I can't make an honest guess about whether their actual job will be "automated" or otherwise made redundant in the next year, as they suggest. Maybe they're right that they've been doing easily automatable work for these few years.
But I can question whether they have nearly enough insight, exposure, or experience for their personal anxiety to speak to the future of industry at large, to the future of FAANG's in general, or even to the future of their own "FAANGco"
I hope them the best in their personal decisions, but I wonder if they're getting a little over their skis here.
It makes sense if this is the case, he might have even anticipated being hit by the next wave of layoffs and quitted early
> So the next step in my career is going to be talking to people about great AI products that are being built and helping them figure out if they'd find these products useful. If you're building a great product and would like somebody to tell people about it, please don't hesitate to reach out!
So, the blog post up to that point, about how AI will wipe out jobs, could be an audition for selling AI products to businesses.
Olympic level acrobatics.
To me, the interesting parts in building is taking a real problem, mapping it to a set of "things" that need to be built, decompose them into treatable chunks, and defining how they should interact. This is where intelligence comes in. if agents want to take the rest, please do! I can focus on making better products.
The ultimate end result of lowering the barrier to entry down to zero is that making money on bespoke software will be about as commercially viable as making money writing music.
Writing software was always that, automating yours or (more likely) someone else's job away.
I get it that coding is like playing boardgames and that might be fun.
But solving real problems (with the help of AI or whatever other tool is most appropriate, maybe and IDE or a degugger) is where I want to be!
No one's job is actively going away. What's happening is job-role compression - no longer are there "pure coder" roles. You can think of it the same way as there's no longer an IT team in the depths of the company - nowadays the company has many SaaS products strung together with APIs, and the office manager is part-time IT as one of their many roles. They do point-and-click to perform onboarding/offboarding etc. - in the same morning they might onboard a new employee, then go restock the kitchen.
In software the roughly-equivalent outcome is a decrease in deeply technical work (and especially a decrease to produce CRUD apps). But no change in the human-to-human work to uncover what actually needs to be built. So you're no longer a "programmer" or even "software engineer", you're now a "full stack product manager".
It's a continuation of a trend where less "sit-and-type" is needed to get to value. Think of how simple kubernetes and similar infra makes it to implement horizontally scalable, stateless web apps. As the "sit-and-type" ratio changes, the value you can generate by being good at deciding what to build increases!
As always, if you want a durable job, hone 2 skillsets: get good at talking to people about what they need, while simultaneously keeping up with trends such as LLMs so you can keep on guiding the computer to produce what is needed.
Well, it's been 20 years and it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps this will be the year! But not yet.
