I have heard some version of this argument frequently over the years: there is this "hard" skill in engineering or physics or computer science that has real las

I have heard some version of this argument frequently over the years: there is this "hard" skill in engineering or physics or computer science that has real lasting value, and there there are these other disciplines that don't really have much of value. Now, let's unpack what people mean by "hard" skills. Do you mean they are difficult to learn? Do you mean they are useful in today and tomorrow's economy? What exactly does the hard in hard skill mean. I think you can see how the deconstruction of the argument works here. If by hard you mean difficult to learn, then I can list a bunch of hard skills that are not directly useful. If someone can rattle of all the major proofs in quantum mechanics on a blackboard, they may be a genius, have worked hard, and can do amazing things with their brain but that effort may not directly make them more employable. If by hard skills you mean things that are useful to the economy, then that changes. I could have spent 4 years learning WAMP and then when I come out the economy has moved on to some other framework. Maybe by hard skills you mean some skills that make it easy to pick up the other computer skills. So I may have learned a particular computer language, but along the way I know conditionals, loops, computational expense and so on. Are these harder to learn than presentation skills? Are they more useful than financial statements? The example here of a slide that says "profit = revenue - cost" is hardly fair. That's like saying I once saw a piece of code on github that was very poor. Picking individual examples of something you don't find challenging is easy in any field. Explain what you mean by hard skills, and then we can talk about whether a particular discipline has them or not.