No more software engineer hiring in 2025?

No more software engineer hiring in 2025?

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Generative AI is reaching greater and greater heights. Google has proven that they can migrate software at rate of up to 80-90% faster by using AI assisted coding tools. More and more companies are finding AI assisted software development can dramatically help certain tasks and predict AI assisted development will soon be sweeping the industry.

Now Salesforce, Microsoft, Replit, Meta and other CEO’s are all saying they might not be hiring a lot more software engineers very soon.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has gone so far as saying Salesforce is looking at essentially freezing hiring for software engineers in 2025 owing to agentic AI: 

I think in engineering this year at Salesforce, we’re seriously debating maybe weren’t gonna’ hire anybody this year because we’ve seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side-by-side with our engineers, making them more productive. And we can all agree, software engineering has become a lot more productive in the last two years with these basically new models.

Mark Zuckerberg also piped with similar sentiments

In 2025, AI systems at Meta and other companies will be capable of writing code like mid-level engineers. at first, it’s costly, but the systems will become more efficient as time passes. eventually, AI engineers will build most of the code and AI in apps, replacing human engineers.

Microsoft Copilot Studio can now create new agents through Copilot Studio and integrate them into Copilot. Microsoft’s CEO said:

The way to conceptualize the world going forward is everyone of us doing knowledge work will use Copilot to do our work and we will create a swarm of agents to help us with our work and drive the productivity of our organizations.

Replit’s CEO Amjad Masad went even further by saying that ‘We don’t care about professional coders anymore’. They have grown their revenue five-fold in the last 6 months thanks to artificial-intelligence capabilities that enabled their new product called “Agent,” a tool that can write a working software application with nothing but a natural language prompt. “It was a huge hit,” Masad said.

So what’s a soon to be out of work software engineer to do?

A recent report by The World Economic Forum (WEF) and AI expert Tak Lo both estimate about 92 million workers are about to be displaced by AI, but claim there will be the creation of 170 million new jobs.

I always approach these reports skeptically. Just because you claim it will create new jobs doesn’t mean those that lost their jobs have the skills or capability to take one of those new jobs. Jobs that often require very different skills or appeal to very different people. In fact, they predict 39% of current skill sets will become outdated by 2030.

The report indicates that manual labor jobs will be the safest: construction, farmers, laborers, medical/nursing, truck drivers, etc. They claim that knowledge workers should be largely safe, but that’s definitely not what technology leaders are clearly saying – implying this rosy report is probably not right.

Cognitive decline?

Additionally, a study by Uplevel found that the productivity of developers hasn’t improved because of AI coding assistants, and their code has become more buggy.

Research is also starting to show that AI may be contributing to a decline of critical thinking skills:

The effects of AI on cognitive development are already being identified in schools across the United States. In a report titled, “Generative AI Can Harm Learning”, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that students who relied on AI for practice problems performed worse on tests compared to students who completed assignments without AI assistance. This suggests that the use of AI in academic settings is not just an issue of convenience, but may be contributing to a decline in critical thinking skills.

Greg Isenberg had an interesting interaction with a young Stanford grad who claimed he was forgetting words now due to his near constant use of chatGPT to finish his thoughts. https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1869202002783207622

The new skills

There’s also a great article by Dev that outlines the mindset and skills developers will need to develop to stay relevant.

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Removing Portland’s hoboats in 2024

Removing Portland’s hoboats in 2024

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Portland’s homeless don’t just camp on the streets – they’re also living on ramshackle and abandoned boats at an ever-increasing rate. Unfortunately, they are a source of a lot of solid human waste and pollution – especially when they sink or are abandoned. Recently they’ve been parking them right in the middle of downtown right beside OMSI children’s museum or St Johns.

The problem is only getting worse. 44 boats were removed from the river in 2024 through funding from the Oregon State Marine Board and the American Rescue Plan Act. Over the past three years, a total of 88 boats were retrieved from the river including 25 in 2022 and 19 in 2023. It doesn’t help that the parks department is forced to store the boats for 30 days before they can clean up the mess.

Either way, it’s costing us millions to get rid of them.

In a step sideways; the city is spending a lot to dispose of voluntarily surrendered boats before they’re abandoned. It prevents them from being abandoned/taken by homeless, but still costs taxpayers to dispose of them.

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New kind of multi-color LED bulb

New kind of multi-color LED bulb

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There’s plenty of color changing bulbs out there – but they usually only display one color at a time. The Moonside Star-Bulb allows you to have mulitple colors from the same bulb. Make one side one color, the other side another, or have the colors rotate and move in interesting ways. Very resonable at only $37 per bulb.

Wayne Enterprises

Wayne Enterprises

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Are you a millionaire? Want to live the real Bruce Wayne lifestyle? Warner Bros partnered with a PR firm to create the luxury Wayne Enterprises company. How luxury? How about buying one of 10 real life, functional, Wayne Enterprises Tumblers – for a cool $2.9 million?

Or perhaps $20,000 custom chairs, $5,000 shoes, $120,000 wall clocks, $21,000 lamps, or $3,000 luggage? All of these ultra-luxury items are real and for sale.

Head over to Wayne Enterprises website and start living the luxury lifestyle you never knew existed.

Pixeldarts kickstarter

Pixeldarts kickstarter

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This is an interesting twist – instead of the old dartboard – how about a digital pixel art dart board. It can be programmed with images to change gameplay and to display art, data, and even play retro games.

It uses silicone suction darts with a sensor chip that can send data on its exact position on the board to keep score. They also plan to make NERF-compatible sensor darts.

Google implements Spatial Memory Safety in C++

Google implements Spatial Memory Safety in C++

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After analyzing nearly 10 years of CVEs, Google researchers calculated that at least 40% of safety exploits in C++ were related to spatial memory exploits like writing to an out-of-bounds memory location.

Google researchers showed they were able to “retrofit” spatial safety onto their C++ codebases, and to do it with a surprisingly low impact on performance. They used straightforward strategies such as bounds checking buffers and data structures – as is done in other languages and released a new, safer Hardened libc++. 

The results show up in this chart of segfaults across the entire fleet of computers before and after using the improvements. Their internal red team testing results were also much improved, uncovered over 1000 bugs and likely prevent 1000-2000 new bugs each year based on current development rate.

Here’s a blog post about their results.

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Input to display latency metering tool

Input to display latency metering tool

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AMD has just unveiled Frame Latency Meter (FLM) – which allows you to determine keyboard to display latency. Normally, this was done with a high-speed camera, a mouse, and an FPS game with a visible muzzle flash. The camera would capture the moment the mouse was clicked, and you would count the frames until the muzzle flash or other on-screen reaction appeared.

This utility does not require any special equipment and works with any AMD, Nvidia, or Intel GPU that supports DirectX 11 or newer. For capturing data, AMD GPUs use the Advanced Media Framework or AMF codec, while other GPUs use the DirectX Graphics Infrastructure or DXGI codec. FLM can generate detailed latency and effective frame-rate statistics, which can be exported to CSV files for further data analysis.

The way it works is clever: FLM measures latency by continuously capturing frames and comparing each one to the previous frame within a selected region. It then generates a mouse movement event using standard Windows functionality and waits for the frame contents to change. The time between the mouse movement and the detected frame change is recorded as the latency.

FLM is available as a free download for Windows 10 and 11 users via GPU Open or the official GitHub repository

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Hackers are targeting open-source

Hackers are targeting open-source

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A Microsoft engineer became suspicious of performance problems while optimizing his code. After digging in, he discovered that a simple data compression library called XZ Utils was creating a secret backdoor. What made this discovery noteworthy is that the innocuous looking compression library is used in tons of open-source projects and Linux distributions.

The analysis of how the code got into XZ utils uncovered a fiendishly sophisticated operation. The XZ utility was understaffed with only one primary maintainer. He was increasingly catching flack for falling behind – an increasing problem with open source projects. An eager developer named Jia Tan had been a contributor to the XZ project since at least late 2021 and built trust with the community of developers working on it. Eventually Tan ascended to being co-maintainer of the project which allowed him to add code without needing the contributions to be approved.

Tan did this by what now appears to be a coordinated set of accounts and discussions that were aimed at installing him as a co-owner. Various accounts appeared and started complaining about the speed of updates, features, and questions. They coordinated questions and complaints as well as contributions by Tan appear to create pressure for the owner to elevate Tan as a co-owner. Whether this was done by one person or several, this mechanism is known as ‘persona management’ – something that’s been proposed as far back as 2010.

“I think the multiple green accounts seeming to coordinate on specific goals at key times fits the pattern of using networks of sock accounts for social engineering that we’ve seen all over social media,” said Molly, the EFF system administrator. “It’s very possible that the rogue dev, hacking group, or state sponsor employed this tactic as part of their plan to introduce the back door. Of course, it’s also possible these are just coincidences.”

The code introduced was sophisticated enough that analysis of its precise functionality and capability is still ongoing.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center has defined this kind of attack as a ‘supply chain attack’; and open-source projects are particularly susceptible to it.

It’s definitely worth reading the article because these kinds of sophisticated social attacks are obviously now reality.

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