Varun Mohan: belief

Transcript context

…I love how these days like, "oh, a million. Oh, no big deal." It's just the numbers are absurd these days. We're just getting used to just 100 million ARR here, million users in four months there. It's just like, "Oh, of course. How could you not have that?" But that's absurd. It's just like an insane time right now. You touched on something that I wanted to get to later, but I may as well bring it up now, the question of just how engineering will change in the future. You throw out the stat that 90% of code is going to be written by AI in the future. Dario from Anthropic recently said the same thing. You guys have a really interesting glimpse into just how things will look in the future. So I guess the question is just, how do you think coding specifically will look in the next few years, how different will it be from today? I think when we think about what is an engineer actually doing, it probably falls into three buckets, right? What should I solve for? How should I solve it? And then solving it. I guess everyone who's working in this space is probably increasingly convinced that solving it, which is just the pure, "I know how I'm going to do it" and just going and doing it. AI is going to handle vast majority, if not all of it. In fact, it probably actually, with some of the work that we've done in terms of deeply understanding code bases, how should I solve it is also going to get closer and closer to getting done. If you deeply understand the environment inside an organization, if you deeply understand the code base, how you should solve it, given best practices when the company also gets solved. So I think what engineering kind of goes to is actually what you wanted engineers to do in the first place, which is, what are the most important business problems that we do need to solve? What are the most important capabilities that we need our application, our product to have? And actually going and prioritizing those and actually going and making the right technical decisions to go out and doing it. And I think that's where engineering is probably heading towards. Now, does that mean that no one needs a CS degree? I think that's maybe a little bit overplayed a little bit just because maybe here's my argument for that. A lot of developers nowadays that build full stack applications, at least until a handful of years ago, they probably went to college and took an operating system course. And in theory, they're not really playing around with the operating system, like the kernel scheduler very frequently. But do those principles help them in understanding why their applications are slow? Do they help them in understanding why some design decisions are better than the other? Yeah, that makes them a much better engineer than another engineer. And I think that idea and the understanding of what's going on at the bottom will make a good engineer even better. But also at the same time, it empowers a bunch of people that never understood all of those things, how to actually build as well, which is another remarkable sort of thing that fell out through this whole process. I don't know if you have kids, but just say you had kids or you had niece or nephew going into college, let's say, would you suggest they do do computer science or would you suggest you're not going to have a good time if that's the career you choose right now?…

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