Zuckerberg Said NO MORE Software Engineers! PANIC TIME!

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all right it's Wednesday January 15th headed to the office I had uh some morning meetings and then got to get a bunch of stuff done today so I'm going to be Super Heads down um hi if you're new here I talk about uh software engineering topics that you're either submitted in comments or messages or I go to Reddit for uh some topics um I had someone saying that I should spend less time giving updates on uh my life and just talk about the topics at hand um if that's how you feel about this content I actually have a another YouTube channel called Dev leader which has straight to the point polished edited videos that I pay money to have someone edit so you get rid of all my ranting and rambling and it's uh I think a lot more succinct so check Dev leader out

if you like content like that it's on the same topics and then there's programming tutorials otherwise this channel will basically always remain like a Vlog so if you don't like that sorry um so the topic we're going to be going over this came from the comments um and I think there's probably a lot of people that are like I don't know a lot of people are thinking about this kind of stuff over the past while but uh we had a little bit of a sort of a news thing with Mark Zuckerberg talking about meta um because he was on The Joe Rogan podcast and was saying how uh and for I needed like total disclaimer here I've not even watched it um I've just seen like headlines so I'm kind of like regurgitating like you know not a direct quote but what I think I've

inferred is that in like within five years we're not going to have any like mid-level software Engineers um thanks to AI um and then now there's people panicking like people were already panicking because the job Market's tough and Ai and now Mark Zuckerberg says we don't need Engineers um so people are freaking out um so I wanted to talk through this it's going to be about says about 30 minutes to work um we'll see we'll see how this goes uh a friendly reminder if you want your questions answered leave them in the comments or send a message to Dev leader on any social media platform you want I should be on uh all of them if you find a platform that I'm not on then let me know and I'll start posting there and uh if you send me a message you can uh assume

it will be anonymous when I go to talk about it so we don't have to worry about that and uh yeah let's dive into it so uh first of all I just want to say I think this statement's um and end a video but uh no seriously I I think that there's we have to kind of step back and look at who's talking about this stuff right so um I like I don't have anything against Mark Zuckerberg I think he's I think he's got to be an intelligent person based on his accomplishments um and I think the reality is that uh he's in a position where uh he you know like almost like rightfully so from the perspective of a of being a business person needs to be able to talk about the things that he's intending to have his company invest in and promote

like talk about it in a way that's going to uh you know make it sell and that seems like a ridiculously valuable selling point to be able to say that uh AI will be able to replace you know up to to mid-level software Engineers um I just think that in practice this is like so far from reality um at least in the current state of things and uh so I wanted to talk through that um give my perspective on it and one thing that I like to do when I especially if I find I have like a really strong opinion about something like in this case I kind of started off by saying I think it's so I do want to make sure that I can give some time to talk about perhaps the other side right I don't think it's like I try to

make this apparent in all of my content I want to be able to like talk about things from different angles even if I don't agree with it I think it's actually important that we practice doing this kind of thing uh and I think it's really helpful for trying to expand our perspective and uh and look at things uh more conclusively so let's say like like I maybe let's let's kick this off to start it the other way right um so my claim is that I disagree with uh with Zuckerberg and I I have a really bad feeling as I talk through this if I start getting ranty I'll probably start saying Elon by accident so I apologize not because I like have a hatred for Elon just I don't know why I think that name's just going to pop into my head but I don't

uh I don't agree with Mark Zuckerberg in this case uh that it will replace like the statement seems like it will rep place all of the mid-level engineers um AI will and even if that's not the exact statement cuz I haven't seen or or heard it firsthand uh I think that's the impression that people are getting basically is like there will be no software engineering jobs right like why would there be if we're about to replace all the mid-level engineers like why should I even get into software engineering so I disagree with this but the alternative that I like kind of want to start to entertain before I rant about why I disagree with it is like if we think about the capabilities of llms right now and the rate at which they're progressing um I don't like you have to kind of uh maybe

think about this from your own perspective like are you using AI tools right now in any of your development uh and I realize maybe for some people watching this you actually haven't done any coding yet and maybe that's why this seems so scary is like I don't I don't even code yet and like I thought that I wanted to be a software engineer but it's like all doom and gloom um so I mean if you haven't coded like kind of sit back maybe people will chime in in the comments uh and they'll give some perspective but even for me like I'm a software engineering manager I don't code at work right but I code every day outside of work I've been programming for over 20 years love to do it and I use AI tools all the time and the rate at which I've seen

them like kind of help in my workflows is is advancing quickly and that's awesome so I've made videos actually my my most disliked video that I put out on this channel is just me talking about personally the handful of situations that I like using AI tools for development and people seem to really dislike it I don't still don't know why but anyway I use it in my own development and I like in a nutshell and mostly using it for um either uh what I would call like mundane things like things I know how to do but I just like really don't want to spend time doing that way I can use the llm to kind of do the work and then I can review it and be like yep checks out makes sense um and it just saved me a lot of uh time right

um and then the other thing is like probably around on on the surface like if I don't know how to do something like kind of putting me in the direction uh but certainly if I didn't know anything about a topic for me I don't use llms to to just like blindly get some result and then just like be like LM says so let's go uh which I think is a bit of a meme right now with uh say may maybe more Junior developers but that's kind of how I use them and it's been helping tremendously but like I think it's a it's a very big step forward to go from that to replacing so what I'm wondering in in the statement from Zuckerberg is if the intention is not to say in practice every mid-level engineer will be replaced in practice every which implies like

they like literally whether it's meta Maybe was just talking about meta like meta just goes and lays off every mid-level engineer cuz and Below cuz uh doesn't make sense we have uh AI that can do it for us right all those roles laid off gone um maybe that's not the implication of what he's saying maybe the maybe the intention and I don't know this right but just to kind of think through it maybe the intention is to say that AI in 5 years will be good enough to be able to kind of uh I don't know if I can like personify AI this much but like to think in reason I don't think it necessarily does that currently but to think in reason like a mid-level engineer would such that if you were a stakeholder talking to a mid-level engineer and said hey here's the

problem space here's the problem I need you to solve that if you did that to AI versus a mid-level engineer they would come up with similar Solutions right if that if that's what we're saying then I think within 5 years for sure we can achieve that um but that that kind of statement is not um like what I phras it that way what I'm trying to not do is kind of like fear bonger I'm not I'm not even suggesting with that statement therefore we replace all the midlevel engineers like why why would you necessarily because there's different like when we're talking about this in practice we're not talking about the um what other types of overhead get introduced right we have so many things in place in organ like software organizations that help us sort of manage teams like I'm I'm a manager um but

in terms of organizing work the processes that we go through there's a lot of this stuff in place already if we think about large companies even the transition to try and just like eradicate this but only up to midlevel somehow up to an including midlevel eradicate this and just like now it's just llms and all of a sudden we're saying that's on par or potentially better like I think that that's completely infeasible at least with this trajectory and the thing that I kind of want to interject and say is that by the time we are able to do that where like it actually just makes sense that we have AI That's So Advanced where we could just do that I don't think that we're like as uh as Society just concerned as software developers to say oh no they got rid of software development I

think that's at a point where we're saying like what kind of other roles do you imagine are place at that point okay so like it's not I think the Doom and Gloom around the soft engineering part is so hyp specific that like I think it's just people getting completely irrational with it so I think like when I'm kind of navigating this and I'm hearing it like first of all I want to resist it because I'm like it just sounds like ridiculous um so I am just for context right like I am at a principal level uh as an engineering manager though so like okay so in this in this future world where you know 5 years from now ai has replaced the mid levels I'm still employed right great cool um but like what what does that look like and the reality is that in

a situation like that we're talking about in practice this happening how would I realistically start just replacing humans with AI up to a certain level to go do the work that needs to get done and I just think that in practice when we talk about this from the perspective of like okay if you're up to level whatever you're now just gone now we just put AI there like what does that even mean like I I I think in practice there's something missing there when we try to say that because it's easy to say the words out loud but like what does it mean in practice and I think that like as someone who has been running software engineering teams for like over 12 years if someone said to me in leadership hey we're going to start replacing people with AI I would have a lot

of questions about like how do you expect that to work in practice okay so let's use an example let's I have a team of six people and two of them are junior so we say okay it's time we lay off the Juniors and then and then what happens so the AI replaces them but what what does that mean in practice we we we basically go to a server we run two AI agents and now the rest of the team and I just talk to the AI agents like they were mid-level engineers and tell them to start coding things and then we start doing that for a bit and then the AI becomes Advanced enough and I say okay like you know leadership says AI is good enough to replace the midlevel so then you know on that team I now go lay off another two

people that were mid-level so I only got a couple senior I can't remember how many people I set on the team so one or two people left on the team that are senior and they now talk to a total of four AI agents and then do we just continue this pattern until it's just AI agents essentially operating the software engineering organization because at what point do we not need the managers do we not need any of the other supporting roles like the directors like where do you stop and this is sort of the meta point that I wanted to get across is that by the time it's able to do that kind of you could make the argument you don't need any of the roles I think that when we talk about this stuff in theory on paper it's so easy to say but in

practice it's not that straightforward to go Implement like my take is we would if we expected that kind of thing to happen in like 5 years from now we don't have mid-level Engineers I think you would have to start on that in like these big organizations I think you would have to start that transition already you would already have the plan to start phasing people out and some people are going to be listening to this and say but they are doing that they are you see the layoffs and stuff happening um and then the conspiracies start like the the challenge with talking about this kind of stuff is like if you already believe a certain thing you won't you won't even be receptive to what I'm saying and it's I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you otherwise like if you already

believe that this is the way that AI is going to replace all the software engineers and that means because here's the other thing the consequence of that is that every software engineer will have no job I think that's a key Point too um if that's what you already believe like I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you otherwise you're right it's cool my video's wrong you can give it a thumbs down you can move on um great but to go back to what I said I think Zuckerberg's in a position where he needs to be able to take a strong stance on this because he's a business person so I can understand that I don't agree with it but to try and blend some of the things that I was saying back at the beginning is like maybe it's not a matter

of directly replacing software Engineers maybe it means that we're able to scale up software engineering teams by and I don't know if if if his claim was AI agents or whatever else but by by leveraging Ai and in that case I absolutely agree because I absolutely agree or believe at least I'm I'm assuming that Zuckerberg agrees with this but I don't know um but my belief is that uh that we can enhance ourselves as software developers doing this it it change it will fundamentally change how we develop software because it already is and I know there are people that like to like uh they want to like dismiss this and they say well it doesn't for me like basically based on my experience it doesn't for me therefore it doesn't for anyone else but it's kind of like a shitty argument it's not like it's

not real um and even like to go back back on what I said I said hey it does change it for me therefore it will change it for everyone else that's not what I'm saying I'm not saying it changes it for everyone else the point is that if it has the ability to and then we look at statistically is it like over time and this is something we would have to measure is it changing how people develop software I'm quite confident the answer will be yes it does and then as a result the role of a software engineer changes I think that we will be spending less time on some of the intricate details of things it's not that those things don't become important because when they do come up you're really going to have to know your but I think we'll spend less time

day-to-day doing that kind of stuff because we will have ai tools that can do it so things like mundane tasks will start to be going like becoming less and less well have more ability to aggregate data and sort of do like a high level understanding of it that'll become more and more common and honestly I think the role of software Engineers will become a lot more um arguably like almost like a I don't know if I can call it like a product architect I'm just kind of making stuff up right now but um we will have to do a really good job of understanding requirements of the product because we will need to be able to relay this to AI because we'll be using the tools more and more and more but also when things inevitably aren't perfect because guess what even today they're not

perfect we need to dive into the really nitty-gritty details debug things diagnose things and have some some way to uncover the information so whereas right now what might happen depending on your level someone will say hey here's here's a user story or however you want to split up your work right here's here's some work you have to go do and you look at it you're like I need to understand the requirements okay I'm going to have to go code I'm just making this up again this crud API um that's going to you know I need to be able to interact with the database and so you go do it and like some of those things like you may not have to do anymore but that doesn't mean that like you're just out of a job it just means that your time has to be focused

on more complex things or different like maybe we can say like higher level thinking of things and I feel like that's probably a good thing I don't know if people just love building like crud apis and like really simple things I certainly don't if I could just have it done I would and then I can again like I love building stuff but there's a lot of repetitive mundane things that's why we have levels of abstraction in software engineering right it's to make it so that we don't have the cognitive load of having to go do all these things all the time so my take on this is that it's in 5 years we will absolutely have software Engineers of all levels uh in 5 years the role of a software engineer will look different um the way that develop software will look different the skill

sets that you need to focus on on as a software engineer will look different and I don't think that they're going to happen overnight okay so when people are fearful of like well maybe I shouldn't become a software engineer like if you want to remain fearful just do this thought experiment go pick something else pick it pick any other career choice that you want for fun okay okay and now now go ask yourself how AI is going to replace that and then people are going to get to the point where they're saying well like okay well it must be something like manual like some type of physical labor I don't know have you seen the robots they're coming out with you're telling me that that's not going to replace jobs so if you just want like if you enjoy being afraid there's plenty of options

to go be afraid so in my opinion if you're like I don't know what to do I don't know how to take a step forward like you can either literally do nothing and just stay afraid of everything because if you want to be afraid about software engineering jobs go be afraid About Accountants go be afraid about lawyers go be afraid like doctors right we'll get some high Precision robots with AI we're set we don't need doctors so go be afraid about anything that's cool I just don't think that that's like helpful or productive or going to move you forward this Tesla's really got to make up his mind unreal Elon see I said I was going to bring elot um so again like I'm not trying to totally be an here but I think that I like I can understand if you're very new to

the industry that you would just be very afraid of these things because of how it's marketed to you Zuckerberg says it right like it's that's what's going to happen I'm just a dude in the car but I do run software engineering teams right so now I I was thinking about this ahead of time and I didn't want to forget it um I suspect there will be people that watch this that say okay well you're saying it's in uh Zuckerberg's best interest to talk about it aren't you just doing the same thing you run software engineering teams won't you be out of a job and like even this is how like I'm Not Afraid like the the No Fear Part on this like let's even assume that I was let's pretend it's real okay and because there are no Engineers we don't need engineering managers okay

and I lose my job as a result of it within 5 years I still build software so I believe I already have a set of skills I'm already working on other things I'm not afraid of just not being able to survive I also sell courses for software engineers and how to program and if no one needed those because uh you know we don't need software Engineers there goes my income right like oh no um I will find other ways like I'm not concerned so uh if you if your concern like if your perspective is that I'm just trying to sell you the opposite story uh of Zuckerberg because I don't know I'm trying to protect my own career or because I have other vested interest in trying to sell you things like literally if you don't want to become a software engineer it has absolutely

no effect on on my career um or my trajectory in the places I want to go so um I say that seriously right like it doesn't affect me however I just wanted to give you some perspective because I think that if you see all of the fear going around like someone at the ground level if someone came to me and said you got to start replacing your team with AI I would be like okay well you better expect that we're going to take an an absurd productivity hit over the next however long uh and they're probably going to be like well why that doesn't make sense they said the AI was at the level of mid-level Engineers and they going to say yeah and you got lied to so it doesn't it's not a drop in replacement so until we have some some path forward

on that and is it going to take 5 years I don't know um I doubt it and even if we do um I think the replacement of the engineers is probably where uh I have the biggest disagreement because could you not say Hey you can just replace the junior Engineers you can replace two Junior Engineers with a senior engineer why didn't we do that you can replace two senior Engineers with one principal engineer why didn't we do that that would have probably would have saved money wouldn't it why didn't we do it so I don't think it works like that in practice um so if you're listening and you want to keep an open mind I would say try not to uh let the fear totally overwhelm you um I'm of the mindset that we will continue to need software Engineers I'm of the mindset

that software engineering will evolve um I'm I think it's exciting times ahead I'm very curious to see how things go uh if I'm completely wrong about this I'm if I'm still making videos uh then I'm happy to kind of go back and reflect on this but I cannot comprehend how in five years we would eliminate jobs completely eliminate the midlevel software engineer and Below um and again maybe because I didn't look up exactly what Zuckerberg said maybe that's not exactly what he said but that's at least the sentiment I'm getting when people are asking about this why should I become a software engineer if software Engineers simply won't exist so hope that helps um kind of thinking I'm going to have uh I suspect that if YouTube actually promotes this in the algorithm because uh unfortunately I'm at the mercy of whatever it wants to

do but I suspect if it does um this will probably be a heavily disliked video as well it's kind of interesting I don't know why uh it's like probably polarizing for people maybe and what I've noticed on videos is like like I said I'm trying to give you both sides to this right I don't think it will completely eliminate roles I think it will change them um and I think that when people are watching a topic that's polarizing if like they're going to have a very strong opinion too most likely and even if I sit in the middle or try to give you both sides if I don't agree with you people are like no like I hate this dislike which is fine as long as you watched I got the the watch time right I'm just kidding but uh if you disagree with it

I'd love to hear from you in the comments right because I actually am open to hearing other perspectives the uh kind of thing I'm not open to is when people uh are just uh a total ass hat out of the gate like if you come Out Swinging like insulting me then um it's not going to be fun for anyone but if you disagree and you want to share your perspective I would love to hear about it I don't have to agree with you and you don't have to agree with me and that's okay as long as you acknowledge that c is the best programming language that's ever been created in the history of the universe man there's no good parking spots sucks no matter what I have to risk getting a door ding I don't trust anyone in this parking garage no offense but the

uh the parking is like I don't I don't even want to park here I have to drive around a little longer throwing everything off you got to hang out with me a little longer it's probably a good opportunity to plug some stuff if you watch all the way to the end um so my main Channel Dev leader has a live stream that is Mondays at 700 p.m. Pacific and it's on similar topics look at like you can't see can you see the lines I don't know probably not um there was like three cars that were just not inside any lines okay so I got to park in this stupid spot whatever not happy they're all compact spaces and the car is long so that's not an issue but it's a coupe so the doors are really long and if I have to open them it

sucks and then like I said I don't trust anyone in this parking garage so parking near other people sucks anyway software engineering AI don't be scared I'll see you later thanks