Nikhyl Singhal: prediction

Transcript context

…It still boggles my mind. Everyone's like, "Oh, what's the cutting edge and all of that." I think there's still, I don't know if this is true even today, but very recently there were more lines of Cobalt than I think any other language out there. Mainframe sales continue to do pretty well and they're unusually large line item for companies like IBM. Part of the reason why these systems... I think I spent an hour and a half trying to get my Mileage Plus account on United to work correctly with my daughter's phone and all this other stuff, partly because these systems are so complicated, but they're built in mainframes. A lot of the engineers, and this is going to sound morbid, but I think it's true, a lot of the engineers are dead. They literally are passed away. They were written 10, 20 years ago and going in and touching that code is probably the last thing anyone wants to do, so nobody goes in there. It's all that side. Now, we can change that. I'm very excited about what it means to go in and improve things that people take for granted. That's a big one. That's a bit of an aside. I think that the other thing that I think is worth signaling is, I think that the way the skills that you need to be effective in today's world is an acceleration of what we were talking about last episode. We were talking about ICs, we were talking about hands-on, we're talking about opinion, even back then, before Claude and ChatGPT and others came out. I think what we're now seeing is companies are looking very, very carefully at their staffing and they're asking themselves, one, do we need this many people? Did we overhire? Part of the reason is they're looking, "Hey, maybe we doubled our staff in the last five years." Lots of companies that are public have done that. "Did we get twice as much for them?" It was funny, when I was at Google, now over 10, 15 years ago, we used to ask ourselves, I was on an ancillary team. I wasn't in the search or the ads team. We used to ask ourselves, "How many people are really needed for Google to hit their numbers?" They were like, at that time, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people. If you ask someone who wasn't in tech, you're like, "Oh, probably 90% of those folks, obviously." The answer's probably closer to 9%. Probably you need 500 people to keep the lights on and to build that business. You don't need 25,000, 30,000, 40,000 people. There's a huge amount of overhead where companies hire not just because they want to have bureaucrats, because they want to expand, they want to try new things. But I think that there's a judgment day that's come back where companies are like, "Look, we aren't getting as much for the staff that we grew in the last five years. This AI thing requires a totally different skillset." The combination is going to mean, this year I predict in the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. hing requires a totally different skillset. " The combination is going to mean, this year I predict in the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. But you might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 people they're going to hire are going to all be AI first. The 30,000 they're going to let go of are going to be in combination of, we didn't get as much for those folks that we needed and we want to set the destination differently with a much lighter payload, and that's dark. That's going to make this year and the next year going to be pretty, pretty challenging. I'll transition a little bit to my thoughts on people, but I'll pause for a second to see if this resonates with you. That's scary to hear. We're going to talk about what folks listening can do to do their best to be in that second bucket of being rehired and kept, because there's a lot you can do. There's a lot of people that know they need to change and adjust and they're not doing anything. Now we want to talk about maybe some of the blockers there. One thing I'll note is, I should have mentioned this earlier, I just did this report on the job market. Interestingly, as of today at least, we have the most open PM roles globally at tech companies in three plus years. The last time it was this high was during COVID, basically. There are some good news there at least for the PM role. I don't know.…

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