Artificial intelligence is not a death knell for the software engineering community feels Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman. In a podcast, the executive instead said he believes AI can increase engineer productivity by 50-100% and have no impact on entry level jobs for new graduates.
Speaking on ‘Sourcery with Molly O’Shea’, Huffman was gung-ho about AI but called it a “moving target” with tools that are “changing so fast”.
“It (AI) is really picking up. It’s such a moving target. The tools are changing so fast. I mean my own experience — I’m a programmer, my first love is programming so I’ve done it almost every day since I was a little kid. (But) something happened in December… the new (AI) models came out and I haven’t read, let alone written a line of code since December,” he told the host.
‘Fun part about AI is its evolving rapidly’
But even then, productivity has increased, according to Huffman. He added that despite not working on code since last year, “I’ve produced so much more”.
“You’ve got code and then AI on the side. I don’t even have an editor anymore. It’s just AI. Suffice to say, it’s changing really rapidly. Our bottleneck at Reddit right now is actually code review because we can produce so much code, but we got to review it and deploy it,” he added.
Huffman added that the challenge or “fun part” about AI is that “I don’t know what the tools are going to be in a month. It’s really evolving so fast. So, I think you can’t get married to any particular tool or way of working right now.”
‘No impact on headcount, want to hire new grads’
When asked about whether the AI productivity would lead to headcount reduction at Reddit, Huffman said the opposite is true. “No way does it (AI) change our headcount. We are a building company and so in order for engineering head headcount to go down, we’d have to know everything we wanted to build,” he stated.
The executive explained that AI makes the company’s engineers “50%, 100% or even 10x more productive” and so instead of decreasing numbers, “we’ll just build more stuff. We have a lot of work to do”. He added that Reddit is scaling teams and using AI to build more.
When asked about the impact on entry level jobs, Huffman felt that new graduates have an advantage in the AI world. He explained: “The kids coming out of college right now learned how to program with AI. They’re really good at it. And so I think we will go heavy on new grads because they’re so much more AI native.”
He feels that older software engineers are more resistant to adopting AI and view writing code as a “craft” and “hobby”. But the younger people “don’t have that baggage”.
“They just write with AI. And so, I think there’s so many reasons to hire new grads. Also, the best new grads, like if you don’t hire them as new grads, you will never see them. they will never be on the job market again. They’re too valuable to ever let them be on the job market. So, if you don’t hire them when they’re young, you will never see them. Or if you do, they’re 100x more expensive. So, you got to got to got to get them right out of the gate,” he added.
How AI does impact jobs is a wait-and-watch game. Notably, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report for February noted that unemployment rate was at 4.4%, or 7.6 million people, similar to last year’s 4.1% (7.1 million people).
