Software Engineer

“And in fact, the only jobs that have been lost really because of AI to date are like software engineers.”

“More software engineers are doing code review than they're doing the generation of code.”

“In practice, the data shows that we've never hired more software engineers.”

“And so I think there will be more software engineers in the world. we will need few of that, fewer of them to do the things we're already doing.”

“There are so many companies now where software engineers have not had to write a single line of code in say more than six months, which is I mean, quite unprecedented, right?”

“A big chunk of maybe more over half the you know software engineers in the world operate at a relatively narrow task scope.”

“The rough answer for, you know, two, three years from now is roughly every software engineer in the world, and probably a lot more than all the Just the software engineers because I think a lot more people will be able to produce code and produce products and …”

“Historically, 70 cents of every dollar we would give as VCs to founders would go towards hiring engineers, right?”

“Now one engineer can do the job of 1015, 20 engineers, right? It's only getting more, it's only getting better. That's great. Right? That's great. That's great. Maybe one senior engineer who's not cheap here can suddenly do the job that, like, you might have n…”

“Unless you're the founder of a company, you shouldn't be at the same place forever. I very much encourage people not to Jump ship every one to two years, not just because it looks bad, but because to actually see, especially as a software engineer, to see the …”

“I happen to think that software engineers are one of like the worst customers to sell to, and they can change tools on a whim. Something new comes out over here, they'll adopt it. So I see it as like almost this market that's always incredibly competitive, but…”

“The best engineers are going to be the ones that don't see sales and marketing as dirty work, but as again, an important part of the product, because as an engineer, you're no longer, you know, just your job is ship feature.”

“Five years from now, it's going to be like, oh my God, I cannot imagine, cannot believe that these people that get paid so much money spent hours of their time doing this. I think that's something that, you know, we definitely won't do.”

“Short term, yes. Long term, no. Short term, yes, because it's just a shock to the system where, you know, there are all these big layoffs that are happening that are pretty aggressive, and, you know, these are 1010 of thousands of people that had a job that no…”

“So naturally there, there's roles, I think that, that creep in, you know, you get the, like a lawyer and accountant are not going to work in the same way that you know, a software engineer might. And that's just a fact of life. So, okay. So if they don't want …”

“There are forty-seven million software engineers in the world. I mean, that's five trillion dollars just in software engineering token use.”

“So what does that mean if you're a software engineer? It means there's gonna be fewer jobs, aren't you? Without a doubt. Fewer jobs. For now.”

“The stuff that we're doing as software engineers now is like, we seem to be a step ahead of everyone else, because we're able to work in a domain where AI is actually producing quality stuff.”

“There's all this stuff about there being less software engineers, and I think we just build more software. I think we just build a ton more software”

“I would claim by now, good model writes code on average with fewer bugs than average human.”

“And in my, what I feel like is that the engineers that will continue to thrive are just are basically going to become more PME because the coding part is now going to be solved.”

“So this is kind of the big prize because it goes from the TAM The total addressable market being, you know, all of engineers to now the total addressable market is every knowledge worker, and that's probably about a 30 to 50 x larger market in terms of, you kn…”

“I expect by the end of this year, it will not be uncommon to have an engineer say that almost all of that code is written by AI.”

“People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders, right? Your coders needs to have Like solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and tune out the code. It's some, that that's changed completel…”

“We actually, I, for one, strongly believe that if you think in If your budget in twenty-twenty-four for twenty-twenty-six was to have a 150 software engineers, you should still have a 150 software engineers, because those software engineers can be, like, expon…”

“If that 500,000 dollar engineer did not consume at least 250,000 dollars worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.”

“AI is more sophisticated in coding than anything else, but we're definitely not seeing a wave of layoffs of software engineers now.”

“I feel like I won't be like a self, Self-actualized software engineer in the future, if I'm too precious about that artifact, which used to be so central to me.”

“Well, you and I said half of the software engineers that are employed right now It in the Bay area will not be employed three years from now.”

“I actually think of anything like a lot of people who like had a skill that was valuable, and allowed them to a lot of comfort and like to feel like they had a role economically or whatever are just going to get eviscerated. And it's very possible it gets repl…”

“Noah Smith is sharing the job postings for software engineers have picked up since vibe coding became a thing. They had been declining until the early part of last year, actually.”

“Yeah. And I, you know, sometimes we change what terms mean, right? Like the term computer now refers to something else, but now we have the term software engineer. And so I definitely think we'll have many more builders.”

“I think more people overall will be building software, but the number of actual software engineers will need to go down because one great engineer can do the work of many engineers and their job will likely be to like manage and oversee some of these software …”

“Well, so I will go down, in three years, I'll go down to 300,000, and then I think it probably drops.”

“Like if you are a major CEO in Silicon Valley, are you really gonna let go of 30% of your software engineers? 50% of your software engineers? There's no way.”

“I do think that there is a future where I think by the end of the year, what we're going to start to see is these start to get even murkier, murkier, where I think in some places the title software engineer is going to start to go away. And it's just gonna be …”

“I think that fundamentally you know, there's so much demand for software and there's so little supply of engineering and reality relative to that demand that as you add this enormous boost of productivity to software engineers it just gets soaked up. Right. Be…”

“I think we're going to see a lot of these really great engineers who care about the bespoke craftsmanship of everything they do. They're going to be unhappy working at larger companies. As these coding tools get even more. Accelerant because it goes against th…”

“I think we're gonna start to see the title software engineer go away, and I think it's just gonna be maybe builder, maybe product manager, maybe we'll keep the title as kind of a vestigial thing, but the work that people do, it's not just gonna be coding, it's…”

“Most of our customers don't have a single software engineer, let alone a software engineer for their finance team.”

“I think in some sense, you're right that like everyone is going to become a manager in the future, or at least that's my hot take. But in order to get there are steps along the way and you have to really build a lot of trust in the model and understand what it…”

“I do feel like the best or the people who will get the most out of coding agents in the future are going to be kind of like more manager, like where they're focusing on directing flows in certain ways. They're probably going to be a little bit more like design…”

“These things are not like going to replace one person as it is, but more like a passive aura that buffs everybody.”

“I do believe that, you know, we are probably a year away from AI becoming the driver of software, the same way, let's say, agents are the primary producer of code today. I think we're going to move to the same place in a year from now, where humans are going t…”

“I think by us producing more technology, I don't think the end state here is going to look something like where we have fewer software engineers”

“And as you make code even more ubiquitous, it's actually just going to be used for many more purposes. And so there's just going to be a ton more need for people with this, like humans with this competency.”

“I think it'll, I think there'll be more software engineers because if you define a software engineer as somebody who's capable of building a software product to solve a real problem, that pool of builders is going to expand way beyond people who've graduated w…”

“A genius software engineer is not going to, they're going to want to work for Elon Musk. Like you can say about Elon Musk, whatever you want, but like a suave, well manicured executive from the car industry is like not really, like an, a talent magnet for soft…”

“I don't really Buy this, like, you know, that we're not gonna hire more software engineers story. I think, like, for a few reasons I mean, this is an example that, that often comes up, but is it, like, kind of the elasticity of the demand for software?”

“Things we've seen work particularly well for early stage engineering candidates is having shown some experience of building their own projects or doing something that's more akin to starting a startup. Maybe they've even been a startup founder in the past, or …”

“It really matters that the founder, ideally the technical founder, is going to be reaching out for those suite hires.”

“He really describes also, like, a software engineer's mindset and how they get it wrong, where the solution is to build new features, where he really is introducing this, like, new way to build something”

“I still think that things that we interviewed for in the past, a critical mindset, the ability to really understand deeply the technical nature of a problem. Is still much more important than whether you're a fully AI native programmer.”

“He was like, okay, here's more like currently like best performing, average performing, and lowest performing. And then there's a randomized trial. So like they give like half of each group, like access to like cursor. And then he was noticed like over time, I…”

“Essentially everyone, every engineer is turning into an EM, engineering manager, coordinating all of these junior AI engineers.”

“I think we'll have far more of them. Maybe that's a bold bet.”

“If I could have an intelligence as smart as a Google senior engineer, that's two trillion dollars of software value, right? Because that's how much I pay, the world pays to software engineers today.”

“I think more. And the reason is that engineering is such an elastic role, right? Where if we could build a hundred times more software or say we make engineers 10 times more efficient, We would probably build a hundred times more software, right? And so far as…”

“I think that there will come a point, and my guess on this point is probably in the neighborhood of, let's say, two, three, four years from now, where we stop using code as the main interface.”

“Funnily enough, I mean, I think, if anything, we will have way more software engineers, not fewer.”