Dylan Serota hosts monthly dinner parties with chief technology officers. The topic everyone’s wanted to talk about lately is AI coding tools, he told Business Insider.
Serota is CEO of Terminal, a talent platform for software engineers and developers. Last year, he told Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale that none of his dinner party guests believed AI would cut into software engineering jobs. Even as AI coding tools have grown more self-sufficient, Serota hasn’t changed his view.
That doesn’t mean the job of a software engineer isn’t changing.
“There’s absolutely consensus that the job is evolving,” Serota told BI. “There’s job evolution, not necessarily job replacement.”
Serota said his dinner party guests were bullish on AI coding tools, recognizing the “productivity gains” they could offer their teams. Simple engineering tasks may become cheaper as a result— but Serota said this will push tech companies to do more and not to pull back in engineering head count.
“Being able to increase basically the corpus of data, the corpus of software, you actually will continue to invest in more software engineers to do things,” Serota said.
Running a talent platform, Serota’s business relies on the demand for software engineers. He also interfaces with them — and the companies that are hiring them — firsthand. Some have slowed hiring, he said, but others have sped up.
What’s changing, Serota points out, is the type of engineers that tech companies are hiring for.
“We used to get requests from people like, ‘I want a Python developer,'” Serota said. “They were hiring very language- or domain-oriented skill sets for specific positions. That has transitioned now. They just want general really good engineers and a lot more emphasis on engineering fundamentals.”
Serota said that companies were less interested in who can “write code” and more interested in who can “think like an engineer.”
While job replacement remains up for debate, AI code editors will certainly transform the industry. At tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google, some 30% of code is written by AI.
Business leaders speaking candidly about the potential job impacts of AI can be a delicate balancing act — and just because CTOs may be saying they don’t expect to replace software engineers due to AI, it’s still a possibility. In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote a memo to the company that AI would “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains.”
Serota’s dinner party guests are not necessarily from the Amazons and Googles of the world. More are CTOs from “leading startups and growth-stage companies” than Fortune 500 leaders, which may change their vantage point, he said. Serota declined to list any of his invitees.
Tech companies may also be more cautious around AI coding tools than expected. Serota pointed to a recent study which suggested use of code editors led to productivity losses among experienced engineers.
“There’s some companies that even don’t allow junior engineers to use AI tools,” Serota said, fearing they could lead to “broad dependence.”
Other companies handling more sensitive information also still have security concerns. Serota said that some dinner guests worried that opening up their libraries to code editors would make the data vulnerable.
“Those concerns are smaller in number, because people are so excited about what you can do, but those things surprise me,” he said.
From Serota’s vantage point, software engineers shouldn’t panic. “The demand for engineers is increasing, not decreasing,” he said.
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