Software engineers may have to develop other skills soon as artificial intelligence takes over many coding tasks.
That’s according to Amazon Web Services’ CEO, Matt Garman, who shared his thoughts on the topic during an internal fireside chat held in June, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.
“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding,” said Garman, who became AWS’s CEO in June.
“Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It’s not necessarily the skill in and of itself,” the executive said. “The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that’s interesting for my end users to use?”
This means the job of a software developer will change, Garman said.
“It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build, because that’s going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code,” he said.
I could have missed something, but quickly scanning his job history shows he started as an intern at the beginning of AWS while getting his MBA, and then became a Product Manager. Didn’t really see any programming experience or knowledge, not sure he has the context and foundational understanding to be able to justify making claims like that.
Seems like most of the people who talk about AI eliminating programming jobs, haven’t ever had a job writing code or have a firm grasp of what those kind of roles actually do.
The cynic in me thinks all these articles from executives making such bold claims are to scare developers into thinking we don’t have as much leverage in the job market as we do, even after all the layoffs it’s still a workers market. The realist in me thinks they probably just like hearing themselves talk, and everyone’s guilty of talking about something they know nothing about. According to whoever’s razor it was, it’s probably the latter.
Yeah it’s super obvious that he’s a product manager from the quotes.
This is the path for promotion for product managers. Create new interesting products and move on before they fail. And yeah, if you really don’t care about failing LLMs can maybe help speed up prototyping here.
However, what Aws actually tries to sell to users is rock solid reliability and high up time. If you start asking “how do I go build something that’s even more reliable?” It’s incredibly clear that LLMs are not the answer.