(Preview) Justice for Software Engineers, The Various Futures of Vibe Coding, Questions at xAI and Progress for Tesla
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Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? In mourning, Andrew. In mourning. I posted last night from NotechBen.com.

The basketball gods appear to be dead. OKC is the NBA champions. Congratulations to them. They optimized everything. They did everything according to the numbers, not according to the spirit of basketball. You know, you don't have to pay lip service to the thunder on this podcast. I can't imagine we have that many listeners in Oklahoma and everybody from the other 49 states is with you, man. This team has been cheating the game for months. The basketball gods.

I thought might save us. The Pacers got off to a great start. Tyrese Halliburton looked great, was hitting shots. Alas, it all ended in the most gut-wrenching fashion imaginable. So now here we are in mourning together. My condolences to the Pacers fans who showed such grace when Damian Lillard tore his Achilles tendon. Oh, wait, they didn't do that at all. But injuries...

Injuries stink. But no, I mean, OKC was the best team all season. They won the title. I will give congratulations to our winners. We respect winners here. So congratulations to OKC. Yes. Well, that's why I tend to be torn in these conversations because championships matter. Winning matters. So I do feel an obligation to pay respect to the Thunder. But man, oh, man, I did not enjoy that experience.

and you're a bigger man than me. I didn't have anything to say, at least for public consumption, after OKC closed it out in seven. So good job tweeting and keeping it mildly respectful. In any event, we have some mail. Speaking of mildly respectful. Yes, we have mail from Ben. He says...

The fallacy, the subject line here is the fallacy of the disappearing software engineer. And he writes, I keep hearing on various podcasts about the disappearing software engineer and how the barbell effect will come for the software engineer. This bleak prediction has a fatal flaw.

I run a tech company in the Valley and work to hire a lot of engineers. I'm here to say that the disappearing software engineer is nowhere close to being a reality, and I don't think it will be a reality in the future. The fundamental difference between software development and every other type of development is that the primary constraint is complexity, not physics.

If AI makes engineers 10 times more efficient, 100 times more efficient, or even 1,000 times more efficient, you are still incentivized to hire as many engineers as you can because product roadmaps are infinite. A good technology company will never run out of things to build because that is their lever to make money in the world.

Will the activities of a software engineer change over time? Absolutely. But so long as your competitor is competing with you on software capability, you will be incentivized to build more capability. Someone somewhere will have to translate those ideas and capabilities into a working product, and that will take work even if it's just typing into a prompt, long live the software engineer.

So, Ben, what do you think? This is obviously a response to our discussion of the barbell effect in engineering last week. My offhanded comment about downward pressure on engineering salaries over time. What comes to mind when you hear all of Ben's arguments there?

I mean, I'm sort of intrinsically sympathetic, like just in general when it comes to these AI debates. I think the number of problems to be solved and more importantly, the capacity of humans to create problems to be solved is very large. I mean, we somehow to our benefit, the problem of needing a podcast to listen to has been created and we're working hard to solve it. That's right. So, yeah. So I'm...

It's sympathetic to this. Ben does, this other Ben, does also trigger some of my wanting to sort of be contrary in bits here where he's like, look, as long as your competitors compete with software capability, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's like the...

of how companies actually win, right? Oh, Slack's going to win because it's better. Oh, no, Microsoft's actually going to win because they have distribution. And they sort of glue all these things together. And we see large companies all the time, oh, we're going to increase our stock buyback because implicitly saying we don't have better things to spend the money on. They could have been hiring more engineers all the time. Now, maybe you might say that actually it's because engineers are scarce, which I think would be –

might be Ben's counter here. And if they could hire more engineers with that money, they would find more stuff to do, but it's not, I think there's, it's not, not, not, not as simple as sort of Ben puts it, that there's an infinite number of things to do and to build in the fullness of time. Sure. But it is notable. Microsoft did another set of layoffs. We talked about, you know, Amazon talking about, you know, they're going to be reducing their workforce, uh,

Like there is at least some evidence. Again, maybe this is just big sclerotic companies that come up, can't come up with better things to do. Well, that's part of what I wonder about on this question, because my main concern for engineers is not AI per se, but like at least in big tech companies.

All the companies that have hired engineers over the last 15 years and driven salaries up are still, at least on the outside, it appears they're employing way more people than they need to. And if that's true, then A, the efficiency gains from AI may be one reason that software engineers get squeezed in various ways. But also, all these companies have massive ongoing AI infrastructure costs.

that could lead to belt tightening down the road that sort of depresses the market. That's a very important point, right? Like the money is not infinite. It gets pulled from pool A to pool B. And so, yeah, that's definitely a concern. I mean,

I would say in the short term, it seems like definitely we still need engineers. Like a lot of this stuff is theoretical and demo projects, and the actual complexity is huge. And the complexity of software in general means that if you sort of give too much to the AI to do it, you lose a handle of what's being built. You're actually in a worse state than you were sort of at the beginning. It's very much a short-term gain for long-term loss, right?

you know, tech debt is a real thing. Tech debt as generated by AI sounds visible and terrible. Right. Yeah. I mean, so a lot of this stuff is sort of to be determined for sure. And, you know, open AI is hiring a bunch of engineers. I was going to say, right. So you see, that's right. And so, so we'll see. I think,

Like I said, intrinsically, I kind of tend to agree with Ben in this. But when you zoom out and, you know, look at more sort of blue collar work, like how does automation affect, say, say manufacturing people who are not concerned about, say, the U.S.'s trade deficit with China will point to the fact that the amount of revenue generated for manufacturing in the U.S. is higher than ever.

But the number of people employed in manufacturing is lower than ever. And a big part of that is not just outsourcing. It's also automation. Look at agriculture. We generate far more food than at any time in human history. But the number of people working in agriculture is much lower. It's like 2% of the population. It used to be like 90% of the population. So will engineering go in that direction?

TBD will white collar work broadly go in that direction. It seems likely that that's going to happen and you're going to have an ever more shift to services that are not necessarily fully digitized. Everyone in the future will host a podcast and that's how we're going to solve the employment problems.

I mean, I'm feeling a little stiff sitting in this chair. Maybe I'll go to a massage later. I mean, talk about like a creative job in the last like X number of years. So there is a bit of fighting against all of technological history. Technology sort of by definition increases efficiency. That implies fewer people doing a greater amount of work.

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