Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:21:50 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:21:50] S1: You said, basically, software engineers now become the factory... Managers of the factory. [00:21:56] S0: Yeah. [00:21:57] S1: Do you think that means more software engineers in the future, less? How do you think about that? [00:22:02] S0: Yeah. I think it it depends which type of business you're in. Right? Basic economics says, like, if a if a resource gets a lot more valuable, you want a lot more of that, not a lot fewer, until ideas really truly become the bottleneck, and you can't think of things to have them go and do anymore at the same speed that they can do it. If you're in a profit center, if you're in some company building new things and selling them, then, yeah, I think we're gonna want a lot more engineers. Like, we're gonna have to change the way you manage them, and the org charts are gonna have to get redesigned and all of that. But I think, yeah, there's gonna be an increased demand for these people. But if you're in a cost center and, yeah, you're building internal automation or something like that, you can probably do that with a team of two instead of a team of 20 before like you were doing before. But the demand on the other side hopefully keeps outpacing it. [00:22:44] S1: Hypothetical question. Let's say today you have a child. Would you want them to be a software engineer in the future? [00:22:52] S0: I I get asked this one a lot. I'm like, what what else would you You know? It's a it's a scary time. It's a scary field. But, yeah, creating digital products, yes, I I think that's always gonna be around.
00:22:52 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:22:52] S0: I I get asked this one a lot. I'm like, what what else would you You know? It's a it's a scary time. It's a scary field. But, yeah, creating digital products, yes, I I think that's always gonna be around. [00:23:02] S1: Okay. That was the... That was what I was getting at. Talk a little bit... Right. You touched on something where you're like, org charts are gonna have to change and how you think about that. What you're basically saying is we are going to have extreme velocity of code. Mhmm. It... And and I'll I'll I'll get to where Chainguard sits in the future in three to five years. And I know three to five years is hard to think about, but I feel like we have to. I think we have to zoom out and get a sense of where is this wave taking us. But basically what you're saying is we to are be able to solve more problems than we ever have. The digital surface area that we can build is going to get cheaper, faster, easier, cheaper, faster, easier. More and more people are gonna be empowered to be able to do it. But org charts are gonna have to change change a bit. And say more about what what do you see when you say that?
00:23:52 · Dan Lorenc
[00:23:52] S0: Yeah. We... We've been trying some things, internally. You know, we haven't gone full Jack Dorsey flip over the company and for everything mode. But, yeah, I think, you know, one of the obvious ones, the industry standard wisdom for running engineering teams for, you know, the last twenty years. So it comes out of the mythical man month. This book that was written back in the eighties. It kinda settles in on two pizza teams like Amazon has done it. Right? Every team is somewhere around eight people, and, instead of growing a team, you add more eight person teams under a manager and set things up that way. One of the formulas in mythical man month kinda shows that whole diminishing returns as teams and orgs scale. You know, there's communication overhead. The bigger an organization is, the more people you have to talk to, the more communication that's at, and then that goes up, you know, exponentially with the the amount of people in the org. And so that's sort of where that eight person sweet spot comes in. But with these new tools, if every engineer gets, know, say, just just say 25% more productive, which I think is an underestimate, That team of eight now shrinks to a team of four. You know, half of it is because people are growing faster, and then half of that is because there's fewer people I have to talk to and coordinate with. You then start to run into other issues, like people take vacations. You need on calls and everything. So I I don't know how much below four you can really shrink things to before other, people issues start to come up. But we started doing that yet. Instead of a team of eight, as we build new things, we start with a team of four. But then, you know, how do you organize those teams of four to make sure they're not all doing the same thing or doing opposite things and everything? So you start to get different problems as you try to figure out the right way to ship quickly in this new world.
00:25:24 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:25:24] S1: That's awesome. Where do you think Chainguard sits in this future in five years? Are you the safety store that becomes literally a layer of the entire Internet as we built?
00:25:40 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:25:40] S0: Yeah. I hope that... You know, in that time, I hope we have every type of open source software out there, And I hope we are the place everyone comes to get that open source software. We we sit in this critical gap between the people writing it in that source code form and the way enterprises actually build and rely and run on it. And there's a lot of work there that, you know, that these people just aren't going to do. You're not paying them to do it. They don't want to do it. And they especially don't want to do it in the way the enterprises want them to do it. And as we keep getting bigger and faster, I hope that, you know, we start to cover all of it. You know, today, we probably only cover somewhere between 56% of all of the open source software out there when you look at all the different form factors and ways that it's built and ways that it's consumed. I hope we're a one stop shop for all open source software, every programming language, every form factor. And there's new ones too all the time. Right? You mentioned some of the new AI stuff we're doing. There's agent skills. There's new frameworks. There's new, orchestration systems, and that's gonna keep changing very quickly. Everyone always wonders when we're gonna have the first programming language just designed for agents. You know, I hope we're there and building all that stuff as quickly as people are trying to use it. [00:26:45] S1: That's, well said. As we think a little bit about your contrarian view on this future, what do you maybe believe that others don't, right, you know?
00:26:45 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:26:45] S1: That's, well said. As we think a little bit about your contrarian view on this future, what do you maybe believe that others don't, right, you know? [00:26:57] S0: I... You know, everyone has a lot of different opinions, so it's hard to come up with one that everyone disagrees with. But, yeah, I think I think the models are already good enough to do the work of most engineering teams, and I think not everyone has realized that that piece yet. Some have. So I don't know if this is something that everyone disagrees with me on, but I posted a while ago, like, cloud opus 4.6. I don't know if I would call it AGI, but it also kind of is at the same time. Like, I don't know that we can tell anymore. We don't need to wait for another wave of models out there to really put these things in their production and get work done safely and, ship correctly. A year ago, that wasn't true. And I think a lot of people, if they're not actually trying this and at the forefront every day, every week, every month, you can kind of get, fatigued. And, you know, six months ago, it wasn't that good. You might have some brilliant moments and then a bunch of terrible ones. But in the last three months, things have changed dramatically, and I don't think we actually need them to get any better to do everything we we need to be doing in the software industry. And they are gonna get better, and that's the crazy part.