen it done 100s of times.