Despite a growing sense of doom and gloom in the field, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon isn’t buying the idea that software engineers are on their way out.
“I just laugh every time I hear about it. This whole ‘we’re gonna have fewer software engineers,'” McKinnon said in an interview with Business Insider. “It’s laughable.”
The identity security CEO said he thinks the job market for software engineers will continue to grow in the next few years as the AI revolution advances forward.
“In five years, there will be more software engineers than there are now,” McKinnon said.
McKinnon’s comments come as the once-stable career path for software engineers has become increasingly uncertain as AI coding tools have taken over many of the responsibilities previously handled by entry-level workers. The shift has led some recent computer science graduates to pursue “panic” Master’s programs, while others in the field are offering $10,000 to those who help them land a job.
McKinnon told BI he feels “very confident” about his prospects on the software engineering job outlook — and he feels that way because it’s not the first time the industry has faced a reckoning. McKinnon said in every era of productivity advancements in the field, from the PC revolution to the rise of mobile devices, demand for software engineers has “kept rising” as the economy becomes more technologically enabled.
The Okta CEO pointed out that it wasn’t long ago that tools like compilers, machine code, and debugging tools didn’t exist. In 1978, a similar argument could have been made when compilers came out, which are tools that can translate code into a language that computers can run.
“You could have said, ‘Todd, there are going to be no more software engineers, because compilers write 100% of the code. The general compilers generate every piece of binary code the computer runs,'” McKinnon said.
Instead, software engineers “moved up a level,” and started writing syntax that made them more productive, McKinnon said. The CEO said he predicts the same will happen in the current era and AI will take on more of the “grunt work.”
“They’ll move up a level. They’ll spend more of their time thinking about, you know, broader systems design and how the systems interact, and they’ll be able to solve more complex problems,” McKinnon said.
Those who buy into the argument that software engineering is going away also seem to be overlooking the fact that there’s “infinite demand for automation” and tools that can enhance productivity, McKinnon said.
He said this means the demand for new products is “growing faster than the increase in efficiency.”
With the new technology advancements, McKinnon said there will be all kinds of new use cases that come out that people haven’t even thought about yet — and those products will have to be invented by people. Assuming software engineers will become less needed is like assuming the launch of the iPhone meant no one would need to build another communication app. McKinnon pointed to Snapchat as an example of a seemingly random concept ended up growing into a major social platform.
“So there’s going to be a whole new generation of software engineers, quote, unquote, that are building things around this new framework,” McKinnon said.
McKinnon’s bold predictions about the future of software engineers don’t line up with what some companies have said on the topic — Google said that over a quarter of its new code is generated by AI, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has said the company won’t be hiring any engineers this year.
McKinnon said he would “really challenge” some companies’ claims about hiring fewer or no software engineers. He said that companies selling AI products and services need to demonstrate that they can boost client efficiency. One way companies can convey this, he said, is by making public statements of how they are using their own tools to decrease hiring.
McKinnon predicts in a year or two, these companies will have more software engineers than they have now, even as they experience “tremendous efficiency gains.”
McKinnon said that companies like Okta, along with Microsoft, Meta, and Salesforce, will hire more software engineers because they’re more effective and because demand for their services is growing.
“Just watch the data,” McKinnon said.
