I think many people, understandably concerned about the potential impact of AI’s rapid advancement on their jobs, are reading too much into this statement. The same applies to other statements made by MANGA-level C-suite executives, whether it’s Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, etc.

I don’t mean to downplay the concerns you and others are likely feeling. It’s completely valid to be anxious about how rapidly this technology is advancing and how it could affect our roles in the near future, especially given recent layoffs and the concern expressed in the framing of your initial post.

That said, it’s important to remember that the primary role of a CEO at any tech company is to promote their company’s value, increase revenue/profits, and boost stock prices for shareholders, who are more often than not VCs or private equity firms who tend to know very little about day to day software engineering. So, like other CEOs in his position, Zuck is likely exaggerating. Let’s not forget that this is the same person who was heavily promoting the Metaverse not too long ago.

We all saw how that turned out.

Now, this isn’t to say there’s no reason for concern.

However, engineers should only be seriously worried about an AI replacing them when we see a demo of an AI system where someone verbally asks an agent, like one that has just been started up, to analyze an enterprise/MANGA-level codebase of at least a few hundred thousand lines, and is able successfully build production-ready features or resolve complex, non-obvious bugs. And all of this would need to happen within a significantly lower time frame and cost than an average engineer could manage, with no issues, and in a consistently reproducible manner. By the way, this is fundamentally impossible with the current architecture of transformer-based models because hallucinations are an inherent limitation of the architecture.

Until then, the real concern will continue to be engineers who know how to effectively use AI taking all the jobs.

Software Developer, AI/ML @ Cardinal Health

Mike A.

You know this person better than I do, but that disagreement on a code review change doesn’t seem particularly passive aggressive to me personally. 

Again, I wasn’t there. So I can’t speak to that instance, but I will say that it’s difficult to read tone charitably in written text sometimes.

That being said, there are a few things you could do to ameliorate the issue.

Speaking with a superior - Whether it’s a PM, Team Lead, etc. Communicating your difficulties to them might help to reduce issues with this team member.

Working with this person less by gradually moving to a more hands off approach in teaching - This might not be a practical option for you, but choosing to work with this person less and trying not to engage with them more than necessary could help you with not having to deal with their behavior. To move towards that goal, you could gradually begin to decrease your current level of assistance by just nudging this junior in the right direction as opposed to directly giving her the answer to her issue. It’d be better for you and better for her growth as a developer to have to find the right answer on her own.

Seeing if another person on the team can assist the junior - Since you’ve already provided a significant amount of guidance and the high-level design, a less senior developer on the team might have the bandwidth for you to delegate the assistance of this junior developer with you only needing to provide assistance as needed.

These are just a few things you could do that might help to address some of the difficulties you’ve been encountering with this junior developer and do keep in mind that these options aren’t mutually exclusive either. You might find that applying all three to be the solution or only 1-2 that do the job. 

In either case, I wish you the best of luck with your situation. 🙂👍🏼

Software Developer @ Nationwide Financial

Usually, companies tend to be pretty relaxed if you're wrapping up the interview process while considering an offer. I would personally be a bit skeptical about a company not budging on their offer review time. That's just personally a red flag for me. So I would say that it largely boils down to how much you need the role immediately as opposed to whether you can wait a bit longer for another one to come up. \
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I don't think I would personally tell someone about what decision they should make for their life, but personally speaking, if I wasn't in desperate need of immediate work/income then I would decline the offer, seeing if I could leverage the previous offer as my way to request a larger salary if asked about my salary expectations in future interviews.