Varun Mohan: prediction

Transcript context

…It's that contradictory, will there be an inflection point of like, "All right. Now we don't need them anymore." I think it really comes down to, do you get incremental value by adding more engineers internally? I'm going to take... First of all, maybe just to set the record straight, if AI is writing over 90% of the code, that doesn't mean engineers are 10X as productive. Engineers spend more time than just writing code. The review code, test code, debug code, design code, deploy code, right? Navigate code. There's probably a lot of different things that engineers do. There's this one famous law in parallel computing, it's called Amdahl's Law. I don't know if you've heard about it. But it basically says if you have a graph of tasks and you have this critical path and you take any one task and parallelize it a ton, which is make it almost take zero amount of time, there's still a limit of the amount of how much faster it made the whole process go. So maybe put simply, let's say you have 100 units of time and only 30 units of time is being spent writing software and I took the 30 and made it three, I only took the 100 and made it 73. It's only a 27% improvement in the grand scheme of things. So I think look, we are definitely seeing over 30, maybe close to 40% productivity improvements. But I think for the vision that we're solving for, even if I were to say the company in the long tail had 200 engineers, it'd probably be too low still at that point. So the question is, how much more productivity do you get per person? Actually, maybe just to even say one of those thing for some of these large companies, let's say you took the CIO of a company like JPMorgan Chase, right? Her budget on software every year is $17 billion and there's over 50,000 engineers inside the company and you told her, "Hey, each of these engineers are now able to produce more technology." That's effectively what you've done, right? The right calculus that JPMorgan Chase or any of these companies will make is the ROI of building technology has actually gone up. So the opportunity cost of not investing more into technology has gone up, which means that you should just invest even more. And maybe in the short term you have even more engineers, right? Now, that's not true across the board. There are some companies that are happy with the amount of technology they're building and there's a ceiling on the amount of technology they want to build. But for companies that actually have a very high technology ceiling, this doesn't mean you stop. This actually means you hire more. This is a great bull case for engineers. I feel like the canary in the coal mine for the engineering profession is when companies like yours slow down on hiring engineers.…

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