Jason Calacanis’ Post

Transcript

What is your thought on the future of being a developer? Because now, if developing isn't limited to the top 2% of humans who have a propensity towards it, a desire or motivation, and it opens up to say, let's not even say 100. Let's say it just opens, it goes 10X to 20% of people who maybe understand basic logic, math or whatever. And they can get in there with these tools. It'll, it'll get them good enough to make these. Do you see this being incredibly deflationary and the let's just keep it up. Back here, the salary of a developer has been artificially high because of the demand and the supply you Tenex supply with these tools, demand is going to get in some ways well the demand should stay the same even if it increases is not going to increase 1020 fold. It's going to increase to a 3X maybe in which case we will have a lot of supply and parents right now or you know people who are thinking about going into development are saying oh, is there a hundred fifty $250,000. Order for me at a big, you know, Uber, Airbnb, Google, etcetera. Or am I going to be, you know, making just but $100,000 competing against people in India, Mumbai, Ukraine, you know, and San Paulo for this work which is already doing. They are competing with them already, but now it's going to be even more pressure. How do you look at that? Yeah, I think that maybe empirically speaking, every time software development has been easier, we've just gotten more people doing it and salaries have gone U right. Like you look at, you look at going from assembly to to see, right? That is maybe that's what the package installation question almost sounds like, which is like, hey, when you went from assembly to C, programming became much, much easier. By the way, C is considered hard now because you went from C to Java and then from Java to Python And Python is considered much, much easier than Java. C and assembly, right? And we just had more developers. Now maybe this is like a little bit of the technological optimist in me. I just think if technology becomes easier to create, what companies are going to do is they will get more return on investment from investing a larger percent of their revenue into technology creation. Unless a company believes that they cannot become better there. There's like a limit to how much technology makes the company better. That may be the case for some companies, but I would say for a large chunk of companies, that is just, I think, a unwillingness to dream in a lot of cases. So here's what I do think happens. I do agree with you, the number of developers doesn't does increase in the future. On the other hand, I think knowing more and having more taste does make you more valuable. Does this mean that there are a class of people that have less taste? And by taste I just mean like when you do any sort of creative pursuit or you do anything that has a design decisions, there are people that just have better tradeoffs. Understanding the business and understanding the technology that will make better higher level trade-offs. Like when you talk to an AI and AI is not going to know about this. Conversation that you and I are having here that is affecting the way in which not yet, not yet, maybe in the future, we don't know that Zoom is recording this and that if this was a staff meeting, it could very easily be fit into your, it could very easily. You're totally right. But you kind of see what I'm saying here, right? I do agree with you though that there will be a long tail. I don't think salaries are going to be equally distributed, but I believe in this deeply that there are 10X people compared to other people. And for people that get deep in the weeds, there will always be great opportunity for them in this space that is. And that was very politically correct. You were you were very you have a future in politics being a politician perhaps there. But you know, Alex, I'm going to call BS on it. I think that we're going to see deflation in developer salaries. I just don't see how it's that doesn't happen because you we saw it happen with remote work. Now, it used to be very rare that a team like Matt Mullenweg, shout out to Matt, you know, was one of the first people to have like a really distributed team. And he and way before COVID, the decade he had worked from home, everybody in the industry thought it was crazy. They thought it would be have been $100 billion company instead of a 10 or $20 billion company had he been in an office and, you know, pursued it harder in their minds. But he benefited from having a global workforce and little tiny remote offices where people could hang in. And they still have that philosophy where they just they're all nomadic. But he paid less, he was able to pay less salaries by having people in your Uruguay and Paraguay and everywhere in between or everywhere outside of there. They're actually next to each other, so nothing in between them. So I just think we're going to see the the developer. Elite developers will always be elite developers. I don't disagree with that. But I think for the average developer, we're going to see salary stay the same, if not go down. You know, from the peak, we may have seen peak developer salaries over the past couple of years or the next couple of years, and then it starts going down after that. What do you think? Median, big median developer salaries? I I think, I think that this stuff just dissolves crummy developers. Like if you've been always a C plus or B minus developer, I think you're gonna get just steamrolled by the market. OK, A+ crew are probably going to be able to extract even more value, Jason, because if you can be someone who is. Absolutely, at the top of the pyramid and you have more tools, you're amazing and you're more impactful. Shouldn't that give you that? Yeah, I'll go with that for sure. Yes. I think that is like the elite becoming a leader. We saw that in Hollywood. The people who actually could draw people into a movie theater with Avatar, way of the water. Like he just he's able to get budget. Robert Downey Junior is still going to get a huge salary, but then the average person, maybe they're just a commodity now and they're doing TV anyway. Ruin. This is all incredible stuff. We'll have you back on the program. Tune and I know you're hiring a ton because you raised a ton of money, but you know, I'm curious if your internal team, do you need to hire a ton of people or do you just think is it better to go slower on hiring? And you know, at this point as opposed to doing what Google, Facebook and everybody did for the past couple of decades, which is just higher, higher, higher, figure it out later. Feels to me like something's changed where people are very selective in hiring, maybe don't expand their team size. And just work on professional development and make people who do work for you 10% better, 5% better every month. That's what I'm pursuing. Have you built something awesome? Are you ready to bring it to market? Well, that's great, but you're probably asking yourself, how do I get to my target customers? Well, here's an easy solution for you. It's called LinkedIn Ads, and with LinkedIn, you can precisely target the professionals most likely to care about your product. You can use LinkedIn to reach people by job title, industry, company, location, and more. You know all the stuff that you have on your profile page. Imagine you're looking to build your B2B audience. Maybe you want midsize companies, maybe you want large ones. Maybe you want emerging small businesses, right? 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