Dylan Serota hosts monthly dinner parties with the Chief Technology Officer. The topic that everyone wanted to talk about recently is AI coding tools, he told Business Insider.
Serota is the CEO of Terminal, a talent platform for software engineers and developers. Last year he told Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale that none of the dinner party guests believe AI will cut down on software engineering jobs. Even as AI coding tools grow more self-sufficient, Serota has not changed his views.
That doesn't mean that the work of software engineers will remain the same.
“There is absolutely a consensus that work is evolving,” Celota told BI. “There's an evolution of jobs, and it's not necessarily a job exchange.”
Photos from one of the dinner parties. Courtesy of Dylan Cerota
Cerota said the guests at his dinner party are bullish with AI coding tools and are aware of the “increasing productivity” they can offer to their teams. The result is a simple engineering task that could be cheaper, but Serota said this will encourage technology companies to do more to avoid pulling back the engineering headcount.
“Essentially, you can increase the corpus of data, which is a corpus of software, so in reality you can invest in more software engineers and do things,” Serota said.
Serota's business, running a talented platform, relies on the demand of software engineers. He is also directly entangled with them and the companies that employ them. Some people have been slowed down in employment, but others have vomited.
What Serota points out is the type of engineers employed by high-tech companies.
“We were getting requests from people like, 'I want a Python developer,'' says Serota. “They were hiring a very language-oriented or domain-oriented skill set for a particular position, which is currently moving on. They just want to focus more on the basics of genuinely good engineers and engineering in general.”
Serota said companies are less interested in who can “write code” and more interested in who can “think like an engineer.”
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Swapping jobs remains controversial, but AI code editors certainly transform the industry. In high-tech giants like Microsoft and Google, around 30% of the code is written by AI.
Business leaders who are openly speaking about the impact of AI's potential work can be a delicate balance act. Just because CTOs say they don't expect to replace software engineers for AI, that's still possible. In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote a memo to the company that AI will “reduce the total workforce of companies as they gain efficiency.”
Celota's dinner party guests don't necessarily come from Amazon and Google around the world. There are more CTOs from “major startups and growth stage companies” than Fortune 500 leaders. Cerota refused to list any of the invited guests.
Tech companies may also be more cautious about AI coding tools than they would expect. Serota pointed to recent research suggesting that the use of code editors has resulted in loss of productivity among experienced engineers.
“There are a few companies that don't allow junior engineers to use AI tools,” Serota said, fearing it could lead to “a wide dependency.”
Other companies that process more sensitive information also have security concerns. Serota said some dinner guests are worried that opening libraries to code editors will make their data vulnerable.
“These concerns are small, because people are so excited to do that you can, but they surprise me,” he said.
In Serota's advantage, software engineers should not panic. “Demand for engineers is increasing and not decreasing,” he said.
