Zuckerberg On Rogan - Software Engineers OBSOLETE Or Augmented?

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all right we're going to address the Mark Zuckerberg Joe Rogan interview now that I've actually watched it uh had a lot of positive feedback comments good discussion on the previous video I did on this uh so thank you so much for uh for all of your thoughts and I figured I'm going to write a newsletter article on this uh over the weekend and that means I H actually have to watch what's going on so not only is it the newsletter article uh from Dev leader so Dev leader weekly that out it's also going to be the topic of the live stream on my main Channel Dev leader so that will be um if you're watching this tonight at uh 700 p.m Pacific so it's a Monday when this is going out so every Monday at 7 p.m.

Pacific on dev leader my main Channel I do a live stream will be based on the newsletter topic which is going to be the uh Mark Zuckerberg Joe Rogan podcast interview and how AI is going to replace all the software engineers in the world and we need to be terrified and everything's ending and it's the end of the world so if you want your questions answered leave them in the comments or search for Dev leader on social media send me a message I have a bunch of them that I have to get back to you so thanks so much for leaving your questions really appreciate it but I figured we got to dive back into this now that I've watched the video now that I've seen the part of the conversation it's a it's a three-hour interview um so pretty pretty intense I haven't watched

the whole thing but I watched this segment where Joe and Mark Zuckerberg talk about this so I'm going to give my thoughts and spoiler alert um I feel like I was completely misled by how much fear was being raised by other people but I get it um so I'm going to start by saying that based on what Mark said I actually agree with a lot of what he has to say um and I think my biggest sort of difference of opinion is the timeline that he talks about so I have a bunch of notes that I took in notepad this is probably the most closest to scripted code commute video you may ever see actually that's not true in the future if I have this kind of situation I want to take some notes but I felt it was important because now that I've made

a video on this already I want to actually highlight some things that were said uh because I think to back up some of my perspective I think it's important that I'm calling out specific things okay so to dive into some of this uh time stamp if you're curious is at the 2hour 8 minute and 17 second Mark I recorded it here um Mark starts to get into answering Joe's question about uh or the topic of AI meta this year so he says probably in 2025 and I appreciate all the folks that I had misheard I thought it was in 5 years time it's literally in 2025 Mark Zuckerberg's believe Mark Zuckerberg believes that at meta and other simpar com other similar companies I can't speak tonight there you go um it says we'll have an AI That's effectively will effectively be a mid-level engineer that

can write code okay I believe that's achievable I don't believe in 2025 based on all of my usage of AI and I use AI for my own software development I use AI for creativity tasks I use AI for writing code um not all of my code but some parts of it I cannot see that being the case unless Mark is suggesting um of similar quality not necessarily how it's integrated but let's keep going so he says it'll be expensive at first makes sense and become more efficient uh over time so I agree with that that statement so so far I really just disagree with the timeline because I I can't comp comend how in 2025 we could have an AI that does that but maybe he just means the quality so let's keep going though a lot of the code in our apps in the

AI will be built by AI Engineers instead of people engineers and I think this is probably one of the first Parts where people are going oh this is scary as hell what does that mean I'm I wanted to get into software development it's the end this is it you know stick a fork and me I'm done or as the the kids say these days I'm cooked is that is that what the cool kids say um so a lot of the code in our apps will be built by AI Engineers including the AI itself instead of people Engineers now here's an important detail here Mark does not say that that means effectively humans will not write code anymore that's not part of the statement a lot of our code in our apps or I think he maybe he even says most of the code if you

think about how software development works right there's even I'll give you just an example in C which is the language I use if you watch my Dev leader my main channel uh my Dev leader YouTube videos for programming are all C tutorials all the programming tutorials uh I've actually have a course on reflection which is uh something in C and net that we have access to I love using reflection for things but reflection if you're not familiar with this concept in in net and C is that because it's uh there's it's a the language itself is like heavily relying on types it's an objectoriented language we can actually do like almost like a meta like I don't know um querying of the of the uh the code that's running and kind of uh inspect and operate on type information that seems kind of like unnatural

normally and so reflection is super powerful to use but there's been advancements that actually allow for like Source generators in net which means that a lot of things that we used to use reflection for where we would like sort of inspect the types and call methods based on the type like dynamically almost we can use Source generators to literally at compile time write out a lot of the code for us so like that's a computer writing the code and it I'm not just talking about compiling it there's are just as another example there are Source generators for regular Expressions that are literally they will generate code that gets compiled and the cool part about this is the source generators for these regular Expressions allow you to debug how the regular expression operates so literally an example of a machine writing the code that then gets

compiled based on just your regular expression so I know that's not AI I'm not claiming that's AI what I'm trying to say is there's an example of a ma machine not a human writing code now does that mean that all of a sudden like I'm obsolete no and even if you extrapolate this idea this might suggest we'll see a little bit more of this but maybe a lot of how we are operating as software developers means that we're spending less time actually typing the code into our idees uh in terms of what gets um sort of Saved into our repositories on a larger scale so if you think about even how a lot of upand cominging software developers are are kind of operating and I think tons of people are freaking out about this you'll see things everywhere about like oh all the you know

all the junior programmers are just you know copying and pasting at a chat gbt and it's like the crappiest code I've ever seen like yeah but like if this stuff keeps getting better maybe a lot of how we develop will be like that and it freaks people out right I'm I'm kind of sitting here laughing because like I don't know I can I can certainly imagine that as all of the technology gets better that the code that it outputs will be better it's like a lot of us that have been you know programming for you know 5 10 15 20 years like we had stack Overflow we still have stack Overflow tons of us are copying code off stack Overflow doesn't mean it was the best code right but if you're just copying and pasting blindly like I can get the answer on stack Overflow

probably have to modify for my application is just a little bit more exaggerated with AI so I don't disagree with that statement either a lot of the code in our apps and the AI will be built by AI Engineers instead of people Engineers I don't read that as therefore people go away that's not my interpretation of that statement at all okay um and then he goes on to say but I don't know I think that will augment the people working on it so another statement by Mark where he's saying that doesn't just mean like people buy AI in um it will augment the people working on it now I'll pause here for a moment because I know that becau like I don't I don't work at meta I don't like you know no affiliation with Facebook I don't really use Facebook I have a Facebook

account my mom will sometimes send me messages on Facebook I have a Dev leader social media page on Facebook but like I don't really use Facebook anymore that's kind of just what I grew up on with social media but I don't use it anymore so I don't have like I don't like love Mark Zuckerberg I have no reason to like you know uh like I don't know like be in his favor just for some other reason I'm just the way that the things he's saying I'm like I don't disagree with that but I do recognize that a lot of and this is important when we talk about things like this on this channel I think a lot of people see people like Mark Zuckerberg and they want to hate him for other reasons whether that's because they don't like what he's doing with meta or

you know just anything historical about Facebook or Instagram or Whatsapp like anything or the metaverse right like even in the comments on one of the other videos I was poking fun at like oh yeah like this is the same guy that said the metaverse is coming right like where's that at um I think a lot of people want to just disagree or um basically take what he's saying and just automatically turn it into something that aligns with kind of their view on Mark which is like they dislike him and they want it to be bad so everything I'm hearing so far I don't disagree with except the timeline he says people will be so much more creative and freed up to do crazy things so he'll get into some more of this a little bit later and I'm going to kind of uh summarize some

of the points but the way that I interpret that is that like you no long like if we keep fast forwarding how this looks you no longer as a software developer have to spend time doing things that can literally be done by Ai and you are freed up to do more creative more complex things and this is like just a pattern that we've seen and like he literally goes on to talk about this from a farming persp perspective but I was trying to think if off the top of my head I can come up with a good example of even like Automation in general right or you know let's talk about a couple things I got two that come to mind um what it and I can't remember the site and I always forget it is it is it Dev zero is that the one

where you can basically prompt and it makes uis for you for front end development like oh my goodness I am a terrible front end developer I am horrific at front end development it's just not not for me at least for webtech for like Wind forms and WPF like desktop development that's what I did for a long long time I'm a little bit uh Rusty on it now but um oh my goodness I think it's Dev zero right I have it like I'm at my computer can I just type Dev zero vz. Dev oh my God okay see like you can tell like I don't do a lot of front end development people are watching this probably already in the comments like you idiot um okay so v.d right I have been blown away by that but if you think about it instead of me trying

to sit there going like I don't like I have to go look up the CSS and I hate JavaScript and like my htmls rusty I don't have to do that I can basically spend time doing other things hey v0 here like here's something I need you to do give me the layout for that thank you very much like I will go on to go wire these pieces up now um and if there was something else that came along was like Hey I can wire up that vzer stuff for you and you like then I just go on to do other things like I'm still building software um and people will that you can extrapolate this and say well at some point you're not needed and I'm like well at some point I'm doing something else I think my mind at least on this stuff is

by the time that AI is so effective it can literally just replace people that are already looking for the next step in terms of being creative or doing more complex work by the time that happens I feel like we're getting like borderline close to Singularity like and we probably have other things on our mind because probably everything else is looking so different um so anyway I still see this very much as like technology is helping uh you know move us from having to do like what I would call like mundane things another one that I wanted to talk about briefly that came to mind was not even about Ai and um I've talked about this have I I don't know if I talked about this on code commute uh but at least on dev leader I've talked about this um and this sometimes gets people

a little bit triggered but like I got to my put my disclaimers in bear with me for this example um for software testers okay so uh I don't currently work with software testers I've had mixed experiences with software testers in terms of a role but I've worked on teams with software testers where it worked very very well what I find does not work very well is when a software tester basically spends almost all of their time manually clicking through things and I don't mean to like do exploratory testing or to act as a user proxy and try to feel like feel out what's been designed if this feels good in terms of user experience but I mean like literally they're just going to like all of the inputs and you know trying to hold down a key and seeing like if we're going to hit

a limit or like all these overflow things like when you spend so much time doing that and then someone makes a change and you go well I got to test the whole thing again and then you go through and like repeat all these things that is like in my opinion and from my experience at least an extremely inefficient way to go about doing your job it's not that doing it once and finding the bugs is not valuable but in or in my opinion in order to be like becoming more successful in a role like that we should be talking about how do we make sure we never have to do that kind of stuff again right how do we make sure that you've made the co- change to fix these we're confident that it's going to stay fixed how do we think about like uh

like going forward the next time we have to build another thing that looks like this how can we actually catch this type of stuff before it even you know gets sent over to testing right so what I'm trying to say here is that even EV taking a tester role and evolving it to be like less let me click through a script of like steps to go do like a computer can do that because it's really good at repeating things what's more effective for a tester is not doing those manual steps repeatedly it's being more creative about how we can have better testing strategy how we can make sure that we're as we go forward not putting ourselves in these same same types of situations and like this has nothing to do with AI it's just an example of like if you evolve what you're doing

to automate things doesn't mean that testers all of a sudden disappear they can just have a lot more impact doing something related to their their role that they currently have but where there's more value okay so let's keep moving along here so at the if you're just curious if you want to follow along in the uh Joe Rogan podcast it's uh at the 2H hour 9 minute and 20 second Mark by the way I don't go back and put time stamps and all that stuff in these videos I just upload them because it's code commute Dev leader is a lot more polish that's not this channel um I just told you the time stamp you're an adult you can figure it out um Joe goes on to ask Mark about this fear of job elimination and this this is what everyone's worried about right this

is what I was hearing everyone talk about from this video so with respect to eliminating jobs Mark says it's too early to know exactly how it plays out I don't disagree with that I have an opinion I don't think that all of a sudden all the software engineer ing jobs just disappear because of a lot of what he said already in terms of It augmenting software Engineers so I don't think they just disappear but he says it's too early to know exactly how it plays out it's very fair statement and he then says I think it will create more creative jobs he doesn't say specifically that it won't reduce other jobs or the overall number of jobs he'll kind of talk about this from like a comparison perspective in a moment but at least creating more creative jobs it's kind of what I was alluding

to with like the testing example right um or even when I was saying how I use v.d like and not that I do much front end development at all but when I have to I'm freed up to go do other parts of the development so I can be more creative instead of like I have an idea of what I want to build I can't remember the syntax I have to go look up this thing like how do I Cent her a div like all this kind of stuff I don't have to worry about that so I'm freed up to do more creative things so I totally agree with that statement he believes it will create more creative jobs this is where he gets into his example about um some of the historical stuff and I didn't write out everything he said but the gist of

it he's like I can't remember at what point in history but he's like basically at some point in human history you know there's a lot more time where a majority of people were farming okay so more people proportionally are farming and spending a ton of time doing it and this is kind of like a basic thing that had to happen so that we would just have food right so a lot of people are farming and there's a ton of time spent farming so he's like you know we're doing this at a necessity but then he goes on to say like we introduce industrial processes and things like that and things kind of evolved and he's like now like 2% of society are farmers okay so we basically can get all of the food that we need to sustain ourselves and like 2% of society are

farmers now if you stop there and you think like just with that statement it's like well that's just like the software Engineers like we just become obsolete right like did isn't that the proof but that's not it it's like the things that we had to do out of necessity are going away it and so if you aren't I don't know in my opinion if you're not thinking a little bit more um I don't know high level I don't mean for that to be insulting to people but like if you only see that as therefore elimination of people in software engineering and there's nothing beyond that then I'm like I don't know if you're like thinking through this exactly but let's keep going um he goes on to say in general I don't think people will work as many hours or I don't think people work

as many hours right now as they do compared to the farmer days now some people especially like in the US right we're all like hey man we got to work like 80 hour weeks and like it's all terrible and like I hear you but I think he means that like the average person uh and comparing it to like Farm days where everyone's farming we don't have to work proportionally as many hours as many days of the week in total right to be able to get by I realize that some people hearing that I can already imagine the comments that are going to come in from this but like I don't again I don't disagree with that okay he thinks that this trend will continue so he's using that as an analogy to AI okay so like being able to industrialize is kind of like another

analogy to AI so um he says the hours required to work will continue to shrink that's his expectation over time and that that more people uh there will be more focus on things like artistic cultural Pursuits and I think he's going he's not talking specifically just about software Engineers he's talking about like Society okay um then he goes on to say those that are super engaged so the people like software engineers in this case that are super engaged will be able to accomplish way more than ever before due to unimaginable leverages that we'll have right from the technology so what he's saying is that as a necessity to survive and to get by you will have to work less just like compared to when we had to farm to have all of our food this is this is his analogy just for the record I'm

not it's not my analogy you have to work less just to survive and that frees you up to do other types of things this is why we have all of the different roles and the technology that we have today because the people were freed up to do these other things so he's saying if you lower the amount of work that you have to do to get by you have more opportunity for artistic and cultural Pursuits I don't disagree with that but then he goes on to say that the people that are super engaged so if you don't if you want to stay like investing more time into work or proportionally the same and not go pursue those things like artistic and cultural Pursuits if you're like hey in this example I'm the software engineer I want to work and I want to do software building

that's what I want to do he says this is my interpretation of his statements right be uh super engageed will be able to accomplish way more than ever before due to unimaginable leverage so I interpret that as all of the AI advancements and tooling that we'll have will enable people that are interested in building software to have such extreme leverage because it's so beneficial so does this obsolete people because he tries to clarify right he's like so this seems like something that people are latching on to right he he says um at every step along the way in technology advancements people always thought this would happen every time there's a big change in technology people panic and they go oh no like we're about to be Obsolete and he's like it hasn't happened so far like there have been new jobs that get created now

I just realized I said that and people are going to say well what about this example you sure you you have an example thank you for sharing it in the comments I appreciate it but um the point is that like as a whole technology changes it's not just like everyone everyone's jobs disappear it it doesn't just work like that it hasn't work like that historically and Mark says will that be different this time is this the one that's different he's like could be but like he doesn't see that being the case and I agree I don't see that being the case either so I think what I was saying in the previous video that I made on this was like if I'm making assumptions about what Mark said because I hadn't seen it then I'm like I disagree with those statements I don't think that

um you know people I don't think it's going to happen I said in five years but in 2025 in this case um but as I heard what Mark was saying after I watched it I'm like I agree with a lot of what he has to say I do not interpret Mark's comments as saying hey look we're about to go fire all the software Engineers or we're going to stop hiring software Engineers cuz we don't need them I think the role will continue to evolve over time I've been saying that over and over so I still stand by that I think that people will be able to leverage AI more effectively it'll be more advanced it'll be more powerful I I believe that we'll have more AI doing code writing for us it's already happening right it's already the Juniors the the terrible Juniors that don't

know how to program just copying and pasting it's already happening there's more AI putting code into our code bases you might not like that but my the reason I'm laughing at this is because like I think it's only going to get better so like it might be kind of rough right now and I'm just I'm I'm still laughing and kind of picturing like some of the code that I've seen like chat GPT and stuff spit out so it's like I get it I get where the frustration comes from but if the technology continues to advance and it can output quality code like a mid-level engineer yeah copy and paste that in let's go massage it make it work I was doing this for years off stack Overflow most of us were most of us are so I don't see that as a I don't know

something to be afraid of so those are my thoughts after watching the podcast I realize that um you know I I think probably I said in the other video like people are going to be pissed off like I can't wait for the comments on this or the down votes and stuff that's my my it's my take on it um so it's I think you'll find if you watch the other video or if you've already seen the other one that my perspective remains aligned with what I said before I didn't change my mind where my my mind is changed is based on what Mark actually said like I I thought that he was saying it's going to replace software engineers but that's not the take I got so um the overall stance I have is the same so that's my my thoughts um I want to

recognize that I know people are still afraid and I don't really know what to do anymore aside from just continuing to share that like things are going to change I don't see software engineering going away and I think that it will continue to get more and more creative um I the I think one of the the points if I haven't I don't think I've mentioned it in this video but I said it in some comments I think that people don't recognize that especially if you're very new to the industry there is so much work to get done like ridiculous amounts of work to get done I've never managed engineering teams where there hasn't been like a stupid backlog of stuff we got to get done there's only so many people so much time and we got to keep moving if I could scale teams to

some degree I would be trying to do that right if if there were budget for it if if I you know could scale out and make sure that I had like the right structures that worked well like I would absolutely be doing that if it meant we could get more done but like there isn't budget for it or sometimes it's not the right thing we do with what we we have and we make it work we just cut out the like have to prioritize stuff and cut out things that can't fit so in my head I'm thinking if this pans out the way that I'm hearing Mark talk about it I'm like okay we have like we basically have the ability to be so much more productive I'm like hell yeah I don't look at I think people hear this and they're like that means

people are going to like the the people that run the companies are just going to trim out the developers they don't need them anymore or they they'll stop hiring them and I'm like why would they stop hiring them we need people to do the work we can have them augmented with AI to do even more like so anyway I think that's why I have that perspective that's why I wanted to share it it's like I see it as a not replacement but as an augmentation and I think a lot of people are freaking out because they're like it's a placement if you disagree with that that's totally fine um you can you can debate me in the comments on it but like you're you're not going to change my mind and that's okay if I'm not going to change yours that's totally fine my goal

is that for the people that are um that they're afraid because they're not familiar with how the industry works and they're like I just need other perspectives to kind of balance the stuff out that is mine I don't know if people are hearing that a lot I feel like most people are probably hearing this perspective that's like it will just replace engineers and kind of fuels like perpetuates that that fear so I'm hoping to share some other perspective that might not be out there as much that's my honest take on it um so I hope that helps but that's my take on The Joe Rogan Mark Zuckerberg podcast so thanks so much for watching um remember to check out my main Channel DE leader for the live stream that's every Monday night at 700 p.m.

Pacific if you're watching this on the day it was released that means a live stream is this evening uh if you've missed it and you're watching this at some point in the future uh it's recorded on my main channel so you can check that out and of course if you have more questions leave them in the comments below I'm happy to get back and answer them for you and if you want to send something with more detail keep it Anonymous look for Dev leader on social media and I would be happy to try and answer your question thanks so much and I'll see you next time take care