Latest / DevQuestions with Tim Corey / 283. AI, Layoffs, and Why Developer Jobs Are Going To Grow

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283. AI, Layoffs, and Why Developer Jobs Are Going To Grow · DevQuestions with Tim Corey

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: A leaked document from Amazon indicates they're going to be eliminating up to 600,000 jobs in the next two years.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: AI has gained traction seemingly in every company.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: These types of headlines are actually great news for software developers.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Not only is our profession secure, but these are indicators that will be even more valuable in the days to come.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about why in this episode of DevQuestions.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Software development is more than just writing code.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about the rest of it.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Specifically, let's talk about the elimination of jobs and how that can actually be a good thing for software developers.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: As you may know, DevQuestions episodes are presented in two different formats.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: On YouTube, you can watch me as I talk to you.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Or you can visit your favorite podcast location to subscribe to these same episodes as audio-only podcast episodes.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: As such, I work to provide a similar experience for both audiences.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: But in today's episode, we're going to do things a bit differently.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to be presenting some visuals and walking you through them.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: However, if you're listening, I will walk you through what I'm presenting so you'll be able to follow along, and the links will be in the show notes.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so let's talk about the scary article that came out recently about Amazon eliminating potentially up to 600,000 jobs in the next two years.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is brought to my attention by a viewer, and I think it's important to go over because the article actually reinforces what I've been saying for years now.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Software development is an excellent career to be in, and it's a growing field.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: So let's look at the article and talk it through.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is out of the Economic Times or out of India, and it has a really scary headline.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Quite frankly, this headline is not representative of what the actual content is, but let's talk about why.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it says Amazon layoffs.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's Amazon replacing humans with robots.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Leaked docs reveal companies plan to replace 600,000 workers with robots by 2027.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of those articles where when you read the headline, you get one sense.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And when you read the actual article, you realize it's nowhere near what they're saying it is.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: So let's be careful whenever you're thinking about these headlines that you don't just take it as true or as a complete picture.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about this article and then it'll become clear why this is valuable.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: So Amazon is, they say it's going to replace up to 600,000 US workers with robots by 2027.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually not what the article or the leaked document seems to have said.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: It says instead there's an automation blueprint showing they're targeting 75% robotic operations.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: So what the writer did was said, okay, what is what is 75% of the current workforce?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's eliminate that.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's 600,000 people.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what the art the leak document was actually saying, I don't think.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, the leak document said 160,000 warehouse workers' roles would be impacted over the next two years.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now, impact, I love that word or hate that word, depending on how you want to say it, because impacted really means um eliminated.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a it's a friendly way of saying that your job has been impacted means you don't have a job anymore.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but if we see down below in this article what that 160,000 warehouse roles actually looks like, is that instead of adding 160,000 new roles, when they expand their warehouses, they just won't add those employees.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: So that's not really the same thing as eliminating current employee jobs.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: That means they're not going to be adding new jobs, but you have to be adding robotics.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Still, you're not adding new jobs.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: In theory, that's not really true.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so let's talk about why.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk down here.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they they say cost cutting, increase efficiency, robotics.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're saying AI-driven machines.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I'm curious if that's actually true or if it's just automation.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And this is one of those things that people might not realize.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: So back in my early days as a software developer in the late 90s, early 2000s, I worked for a company where I was a software development consultant.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I would come in and write code for you, I'd help you fix your code, I would make your company more efficient, whatever it took essentially.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: And our company focused a lot on mechanical automation.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: So things like uh conveyor belts and robots and other things where we would come in and part of our team would do the programming on the robotics side of things, was the programming, you know, conveyor belts and the switching that that goes through that, or it's actual robotic arms or whatever it was.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: I would do the software side of things.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: I would you know write an application that interfaced with those robotics in order to make things more efficient.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Guess what I was doing?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: In essence, I was eliminating or yes, eliminating jobs.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was eliminating people who were doing manual jobs, I was eliminating those, eliminating those jobs and turning them into quote-unquote robotic jobs.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, for the most part, that did not mean that less employees worked at a company.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: For the most part, what it meant was they had different jobs.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: So they worked on a forklift instead of working, you know, manually picking things.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: They they did other things, but I helped bring robotics into manufacturing.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: That was something that had been done for years before I did it.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: This and this is, again, 25 years ago, 25 even 28 years ago.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: So this is not a new thing.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is a thing that's been happening for time.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And really, we want that to happen because manual labor jobs aren't real fun.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're often miserable jobs, and so often robotics comes in to replace those miserable jobs with um with robotics instead, and then different jobs get created.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, you know, the the economy has grown because of this robotics push.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: So this is nothing new.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now, does it hurt when your job is eliminated?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a point where that can go too far as well.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: But this has been happening for years.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: So this is not something new that just happened because of AI.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: This has been happening for decades.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now, let's look at kind of Amazon's pushback a little bit.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they they say that the company argues that new technologies create opportunities in robotics maintenance, makes sense, right?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Programming and AI management.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, what are the three things?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Robotics maintenance, programming, and AI management.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, software developers are specifically called out here as there will be more jobs for you because of this increased automation.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: So when you see something like this, where they say, you know, big scary thing.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now the reality is it's not what the article says it is, it's not as scary as the article says.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, there's a case where this might not eliminate any current jobs.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: It may eliminate potential future jobs as they expand, but it will also increase jobs for software developers.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: So this is where this article does call out that there is going to be a bit of a divide, all right, where workers who are unskilled, and an unskilled is a is a poor way of saying it, but basically what it's saying is workers who don't have technical training, don't have any specific training, just on-the-job training for a more manual role, a role that eventually get replaced by robots.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Those people are going to have a harder and harder time finding jobs.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to take, you know, there's going to be other places they have to look for jobs because more and more things will be replaced with robotics.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's happening.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: That does stink.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: However, what is going to be it's going to be replaced with is more and more software development roles.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: So with that, our our job, our field grows with this automation.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so there is getting a balance here where there's going to be more software development jobs, more better paying jobs, and less of the low-paying jobs that, quite frankly, a lot of people don't want to do anyway, but um be a lot less of those jobs.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, we're not going to argue over whether that's ethical or anything else, because we have to re-ex, you know, accept the reality of what is.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that does stink sometimes.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: But this is the reality of how things work.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: We want to pay less for things.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: How do you pay less?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you put less human workers in the pipeline.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's how you do it.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so therefore, robotics, therefore, developers become more valuable.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: So this article really doesn't say what the scary headline says.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it doesn't indicate that maybe even any roles will be impacted.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: The 600,000 is is a is an estimation based upon 75% robotic workforce.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's an accurate estimation.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the the 160,000 is based upon not hiring new roles for those things.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: So therefore, there's zero jobs actually eliminated there.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and yet there'll be more jobs added for software developers.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, all in all, this is a great thing for software developers.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So this article actually talks about why this is a really good thing for us and why there'll be an increased demand for technical roles and supervisory roles.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: So there'll be more good roles coming out of these types of things, and this is gonna actually add to some growth.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: But the question still comes up: yeah, but that's gonna mean less software developer roles because AI is gonna do more and it's gonna eliminate junior developer roles.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that's not true.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: But let's not just take my word for it.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk to AWS CEO, where he says replacing junior staff with AI is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's a direct quote.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Dumbest thing I've ever heard.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: So according to Amazon, according to AWS, which is their cloud provider, they're saying replacing junior developers with AI is dumb.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to happen.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg of people coming out and realizing that software developers don't get replaced by AI.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: They may get helped by AI, but they don't get replaced by AI.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I just want to point that out.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to kind of touch on this.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna keep coming back to this in a minute, but I do want to point out one more thing.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that is people saying, yes, but Tim, it's already happened.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's already happened.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's more layoffs than ever.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: That you know, AI is coming for our jobs, it's companies are already replacing developers and mass.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's highlight something here.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think that sometimes when you hear something anecdotally, you think that applies across the industry.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: When you hear of a company that says, hey, we're replacing developers with AI, which has happened multiple times, and it grabs headlines every time it does, which is kind of the point.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: But when you hear that, you think this is what the industry is doing.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So let's look at this chart I have here.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I didn't put any uh I'm I didn't put any kind of indication of what these four these four bars indicate.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I want you to know that this is uh a bar chart that shows the first bar is uh about a hundred and sixty thousand, the next bar is two hundred and sixty thousand, the next bar is about a hundred and fifty some thousand, and the final bar is about a hundred and thirty some thousand.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: So if you looked at this chart and you were trying to identify a trend, what trend do you think you would identify if this was sequential, which it is.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: So if this is sequential, then you would look at the second bar being huge compared to the others and go, hey, that was a bad time.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: But otherwise, these bars are pretty much the same and actually sloping down a little bit, right?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: They're reducing.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, is this income?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: No, actually, what this is is layoffs per year.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's a uh a website called layoffs.fyi.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'll show you to you in a minute, but it captures the tech industry layoffs.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, those layoffs could be project managers or janitors or CEOs, whoever it is.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: If they're laid off, they accounted if they're at a tech company.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not exactly one-to-one for developers, but it does give you a finger in the pulse of the tech industry.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: In 2022, there were 165,000 reported layoffs in the tech industry.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: In 2023, 264,000 layoffs.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: 2024, 152,000 layoffs.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: In 2025, there's been about 112,000 layoffs, but it's only the end of October.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: So what I did is said, hey, we're five-sixths of the way through the year, so let's divide by five, multiply by six.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: That gives us what the projected number would be.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that projected number is 135,000 layoffs.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that includes the layoffs Amazon just announced the uh 14,000 layoffs, which could balloon up to 30,000.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: But right now, if Amazon has announced 14,000 layoffs uh just I think yesterday.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that includes that number.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we're on pace to have less layoffs this year than we did last year.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that was less layoffs than in either the previous two years.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, and yes, 2023 is a bad year.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was the bounce back from COVID.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And COVID, a bunch of companies hired a you know a lot of people.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then after COVID, they were like, hey, we don't need you anymore, and let them go.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the big kind of market correction year.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: So when you look at that, those numbers, what does that tell you about the tech industry?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it tells you that while these numbers are huge, you know, for example, Amazon, 14,000 people just got laid off um two days ago.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a that's a bad thing.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's that and every person represents a family or a situation where there was income and now there's not, and that's a bad thing.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And if you kind of lose track of that and start seeing just numbers, that's that's gonna get hard because what you're doing is you're you know devaluing people.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And these people matter.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: But when you're looking at it as an industry trend, then you realize the industry trend is less layoffs every year in the tech industry.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: So when you hear those big scary numbers, 14,000, 30,000, 600,000, you have to really look at what the reality is and kind of separate the anecdotal from the overall informative.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um yes, layoffs happen, and yes, I don't think companies treat people the way they should.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it happens.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: And yet we can't just panic when that happens because when it's happening, we we you know see only that article or only that series of articles, and everybody panics over that one thing.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a bigger picture.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, honestly, this is not the whole picture either, because there's a much larger industry outside of just technology companies, right?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, that's the vast majority of software developers probably don't work for technology companies.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: They work for regular companies, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like you know, Proctor and Gamble or insurance companies, or you know, these companies that are doing things that are anything else besides technology, but they need software developers.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a larger pool there, and yes, there may be different uh things in different industries.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: And overall, economically, we're not in a great place right now.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: So economically, most companies seem to be kind of not hiring or kind of like just figuring out what to do.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: They're circling the wagons, they're they're they're trying to figure out what to do and not spend too much money.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that is causing a overall market disruption.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't mean the world's ending, especially not for software developers.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk through uh the four realities that I see out of this.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Reality number one is how and what we develop is going to change, but the role of developer is always going to be a thing.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: So with AI, with you know, Amazon saying, hey, we're doing more robotics.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, guess what?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: There may be more developers integrating with robotics.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's what I did when I was first starting out.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was working with the people who are you know writing the PLC logic, and I was integrating with those PLCs, and I was that was a lot of fun, by the way.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um you're doing more and more like connecting to hardware and automating things.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: That may be the case.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, AI is here, and so there's getting more integrating an AI into your software.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: I used to course where we embed an offline AI into a C application where it made sense.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's going to happen more because there are places where that is valuable, where that idea of it's not an expected output all the time, but a different output, or a um, you know, it needs that almost human-like response as opposed to the very robotic cause and effect type thing that normal development does.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: So there's cases where that may be the case as well.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: So our role is going to change.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: It may be that we do more and more work where we do more and more prompting and have more and more code written by an AI where we more supervise that.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: That may be the case.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that may be okay.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Our role may change.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Our role is not to write code.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Our role is to build applications that companies need.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: So how we do that may change.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: But the role of a software developer itself is not going away.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it's actually growing.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, a developer's job is never just to write code.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was never our job.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you may say, well, no, that's all I was hire to do is write code.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, it wasn't.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: You the code is just the thing that you do to do your job, but it's not the actual job.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Your actual job is to solve logic problems, to build applications that customers need, to fix applications that aren't working the way they need them to work.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And how you do that has changed almost every year for the past 40 years.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: When I first started, um, I was working on Windows 3.1.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was working in Visual Basic, four or something like that, uh, professionally.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I was SQL Server, I think it's seven.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, things have changed since then.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: The the code that I wrote has changed dramatically.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've written in dozens of languages.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: I have you know seen things evolve over time.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: That has changed.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: But my role hasn't changed because my job was never just to write code.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: If my job was just to write VB4 code, well, my job's gone.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't my job.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: My job has been secure because my job is to build those applications and what language I use has changed over time.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, number three, the reality number three is depth of skill is going to become more and more valuable.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not enough just to say, oh, well, I can you know do a hello world in in five different Languages.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: I can do a simple tutorial that I can follow along with in three different languages.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's not enough.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Depth of skill is becoming more and more valuable because an AI can spit out code.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: But what's the right code?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the right code?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the right choice?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Is it making wise decisions or is it causing problems?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: Is it leaving open vulnerabilities?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Is it having performance issues?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the depth of skill is knowing the questions to ask, knowing how to identify problems in code, knowing how to identify when the wrong decision was made or there's a better decision to make.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Depth of skill is knowing how to shape an output of code to be more efficient, more effective, and longer term easier to maintain.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Those depths of skill are going to be very, very important.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: The more you can get deep in your skills, the better it's going to be, the more marketable you will be.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, reality number four is CEOs are not Uber intelligent.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: They make mistakes.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: They're wrong.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: They say things that aren't correct.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that may be obvious, but the thing I've seen over and over again is people making decisions or panicking or otherwise thinking that what a CEO says is going to happen.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: There have been a number of radical declarations that just weren't the case.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, have you heard of Devon recently?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not, because that didn't happen.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it does do good prompting sometimes.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard good things about how it's a good tool to supplement software developers, kind of like Copalot is or Clawed Code or whatever, but it's not a replacement for software developers like they promised.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: The CEO of Klarna said, we have replaced all of our customer support agents with AI because it's so much cheaper, they're so much better, they have better outputs, et cetera.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Within a year, he came back and said, oops, we're actually hiring them back.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, AI didn't live up to the promises, the promises that you made based upon statements that you said were true that turned out to not be true, right?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: So CEOs make statements all the time.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: They aren't true.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: They aren't prognosticators, they don't know really more than most people do.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, they might know a lot less.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where this can be dangerous.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: A number of CEOs have talked about AI, but then when you get them behind closed doors, they admit they don't know what AI is.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: They just know they don't want to get left behind.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: So when they make declarations about AI, they may not be saying what they think is true or even know what they're saying.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: They may be saying things and not really understand the words behind them.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: So when it comes to making decisions about your career, don't base it upon these grand predictions or these uh statements by CEOs because of the fact that that probably isn't going to be correct statements.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, a lot of times what a CEO says is designed to boost stock price.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Not to conform to reality is to boost stock price.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: So be careful.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: So those are the four realities.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: How what we develop will change, but the role of the developer is always going to be a thing.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: A developer's job was never just to write code.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Depth of skill is going to be more and more valuable.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And four CEOs are not uber intelligent.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: They make mistakes.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: So the bottom line is this: the role of the developer is shifting, and AI is going to be a part of the process and a tool we need to learn to integrate into our software.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: But as developers, we need to adapt as we always have.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: And as always, I am Tim Corey.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in a course.