Software engineering careers used to be a ladder. You studied for 4 years, got a job as a fresher, and could virtually take for granted a steady career filled with learning opportunities, salary hikes, and role promotions.

In fact being an engineer was so cool that we mocked MBAs and MBA-types – “suits” – for their desperation to find that elusive technical co-founder. The one who would translate an idea (common) into code and products.

Except, that’s increasingly not true.

An NYT story published earlier this week put it best.

“I have a pretty good sense how fast the progress that students should make in a semester should be,” he said. “In 14 years, I’ve never seen students make the kind of progress that they made this year.”

And he knew exactly why that was the case. For the first time, Mr. Ammirati had encouraged his students to use generative artificial intelligence as part of their process — “think of generative A.I as your co-founder,” he recalled telling them.

Many AI chatbots are fully capable of writing code now. So your technical co-founder could be an AI?

Where does that leave engineers? Are we staring at the end of the golden era for engineers?

Welcome to episode six of Two by Two, The Ken’s weekly podcast that asks the most interesting and often uncomfortable questions on topics we all want to know more about. And we do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix!

Earlier this week, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, my co-host, and I met with Amod Malviya, co-founder of Udaan and the former CTO at Flipkart, and Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha*.

Both Amod and Kailash have been programmers and engineers for over two decades now. They are also both deeply in love with their craft. Naturally, they are passionate about engineering and have strong views on its future.

Additional Reading:

Computational Thinking by Jeannette M. Wing

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming

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Rohin Dharmakumar

Is the golden era of the (software) engineer over?

The end of the ZIRP era and the rise of Gen AI is upending old assumptions. Being an engineer is no longer a guarantee of a stable career

Listen to the free “highlights only” episode here: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | YouTube

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is the lead writer and researcher for this episode. Rajiv C N, our resident sound engineer is the audio producer.

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*Zerodha’s perennial fund Rainmatter Capital is an investor in The Ken.