Day in the Life of a Software Engineer | Will AI Replace Us?

For example you could publish it to a dashboard. Good morning devs. With AI, I'm not gonna lie, it's a scary time to be a software engineer. I've been interning at Amazon for the last eight weeks and we just got this message from the CEO which is his thoughts on generative AI. So this is some public post that he put out and basically he says we will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this puts us out over time but in the next few years we expect that this will reduce our total workforce and this is as we get efficiency gains from using AI across the company. So basically publicly the CEO of Amazon just came out I was like because of AI we don't even need some of you anymore or we expect everyone to work 10% better so we need 10% less of the existing software during workforce. So yeah obviously that's not the best news you want to see but at the same time he also mentions that to not panic because they're trying to increase their expectancies by 10% so everyone leveraging these AI tools will just be able to produce more so they're going to set their expectations higher. Yeah it is a stressful time I'm not gonna lie to you. So I'm gonna take you through my day as I go into the office today show you how much AI is used what that looks like and what you could do to protect yourself in this job market. I don't have a crystal ball so I can't really predict the future but one thing I will say is with AI in five years do you intuitively think there will be more or less technology and with that more technology will there be more or less jobs? Just what we do will look completely different and I know the job market is pretty bad right now but this has happened before with the dot-com bubble back in like 2001 and there's the great recession in 2008 and the job market always always recovers. Okay so you might be wondering what I actually do as a software engineer at Amazon. So we primarily work with the AWS cloud development kit or CDK for short and this lets you write infrastructure as actual code it's stuff like Python and TypeScript. So here's how a typical workflow could work. You start with your S3 bucket and this is where data gets ingested then we send these event created notifications to an SQS which is essentially a queue so that means first in first out then after this queue we send it to our lambda which is where all the code gets processed this is where we clean up data or like do any processing and this is where the actual code is so stuff like the TypeScript which is what I use or Python or Java and then finally you handle this process data for example you could publish it to a dashboard send it to users or store it again in another S3 bucket. So basically every single step of the way there each one of those pieces is written with code and this is what infrastructure as code means it allows you to automate your deployments it's way more efficient it's easier to collaborate with people across different teams and in general it's just more consistent and reliable and cost-effective and that's why Amazon and so many other big tech companies are leaning on it these days. Pretty cool huh? So with that AI announcement I talked about earlier we just got given full access to cursor which if you don't know is basically this IDE that integrates all these different LLMs like the anthropic models open AI models to help you generate code so you have a choice between just asking it something or using the agent for to generate code for you so for example I could just ask add all calculator function to this lambda by the way this is just generic code has nothing to do with Amazon so don't come at me and look they'll just go through read your file because I gave a context it's going to go and generate all the changes for you so then your job basically becomes just reading through what it generates and deciding whether or not you want to add this in like I don't remember the last time I've written a line of code on my own and they're really shoving it down our throats to try to leverage this to not even write code ourselves these days it's pretty crazy that a big tech company like Amazon is really pushing AI like that I don't know how to feel because it's kind of like how mathematicians had the calculators released and instead of replacing them it enabled them to do their work faster and advance in the field further that's kind of how I see it at least the one thing I'll say on AI after talking with so many of the software engineers here at Amazon is that really more often than not it just creates more headaches like the amount of times it hallucinates something should not be okay to release in production like you'll just add random imports that don't exist you can't keep track of what's outdated anymore and never mind all the best practices and yes in a way you could get over that with the kind of prompts you do so I do believe you have to practice prompt engineering to become that 10x developer but I feel like the job now has just become debugging instead of writing code not to mention the biggest thing is this is just going to increase all the tech debt in the future and this basically means the implied cost of additional work in the future because right now we're taking the easier solution which in my opinion is letting AI write for you that's just an easy unobtainable solution so yeah if you really think about it in a world where AI does take over you're going to have this dip in software engineering jobs and then when companies have to deal with all this tech debt there's going to be another boom in the market where they have to hire everyone again to fix their problems I always find it so funny how it's always people in like the product managers or management that pushed AI so heavily but anyone with real software engineering experience is always like this is just impossible anyways I need to log in for a couple hours now so I can get some code up for review I'll see you guys at lunch all right well do you think AI will replace software engineers I don't think it'll replace us but it's like you gotta learn and adapt and overcome you know it's like when the calculators came math didn't die you just gotta learn how to use the tool and be better that's funny because I said that literally 30 minutes ago all right what do you think about AI at least for now AI is far from replacing us although you generate a lot of code and seems to save time in the short term yeah I think you spend just as much time trying to understand the code and do you feel like you're still actually learning something if you just use AI I mean yeah like as long as you like actually try to understand what yeah okay so this is your second year working at Amazon you got a return offer last year third year oh damn okay so what are you doing to protect yourself and get a job in this like awful ass job market so use your AI tools to your advantage to go above and beyond your expectations and master the areas where they can nitpick okay we're back in the office now and I have like an hour and a half of meetings to sit through I also find it funny that we come to the office just to take meetings with their online platform chime which is like zoom and half the time the meetings aren't even in person one thing I'll say about AI it's reshaped entirely how coding works before you'd spend like hours reading these textbooks and everything trying to understand all the syntax differences and all these different coding languages but now that's completely irrelevant almost if you master one coding language or understand like the structure of coding you could leverage these LLMs and AI models to just code for you so basically the emphasis now is just on building and results and this is true because even at Amazon I've been able to build way faster because I've had so much practice leveraging all these different LLMs like Claude especially with Empor and building out something from scratch experimenting with all these different features I've now learned how to leverage these tools to become a 10x developer and that's kind of how you need to be to exceed these expectations these days all in all I don't really think it's a bad thing especially for people that got into programming or software engineering that like building things because now more than ever you could actually build something with your own hands and see it impact thousands of people I personally love it and it feels like the sky's the limit anyways it's now 5 p.m I'm gonna leave for the day and go back home while I'm walking back I just wanted to say I know that the job market is at one of the lowest it's ever been and it's not 2018 anymore where all you have to do is learn how to code go to a boot camp for three months then automatically get a six-figure job and yeah I might not feel fair that you have to put in all of this work when people a couple years ago would just get these jobs handed to them but if you really think about it these top five percent of jobs like those fang positions the ones paying six-figure salaries immediately out of graduation should only be given to the top five percent of candidates the people that went to the good university the people that know how to build something from scratch themselves and I think a lot of the fear online comes from the fact that people struggle with that concept and we've been kind of conditioned to believe that we should just have the job handed to us when really it takes so much hard work and I think my channel kind of proves that point if you've been watching for a while took me four years of hard work to get to where I am right now so really you just got to lock in start building projects grind your lee code network put your head down and work and don't expect something to be handed to you anyways I need to clear my mind it was a busy ass day let's go to the gym that was a crazy good workout you need to remember to take care of yourself both physically and mentally especially with all the stress going around the job market AI these days going to work out is a great way to deal with that besides a healthy body is a healthy mind and I don't care who you are you have a nine to five you have a family you're in school everyone has time for 30 minutes I've started waking up earlier at like seven to get a quick 30 minute run in sometimes before work anything to get the body moving goes a long way let's get back home all right it's the end of the night and I was just scrolling through my app mpore and if you're new here it's basically this marketplace app that I built exclusively for students and it's what got me my internship at Amazon because it's actually something that's unique with the user base and it made me realize the majority of the time it's you that's cooked in computer science it's not because of AI it's not the job market it's you with all these LLMs Claude cursor you should not have something on your resume that could be built with AI in under a week no more clone apps no more weather apps you need to leverage these AI tools instead of being scared of them and build something of value now I'm not going to leave you guys with that little bit of doom and gloom so here's a coding project example that you guys could build to kind of understand what I'm getting at you could build a full stack prediction app like a stock market predictor you start by building a machine learning model with scikit-learn or the random forest classifier and if you want to familiarize yourself with these models you can start by going to this website called MLU explain it's basically the machine learning university built by Amazon and they have all these really cool visualizations for all the different models you would need so let's say for example the random forest classifier you could just dive in and then go and visually learn these complicated subjects which I find so helpful and if you prefer to learn a bit more hands-on by actually coding something you can it's pretty good and I love their channel now after you have that model built out all you need to do is find a data set on Kaggle and then train your model on that data set and build out a full stack app so users can actually interact with it in the end you might even get a user base if say someone wants to invest in the S&P 500 and they want to see some sort of predictions like one of the most trending google searches right now is stock market predictions especially with all the stuff going on in the real world so you get a few people using it and the fact that it's a full stack app with some little AI incorporated in it it will look great on your resume all in all I'm personally not scared of AI at all it opens the door for so many more opportunities and change is not a bad thing just like so many sophomores years have done in the past you just have to adapt with these new technological advances and I'm honestly pretty excited to see what will get built with AI in the next couple of years and what in the world our jobs will even look like who are me and you gonna be just building out our own apps with AI because we're able to leverage these tools and all of our knowledge to kind of work for ourselves I don't know I see it as a great opportunity it's not something to be scared of but I totally understand why it's stressful don't worry I'm in this position with you as well and so is everyone else watching this video try not to worry so much good luck and I'll see you in the next one