People like to preach as if Thai tech is on par with Silicon Valley.

You hear it all the time.

Silicon Valley says software engineering is cooling down,
so people here assume the same thing will happen to Thailand.

No. It will not.

Our tech industry is built on completely different assumptions, incentives, and realities.
At the most basic level, it is a different ecosystem.

Capability vs density

The US does not win because every engineer there is a genius.
They win because they have a higher density of people who take technical depth seriously.

In stronger programs, students are pushed into real engineering work early. Many of them:

• Build or modify operating systems
• Write parts of compilers or runtimes
• Treat systems programming as normal, not exotic

Not everyone does this, and plenty still coast.
But there is a critical mass that pulls everything forward.

In Thailand:

• Year 1: Hello World
• Year 2: Hello World, now object-oriented
• Year 3: Hello World, now with a database

That is not an insult. That is curriculum design.

This is not because the US is magical.
They built environments, incentives, and expectations that force more people to go deeper.

You do not close a gap by denying it exists.

The root problem is not talent, it is avoidance

When I was in college, the majority of people I knew hated coding.

Not struggled with it.
Not found it hard but interesting.
They outright hated it.

They would do anything except code.

Why were they there?
Almost always, “my parents told me to study this.”

That is not unusual here.
But the downstream effects are brutal.

Do anything except the hard part

This mindset repeats everywhere:

• Do anything except coding
• Do anything except math
• Do anything except systems
• Do anything except responsibility

Not because the subject is impossible.
Because changing direction is costly, and avoiding the discomfort feels safer.

So people stay in careers they dislike and optimize for escape routes.

Slides.
Presentations.
Buzzwords.
Process.

I still remember forming a group for a term project.
One friend said, without hesitation:

“I’ll do anything except coding.”

That sentence explains a lot.

Fast forward: our tech job landscape

Years later, the same avoidance patterns show up again, this time institutionalized as career tracks.

• Tester
• Business analyst
• Project manager
• System analyst
• AI engineer
• Architect
• And more

These roles are legitimate when they stay connected to engineering reality.

The problem starts when they become escape hatches from responsibility, while still controlling direction.

People end up directing implementation without having to carry the cost of executing it.
And once that structure exists, it reinforces itself.

Within those structures, cargo-cult narratives thrive:

• “Developers will be replaced by AI”
• “Just use AI”
• “Coding won’t matter anymore”

We are not San Francisco, and pretending otherwise only keeps us stuck.

Compare this with the US reality

In healthier tech ecosystems, many managerial roles are held by people who:

• Have shipped real systems
• Understand where things usually break
• Can drop into the weeds when necessary
• Give implementation-level guidance instead of slogans

Not all of them. There is plenty of fluff there too,
but there is a larger share of people who have actually done the work.

It is not perfect. They have cargo cult behavior too.
The difference is that more people recognize it when it shows up.

The idea exists in Thailand, but it is rarely discussed openly, and almost never named.

In Thailand, not always, but often, direction stops at “go do [buzzword].”

Meanwhile:

• Testers frequently write code.
• Architects are usually engineers who have survived multiple failures.
• AI engineers tend to be strong developers who later moved into a specialized domain.

I came across a comment from an AI engineer that summed it up:

“I wish I weren’t an AI engineer.
The pay isn’t much better than dev,
but the job is still dev plus ops plus unclear requirements.”

That line says a lot.

AI engineering there is not a shortcut.
It is extra responsibility stacked on people who already know how to build.

Thailand’s AI illusion

In Thailand, too many “AI engineer” roles are built around optics instead of engineering.

The selection criteria often look like:

• Polished English
• Beautiful slides
• Fluency in buzzwords
• Comfort presenting to executives

But when it comes to fundamentals, things fall apart.

Roadmaps get written that the authors cannot execute.
Milestones are “validated” by LLM answers they do not know how to evaluate.

That is not innovation.
That is theater.

Leadership often ends up rewarding the theater, because it is easier to measure slide decks and demos than real technical resilience.

Reality check

Even if AI wiped out a lot of coding jobs in Silicon Valley tomorrow,
it would not wipe them out in Thailand anytime soon.

Because we still do not have enough people who can:

• Debug deeply
• Trace problems across systems
• Own outcomes end to end
• Take responsibility when things break

AI does not replace absence.
AI amplifies capability that already exists.

If you cannot reason about systems, AI only helps you produce wrong answers faster.

If we want to move forward

We need to stop lying to ourselves.

This is not about nationalism.
It is not about pride.

It is about admitting that:

• Our education system rarely rewards real technical depth
• Our workplaces often reward appearances over mastery
• Our leadership pipelines filter for presentation more than competence

Until those incentives change, no amount of “Thai talent is world-class” posts will make it true.

You do not close a gap by denying it.
You close it by telling the truth first, then building differently.