u/konmari523 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Most of the jobs I'm seeing ask for AI experience, so I'm not surprised graduates optimize for that.
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Are these SWE jobs? Top companies? Interns or full time?
Went to career fair as employer, new grads / interns need to chill out with ML and AI
6 of Michael's comments in this thread · View thread on Reddit ↗
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I've seen this and it's also a common complaint amongst my ex-Meta community - junior devs relying too much on AI and not understanding the underlying code or concepts.
Some day in the future, maybe not too far off, we'll all be using AI like when calculators replaced pencil and paper
But calculators didn't do that over night. My mom and dad actually met because of a calculator back in the late 1970s. Only the team lead had one.
During this multi-year transition phase, understanding the fundamentals and being a really good problem solving is what companies want first.
If you are a student and haven't strengthened those muscles and have instead just gotten good at prompt engineering, you will struggle to progress in the industry as a SWE.
I asked a poll to hundreds of my former colleagues who are now everywhere from startups to CTO of large companies. 90% of people said they don't look for AI skills in interviews for generalist SWEs and don't plan on it.
I also expect there to be a bifurcation of the title SWE, and a whole class of AI related jobs like promote engineering that will be careers separate from the SWE title. And we'll need a lot of people in those careers.
u/konmari523 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yes, SWE. Not top companies, but I guess that's where most people end up in. Full-time is what I'm looking at, haven't checked internships.
u/michaelnovati replied ·
I'm seeing a lot of kind of middle road non tech companies trying to use AI to open up new products for their company.
For example, Thompson Reuters is hiring a lot of legal prompt engineers to try to add some sparkle to a relatively benign business.
If these companies can present themselves as tech companies, valuations skyrocket, stocks up, acquisitions happen... etc.
Sadly, hoarding all the people that are great with AI tools but less great at raw coding might not help them make the sparkly products they think they are. But worst case they'll lay off a bunch of these people, keep some, and just end up being a little faster and more efficient than before and improve profit margins.
u/rashaniquah wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Full time SWE positions, billion dollar companies looking to automate some low level assistants. They were even willing to allocate a decent amount of budget for inference infra. You're right with data scientists not being able to code but the demand and hype is real. This was n
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Oh yeah there are a ton of actual ML jobs too! Like actual Machine Learning engineers which is also different from SWE.
As you said, almost every big company is building out inference infra too which needs a bunch of SWEs to help setup and integrate into the broader infrastructure, in addition to ML people for fine tuning and all that stuff.
I just don't see the demand for full stack generalist SWEs requiring Gen AI skills for any of these jobs.
I see: ML engineers, Data Scientists, Generalist SWE, Prompt Engineer
u/rashaniquah wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
> I just don't see the demand for full stack generalist SWEs requiring Gen AI skills for any of these jobs. I just started seeing this trend about 2 months ago. Basically a generalist with a bunch of LLMs that can replace a whole team of engineers.
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Which companies? I'm not seeing this through discussions with people at Meta, Google, Salesforce, Palantir, Stripe, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Adobe, Databricks, Figma, Dropbox, Uber, Lyft, NVIDIA, Apple, Shopify, Square, and that's all I can think of right now.
Many of these are using AI to help engineers be more productive, like searching the codebase and QA. But none of them are hiring generalist/full stack SWE roles requiring Gen AI.
If they are being the typical engineer this way, send me firsthand sources.
u/rashaniquah wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
That's big tech. They have already released a few genAI products because their engineers are probably already competent enough to work with genAI. I was specifically talking about billion dollar companies with 100+ headcount, there's tons of them. Some of them aren't even tech re
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Ah yeah, ok we were talking different things. Yeah absolutely get what you are talking about. I think that is also a different type of engineer that is new and not yet defined.
Like the "shopify developer" rush during COVID when businesses moved online, or the Web3/crypto rush that happened when Crypto spiked pre-COVID.
During this period of transition to AI (especially in non-tech fields) there will be a lot of one-off jobs that eventually become real/stable new roles.
I think that's the exciting thing about AI, we'll see how it all settles.
Before it settles, all the power to you to find ways to have impact and help companies and build up stronger intuition about how to glue these things together.