‘At Best, Engineers Will Be Supervisors, Within 18 Months,’ Says Chamath Palihapitiya. Kids Should Learn Philosophy, Psychology, History, Physics and English Writing
‘At Best, Engineers Will Be Supervisors, Within 18 Months,’ Says Chamath Palihapitiya. Kids Should Learn Philosophy, Psychology, History, Physics and English Writing
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The billionaire investor and former SPAC king says software engineers could soon find themselves out of a job—or at least, in a very different one. In a March 27 post on X, replying to a tweet by Replit CEO Amjad Masad that said, “I no longer think you should learn to code,” he wrote, “The engineer’s role will be supervisory, at best, within 18 months.”
Area man tells a story that happens to coincide with his business model, more news at 10
Moron. He did stock shells, oldest game in the book. He adds ZERO value to younger generations future.
This is such a dumb take. Good engineers are worth their weight in gold. It’s one of the most important jobs out there and will be critical for making androids that are as dexterous as humans. Which also happens to be the least developed part of AGI right now, embodiment.
I see he’s a billionaire investor. That’s great. It means he’s wrong about literally anything involving computers. Including this.
I can find youtube videos telling me half of those degrees won’t get me a job.
“English writing” – why? We have LLM for that. Looks like he is contradicting himself.
AI will not take engineers’ jobs anymore than autocomplete took writers’ jobs.
My son is about to go to school for cybersecurity.
I have a feeling when he graduates in 4 years there will be a ton of work dealing with the vulnerabilities of AI coded software. And even more work fixing the vulnerabilities for AI-coded cybersecurity software.
In order for engineers to be replaced, clients would have to know what they want and what they’re doing.
AKA – Engineering is basically AI proof.
I have three clients going live this weekend. All three of them are currently testing new shit they didn’t think of in the last six months.
LLMs are a great replacement for investors and executives.
“But wait, AI doesn’t have our connections, network, and wasteful dinner parties to bribe other executives. They can’t replace that!” 🙄
18 months is pretty much saying you have no idea what you are talking about. Even industry optimists arent so hyperbolic.
There’s a second-order economic phenomenon I think he and others are missing here. Induced demand of ordinary goods. If a resource becomes easier or cheaper, depending on its utility demand for it can increase drastically to a new equilibrium. Similar to how when aluminum went from extremely expensive to extremely cheap, its uses changed and grew significantly. The same will happen in engineering, and has been for a while.
As each task becomes easier or more efficient, demand for those who can interface with and validate that the tasks are done well will grow for many more use cases that were previously uneconomical. Rote coder engineers may gradually become obsolete, but just like how high level programming languages increased the “engineer” pool, so will AI. The definition of “engineer” will evolve again as well. To be charitable – he is right in the sense of how studying only current-prior generation engineering will become short-sighted and there will be a benefit to also growing skills that will make you a better decision-maker, more creative, and better manage AI assistants. Like how only studying assembly language hasn’t been that helpful in the last ten years if you wanted to become a typical app developer. The term engineer won’t go away – there will be “supervisors”, many of them and more than there are now, and they will still be called engineers.