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Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:00:03] I’m Ericka Cruz Guevara and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted. If you want a glimpse into what artificial intelligence could mean for the future of work, life for the average tech worker in San Francisco right now is a pretty good place to look.
Rya Jetha: [00:00:26] Engineering and what’s happening in software engineering is a bellwether for what might happen in other industries. And you see the people building this technology warning about it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:00:38] Whether you’re writing code or working in sales, almost everyone in tech is expected to use AI. And even those in tech warn that it’s a sign of what’s to come for workers in other industries. Today, how AI is changing work inside the tech industry and why it matters to the rest of us.
Rya Jetha: [00:01:10] For startups and for some medium and big tech companies, and this is specifically in the Bay Area, their CEOs are demanding AI fluency from their workers.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:01:23] Rya Jetha is a tech culture reporter for the San Francisco Standard.
Rya Jetha: [00:01:28] That basically means you need to come into the job willing to use AI and not being an AI skeptic and also being willing to change your work processes and develop completely different new ways of doing your job using AI. Even if you’re not a software engineer, you are being expected to use a AI. At big old companies, I think for software engineers, it’s you are basically deemed a dinosaur if you’re not using AI coding tools. Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, he recently said that he expects the workforce to be thinned over the next few years because of AI. And he encourages employees to experiment with AI as much as possible and take trainings and play around with it. To basically bulletproof their career, if they don’t want to be one of the casualties of the thinning of the workforce.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:02:23] I mean, it sounds like these workers don’t really have a choice to be anything other than pro-AI. I would say that is largely accurate in San Francisco, yeah. I guess what do we mean when we say these workers are using AI in their work?
Rya Jetha: [00:02:41] For software engineers, it’s basically a must to be using OpenAI codecs or Claude code, which are both coding tools. And you’re basically expected to be deploying multiple agents at a time. And to explain how that works, an agent is basically software that can autonomously do work for you on your behalf end to end. And so as a software engineer, I might be like, ‘OK, this is a problem I have to solve. Go and do it.’ The agent will figure out the best way to do it. It will create a roadmap for itself. It will do it, it will test it, and it will come back to you with everything completely done. When we are thinking about why software engineers are freaked out about AI, it’s because in previous waves of automation, they still had to understand their jobs and design things, even though they were getting the efficiency gains. But some software engineers I’ve spoken to who are rank and file at big tech companies, they’re like, this is fundamentally different. AI has ideas about how to do my own job that I have spent years and years training for. And in many ways, engineers have created the perfect training ground for AI to do their jobs because it’s a fundamentally digital job. And there are huge repositories of code online for AI have been coded on. I think it’s worth discussing how non-technical people are being expected to use AI. So say that I work in sales or marketing or communications, I’m still being expected to play around with AI, whether that’s using AI to make slides or to do research for me or to use it for writing as well. It’s just an expectation now that even non-technical people are even using AI to like do coding, because you can just prompt AI in plain English and it will spin up a website for you or spin up another technical data analysis for you.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:04:45] I mean, I feel like everyone has feelings about AI one way or another. How would you describe the vibe inside the tech industry in the Bay Area when it comes to AI right now?
Rya Jetha: [00:04:55] I think it really depends on whether you’re talking to startups or people at big tech companies or entry-level workers. I think if you talk to some really tech-pilled people who have fully embraced AI, especially people who work at startups, it is extreme excitement because they can suddenly do so much more with so much less. I was talking to one engineer at a startup who basically said he has had so many side project ideas. And he’s been able to execute every single one of them in the past few months. And before, he would have had to employ four software engineers and pay them exorbitant salaries, but now he just has to pay a few hundred bucks to Anthropic to make all of his software dreams come true. I think if you’re an entry-level Woko, you’re feeling extreme despair about the situation. And even when you go on college campuses, People who are majoring in computer science feel uncertain about the world, which in a previous era would have been crazy.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:05:55] I mean, yeah, I was just telling you before we were recording, one of my closest friends is a software engineer now, and we were just talking about how just 10 years ago, you know, studying computer science was seen as a golden ticket, that it would lead to job security perhaps maybe that more than any other major at the time and and that that meritocracy was real, and now I feel like that’s just completely unfolding for him with AI.
Rya Jetha: [00:06:27] I was interviewing a computer science professor at UC Berkeley for the story and he said they worked really hard in high school to get into the best computer science programs thinking that it was the golden ticket. They get to college and they work really hard to ace all their computer science classes so they can land that prestigious big tech job and now they’re in those jobs and The promise is not all that it was chalked up to be It’s very existentially upsetting when you sink, you know, anywhere from like four to six years of your life, honing your craft to write good code and suddenly a machine is able to do all of it. People who are trying to get their career started or entry-level workers with not that much experience, it’s a very, very scary time. Coding and software engineering jobs have been totally upended by AI, but at the same time, you now, there’s… There’s always a debate about what job is going to be next.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:07:31] Is AI leading to mass layoffs already? Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:08:45] I mean, I feel like every week or something, there’s news about layoffs in the tech industry. How much of that has to do with AI taking jobs?
Rya Jetha: [00:08:55] That is a really good question, and I’m sorry to say, but we don’t know. We’ve heard about a lot of layoffs that was Atlassian block laying off 40% of its workforce a few weeks ago. There have been layoffs at Salesforce and Amazon and Pinterest, and they’ve all blamed it either partially or totally on AI. But I think when I speak to exports, they are very skeptical that these layoffs are actually because of AI. If we think back to the pandemic, there was massive hiring because these tech companies were adapting to this new world that we lived in, in terms of e-commerce and streaming. And they arguably over-hired quite a bit. And so it could be that these layoffs are just a product of that pandemic over- hiring, but to get in the head of a tech executive for a second. You look more, you know, techno futuristic and cool to Wall Street if you are blaming your layoffs on AI and not on the fact that you made a hiring mistake during the pandemic.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:10:03] Is AI also changing how much work people are expected to do? Like, if you can use AI to code faster, you now have more work to do?
Rya Jetha: [00:10:12] Software engineers specifically, they are being expected to produce 10 times the amount of code that they were before. And I think this has introduced kind of an interesting problem for rank and file software engineers who, let’s say, are on like the oleo side of their career, they really want to understand what they are doing, but they feel like because of the expectations at their companies, they just have to. Use AI tools to generate that code, and they don’t have time to review it and understand what is going on. I think outside of the more technical domains, people using AI, there have been quite a few studies about this, but people using is increasing workload for people. And if you just think of someone generating a super bad presentation using AI or sending you a really sloppy email to go to a customer, I mean, I hear this from friends. It’s like that one colleague who is super chat GPT-pilled and uses chat GPTs for everything and doesn’t really care about the quality of their work. It’s making some people mad that they have to spend more hours correcting their colleagues. And even when they’re experimenting with tools, if companies are mandating them to experiment with their tools, it’s not like they’re being given half a day to do it. They’re expected to do it on top of their current jobs.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:11:35] Right, yeah. They’re very real, like, labor implications with this technology.
Rya Jetha: [00:11:39] Totally. Totally. And I think it’s really interesting because with every technological revolution we’ve kind of been promised that like, oh, we will walk less. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes also predicted that that technological revolutions would bring in a 15-hour work week and more leisure time.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:11:56] That sounds so nice.
Rya Jetha: [00:11:58] It sounds so Nice. It doesn’t seem anywhere close though. Because I mean, I think now with AI, people are walking even more than before. And they’re like, oh, where was, where did this promise go? We even walk on the weekends now.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: [00:12:16] I mean, I do think some people might be hearing this and sort of thinking to themselves, like, boo-hoo, the techies are getting all existential because of this tech that in many ways they helped to create or they helped to uplift, but why do you think what is happening among tech workers right now matters to the rest of us?
