Techstrong Gang – March 3, 2025

Hey, everyone. Happy Monday. You know what?

We're just throwing more money on that AI bonfire. You're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone.

Happy Monday. It's Alan Shimel here for Techstrong and Techstrong gang. Welcome to another week of as AI Turns, or as AI burns as in money.

But we'll, we'll get more into that in a second. Let me, let me introduce you to our fantastic gang. We've got assembled today to talk about, as usual three different topics that we'll be heading on today.

Um, first of all, down Texas Way from Austin. He's the, uh, visible impact, uh, uh, CTO co-founder as well as future and analyst. It's our friend, but he's originally from the Bronx.

Our friend Guy Currier. Hey, guy, Guy Currier. Excuse me, I'm sorry, guy.

Uh, uh, doing great. Really happy to, uh, to be here again. It's actually been a minute.

Um, and, uh, the weather remains completely unpredictable here. I'll just say that much. I miss the Bronx.

Yeah. I almost made you sort of part of the Curry basketball family there. Del Curry, Stephen Curry, I forgot Stephen Curry's younger brother.

I would be honored to be in their company. I, I can't touch, I don't know if you quite measure. I've never seen you shoot three, so I'm not going to, You know, you never will.

Yeah, Not gonna go there. Uh, moving over from Texas to New Mexico, though she is our open source champion and Linux Foundation participant, as well as the CEO founder of Deploy Hub and many other things. Our friend j Reagan.

Hi, jc. How are you? I'm doing great, Alan.

Thanks for having me as always. I always love being on these calls. Lots of fun.

It is. Okay. ai and Gestalt it text strong.

It SM we've got some news coming with that one. Uh, sag Soha. Hi, Sagner, how are you?

Hi, Alan. I'm good, thank you. How are you?

Good Sag. Is it Soha or Saha? I always mess it up.

It's Saha Saha with the a I'll try to remember. That's Saha. All right, good.

I'm Guil Sagner. It's great to have you here. And we'll go from there.

Up, up to, uh, Harrison, New York. If you don't know where Harrison, New York is, it's upstate. Well, for people like me from Long Island, Harrison's upstate, other people may say, ah, it's just Westchester, but he's our chief content officer, Mike Vizard.

Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm well. 10 miles from White Plains is upstate.

Huh? Okay. How old?

I was wondering that too. Alan, you're also 10 miles from the Bronx. Oh, no.

Hey, look, I, I was on the south shore of Long Island. That's a far ride to Harrison. Um, anyway, on Rochester right now, throwing stones.

That's all I gonna say. Let 'em, all five of them. They're freezing there right now.

Um, anyway, good to have you, Mike. So, I I, I teased it in the, in the opening. You know, I, I also, I discussed this on my Shimmy says LinkedIn Live last Thursday, and it's on our Techstrong, uh, TV show from last Friday.

The replay of that LinkedIn Live, you could probably get it on Techstrong TV or on YouTube as well. You know, more money being thrown at the AI and AI data center investment bubble irrational exuberance. If I ever saw it, uh, in my, in my, uh, presentation, I even used a little flip chart and I actually hand wrote down some numbers.

It's pretty good. 2 trillion. I did include this 200 billion, that meta rumor has meta may be looking at over the 65 billion I think they already committed to.

And, um, you know, of course meta at this point is still denying this 200 billion. But Mike, what do, what do you got here? To your point, there's just a ton of money pouring into this space.

And the issue though, is Microsoft is kind of like making some signals here that people are having a hard time trying to figure out and read. They're saying that some of their models are more efficient. There's conversations about them pulling back on their leases.

Now, whether they over-provisioned in the first place is hard to know, but, um, they might be signaling the folks that maybe we are not gonna need as much hardware as we go forward here with ai. And, uh, tip of the hat to both, uh, Alan and, uh, Mitch, who's not on the show, but you guys have been banging that drum for a while saying that, you know, we'll get more efficient, but Guy, what do you think is going on here? Is this just one big giant pumble about the Burst?

Because NVIDIA's stock took some wild rides just outta numbers that said there was, you know, awesome, and then everybody punished them. Well, I don't know if I'd put it quite as dramatically as either Alan with his irrationality remark or you with big giant bubble would, but, um, I, I think I've been saying on this show for a while, um, along with, uh, Dave Mic and our colleague Dave Nicholson, that, um, that, uh, there is gonna be a reckoning at some point. Uh, my feeling has been that capacity, uh, power capacity specifically and maybe cooling a little bit capacity, um, will be that reckoning.

Um, and it's, it's, I feel like that this is kind of how it starts. You start to see these big wild plans and then counter currents like, like, like what happened with Nvidia. Nvidia beats its number, but drops in, uh, in, you know, in, in like, was it eight, 9% in, in, uh, market cap?

Uh, there are just so many things going on. It's a little bit hard to, um, figure all of it. Uh, I, I do think that, um, the exuberance around this is not necessarily irrational.

The meta story in particular, it makes me think, Hey, wait a minute. Uh, maybe meta facing, you know, from its cash cow, Facebook facing sort of a, a a a relatively stable and starting to decline user population, um, is chasing after, you know, AI and AI services llama and whatever else they produce as, as a new, you know, more promising long-term revenue stream. But I wanna point out one thing, the macroeconomic environment here, um, this did not occur to me until just like, as I was, as I was preparing for, for this show.

We have to remember, or it's helpful to remember that all these tech companies have been sitting on wads and wads of cash for over 10 years now. They've been building up a cash with nowhere to invest it. I mean, that's why they do it, right?

Didn't Apple had a trillion dollars or something like that at some point, or, I, I don't remember how much it was. That's probably more than needed. So, so when AI comes along and generative AI and this gold rush comes along, cash is cheap for a lot of you.

They don't need to borrow. They just, they, they can just spend. And much like on a, an earlier edition of this show, I was saying, you know, this is like the, the, the proverbial, you know, decision that, uh, you know, is gonna always be approved by upper management.

Let's invest in ai. You're gonna get that budget to spend. Um, in the same way, I think in these tech companies, um, real smart product folks coming in and saying, here's the 10 things we can do with ai.

We just need more capacity. They're gonna be told. Yes.

So in that way, I guess it is a little bit irrational. I think there's been a lot of money slashing around in these tech companies, and now all of a sudden there's a place they can invested that, you know, everybody's gonna like until the other shoe drops, which is kind of inevitable. I, I'd like to comment, with all due respect to my colleague, Guy Currier, when you are, when you are talking about two plus, it's two plus trillion with a T of dollars pledged, what, what kind of telethon are we running here?

Right? I mean, let, let, let's be, let's be realistic. Let's look at the GDP of the top.

And this is all on my shimmy says you can go check it out. Let's look at the top 20 companies, or the top 20 nation states. GDP for 2024.

The us I I, I think the US was 30 something or 38 or 39 trillion. China was 28 or 29 trillion. And then there's a pretty big drop off.

5. Japan is about 4 trillion. Uh, UK is about three and a half trillion.

1 trillion. And then it drops off again, right? So you go through, let's say, you know, those six countries, India, maybe at number seven around there.

And then there's a huge fall off down to Italy and Mexico and, you know, some of the, uh, Canada, you know, still highly, highly industrialized first world, you know, big economies. You are talking about more money there than the GDP of some of these major industrialized nations. Where does the money get spent for every, you know, a billion here, a billion there?

Before you know it, you're talking real money. But where does every out of every, excuse me, out of every billion that gets spent or supposedly going to get spent on this AI and data center, boom, about half of it, they estimate half of it goes into semis, into chips. I don't, I mean, that's a damn good business for Jensen, Wong, and Nvidia, right?

If, if 2 trillion is gonna be spent and half of that goes to chips, holy merrow, that's an awful lot of GPU right there, right? A trillion dollars in GPUs. com days, right?

I used to be out, well, worked for a company not far from you, Mike, and purchase New York. And we had data centers all over the world, and we, we partnered with some really upstanding companies, WorldCom, MCI, if it rings a bell, um, the good folks at Enron, the big e down in Houston, we know what happened to them. Level three in, in, uh, oh, right outta Boulder, Colorado.

Interlochen, Interlochen, remember that guy? Level three was there, there was a whole bunch of fiber and all, and it was a very similar thing. We're going to need more fiber.

We've gotta do the last mile, but we need more backbone. We need more backbone. We were using T one T threes at the time.

Right? You, you, you didn't mention Akamai, that that was their Yeah, Well, Akamai was creating A-C-D-N-I, I tell you a funny story about Akamai, my teen investment sense, I picked ink to me. But anyway, um, I knew a founder of Ink to me.

Anyway, go ahead. com time that basically that dark fiber as we called it. 'cause we never lit it up because we over, over capacitated, over capacitated our fiber needs.

That dark fiber stayed dark. com bubble burst. I don't think we lit a lot of that up until two, until 2005, 2006.

And then even after the great recession, there was still dark fiber that now we're lighting up. Are we gonna do a similar thing here? Are we just gonna build so much excess capacity that it's gonna take 10 years for that to be soaked up in, into the, into the, into the marketplace?

And what's that gonna do to Nvidia stock? What's that going to do to all of this? I I do think it's gonna spur electric, uh, innovation in, in generating electricity, right?

Hopefully clean, sustainable. But It's gonna have to, it's gonna have to, yeah. No, not, not in this present administration.

Jill, baby. Jill. Okay, let's just wait, wait.

I just wanna get back to the, this, the stock, you know, it is chaos because when you have an earnings report that says that you are, you know, earning $40 billion a year at a growth rate of 78% year over year, and your stocks go down, we have, we have a different thing happening in the market. I believe that there is a lot of volatility right now because of the current administration and just ins, people are feeling insecure. And maybe some of those are small investors.

I would love to know who is, you know, selling off their NVIDIA stock when they have a, an earnings report that looks like that. They, to me, it's insanity. They buy an anticipation of a blowout earnings.

Well, and then try to sell it and, and make quick money. Or people who, short, short, there are people who are shorting stocks. That's what they do for, right?

It's shorter, right? They Shorting. Yes.

Haven't we always seen that? But still, when you have, if you, to me, that's just insanity right now. It really is.

It's insanity that a company could be doing that well, and, and, and an and investors are gonna start dumping the stocks. Chase, Do you see this right here? You know what that is?

I Get, I do. That's The violin playing harsh flowers for Jensen and all his cronies at Nvidia. And you know, The other thing we haven't really talked about is the CHIPS Act, right?

Is this, is, is, you know, the potential of pulling some of that funding away from the CHIPS Act, is that having an impact? The, The, the problem is the CHIPS act Small. Well, they replaced it with small Potatoes.

Starburst, right? Small to this. Yeah.

But they replaced it with Starburst also. That's a half Trillion Stargate. Stargate Stargate.

I, I really don't care. No, no, they didn't. So here's the deal.

The CHIPS Act is US government money that they're giving the private industry to, to build chips and data centers here. Stargate is private money that's being invested into AI and data centers. We have a similar thing going on, by the way, in China.

Again, this is all on my shimmy says thing. The Chinese government has, I forget how many Juan, a trillion Juan or whatever it is, comes out to about $138 billion that the Chinese government is earmarking for AI and AI data centers for the big Chinese companies and smaller Chinese companies do, to be fair. But, you know, the 10 cents, the, the, the Baidu, the Alibabas on top of that, some of these Chinese companies, Alibaba, for instance, announced, uh, I think it was 35 billion of their money.

So you are seeing both governments and private companies come in here over the top on this. I mean, I look, I don't think a fraction of that will be spent in actuality when push comes to shove. And I think we're gonna wind up, I think it is irrational exuberance guy with all due respect.

And, and the air's gonna come out of this balloon, especially if we can't point to real wins with AI. Real quick, I if we're gonna really get into it, I, I do need to point out that, that, um, that those announcements are not really commitments. Their announcements or Their pledges, you know, good things.

Their pledges ideas are good. It's like writing a telethon. Yeah, no, I get it.

Saying because meta denies, uh, any $200 billion. No, but they do acknowledge the 65 billion. Yeah.

Okay. But also Alan, uh, comparing GDP, which is a yearly annual figure spending over the course of a year with pledges that are gonna, gonna take a, a couple years, at least probably three years to play out. Even if you took three years guy.

I mean, this is, come on. It's, it's, it's crazy Money. But it's funny because the exact example of building out the, the, the, the fiber backbone because of the internet is what that instantly came to mind for me as well.

And I, I, I think we're just really arguing about degree, and I'm picking on you for word choice, which is not even fair. Um, overinvestment seems so likely here. Uh, I, if not, if if only for the macroeconomic, uh, I, it's probably not even ma the economic condition I talked about before, which is these are companies with tons and tons of cash that until this AI boom were, they were mostly holding under 'cause they didn't know what to do with it.

Now they have something to do with it that looks promising, and yeah, they're probably gonna overdo it. That's, you know, that's, that's the boom bus cycle. I agree.

Um, Yeah. So there's this also the funding frenzy that's been going on, like with OpenAI and tropic HuggingFace, they have all reported, uh, substantial fundraising, uh, rounds and even, uh, for AI startups. There is this cold rush of funding offers coming in from venture capital firms.

And this started back in, uh, 2022 when OpenAI heated up the AI conversation with, uh, Chad Ity. And, uh, now they're plowing all this money into this up and coming, uh, AI companies, um, no hold spot really. And that shooting up their AI valuations like overnight, like OpenAI and anthropic are, have been, uh, beneficiaries of this too.

Like open air valuation probably reached over $150 billion this year. And that's a lot more than a lot of companies in, uh, that have been around a lot longer. And, uh, anthropic two, uh, hit I think $20 billion.

So, uh, that there may be definitely some overspending over here going on. 'cause um, it's really like the, it's, it's really like the AI rush sort of, uh, thing that's going on. Companies are really, uh, you know, enticed by this new, uh, shiny new toy sort of a thing.

And, uh, this ties nicely into, uh, this, uh, future research finding, which, uh, was released a while back, which state that, you know, ai, um, readiness of companies is really lagging behind. And, uh, they're not really, um, at par with the expected ROI returns that, uh, that companies thought there would be. And, uh, a lot of things can be, uh, there, there are a lot of factors really that, uh, go into explaining why that is.

There are cultural conflicts, technological lags, and the general lack of readiness of companies. So, and a lot of companies are also using IS corner cases, and there is also this AI washing that's going on. So, uh, there is definitely, I would say that, uh, there is some overspending going on, but also it'll take a while before things start to fall in place and, uh, companies start to see their, uh, expected returns coming.

Inna, you're not implying that companies are using AI as rapidly as possible without really knowing how it works, are you? Yeah, that can't be, This is Work outta my cousin video. Absolutely not, your Honor.

There was a lot of waste out there. Yeah. This is the report from the Futurum group, right?

That you're referencing, I think, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. My colleague, Olivia Blanchard, uh, led that effort. He's, he's our AI specialist.

Mm-hmm. So, I mean, what you're seeing is the trickle down, right? If you get 2 trillion here, it trickles down.

So it's, it's sucking up all of the, soaking up all of the VC funding that's out there, because everyone wants to ride that. Quite frankly, it sucks up our attention here on Textron Gang, two out of every three segments. So it's somehow AI related, right?

It, this is rippling throughout at certainly the tech economy, if not the world economy in general. You know what I find interesting? One last thing, Mike, when I went through the GDP numbers and my shimmy says, every one of these companies is all in on ai, right?

They've all made announcements except Russia. You don't hear anything from Russia on ai. Now, are they just not saying anything 'cause of sanctions?

They're not allowed to. Are they just being really secretive? Or are they too busy fighting wars, Or, or why buy what, what you can steal, right?

So who knows? Well, they're all stealing. Look, there's no angels here.

Every, this is, we, we have cast safety, morals, ethics to the side. It's a full out race to, to be the king of ai, right? And they're all, we're all stealing from each other.

There's no doubt in my mind. Alright, well we have mentioned this in the past, but it's worth mentioning again, we do not give stock tips on this show. But I guess we could remind folks that, you know, Joe Kennedy got outta the market before the great crash when his shoe shine.

Boy, he gave him some stock tips and then you figured out, well, maybe everybody's in this a little bit too hard, so do what you like Folks, but, and he did go into the bootlegging business. But that's a whole nother story. Um, yeah, let's take a break here on text on Gang Joe Kennedy.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. 2, outta three, uh, segments. This is the second segment.

So we're talking about AI and its impact on software development. 'cause there's just a lot of conflicting reports out there. com, there's two stories talking about how, uh, AI is not really gonna do every software engineering task all that well, and that the quality of the code is somewhat suspect at the same time.

There are reports out there that says, uh, I think it's from the Fed in St. Louis. That demand for developers is at an all time, uh, pre covid low.

So we're not quite clear what that means either. And finally, though, we see people like Mark Benioff at Salesforce, you know, they have a bad quarter and they're telling Wall Street, they're gonna get rid of their software engineers to make it seem like they're gonna be more efficient and maybe buck up their, uh, stock price. So Tracy, what's your read on what's going on here?

So what, you know, e every time we go through a kind of a shift in how we develop applications, we kind of see this, it feels like, uh, the job that, you know, the jobs in some sectors or jobs in some skills will, will start disappearing and, and jobs in other areas will start, uh, becoming in demand. And I kind of feel like that that's what I mean. We have to remember that the technology sector is still growing.

Um, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's like a 10% increase since last year. So it's to say that, you know, one article about potentially jobs on indeed, uh, being less, like 30% less this month and maybe a couple of months ago, I don't think is a good reflection of the real job growth in the tech sector. There's a, there's quite a few jobs that are, uh, openings around, you know, AI people who, who understand large language models.

People are just certified in it. Uh, security is a big to topic. So I think we're seeing a shift, and I think some software developers who may have been doing, you know, JavaScript all this time might be not as much in demand.

Um, but I don't think that we can really read into, uh, we can't read too much into what Indeed is seeing. And there is a shift away from, uh, a lot of, uh, developers are moving away from thi uh, platforms. Like, uh, indeed, to be quite honest.

There's other, you know, like Stack Overflow. A lot of people I know, they go to Stack Overflow, they go to, uh, GitHub discussions because platforms like Indeed are starting to become a little bit annoying, to be quite honest in the way that it used. They use AI to find, uh, candidates.

You have to have this perfect match. So I think developers are starting to move away from some of these sites, uh, and go to some of the sites that other developers are at. They're actually looking that they know that they have openings on their teams.

So maybe there's a little bit of a shift in the way developers are looking for work as well. I just don't see a, a massive decrease in the number of software developer jobs. I really don't.

Alan, how much of this has to do with something called The economy? Stupid? I mean, yeah, no, I obvious.

Well, look, in the last two months or so, we, we have seen economic numbers trending down, unfortunately, both on unemployment and a bunch of other, you know, kinda leading indicators. But, you know, even like Trace, you mentioned Stack Overflow, that's where developers used to go to, to, to code and get tips in coding and, and to commiserate with other developers and figure out how to do things. Guess what?

AI has hit Stack Overflow hard. Their numbers are down. I the last, I think we discussed this on a gang a couple weeks ago.

Stack Overflow is down 40%, 40% of their traffic is, is missing, or, you know, less than their peak. Um, to me, that's an indication of something. People are using AI instead of Stack Overflow to get code snippets and learn how to do things, perhaps.

But that's a real number. And that's, that's indicative. Here's the deal.

I'm sorry, go ahead. No, Benioff, as you said, said, yeah, we're gonna do less. Uh, when Zuckerberg went, uh, you know, usual dark sweep parade out here, uh, Zuckerberg said that they were gonna eliminate some mid-level engineering jobs this year because of ai.

Other people are saying we're gonna eliminate some, you know, fresher kind of jobs, engineering jobs because of ai lower level folks. No one says they're eliminating that, you know, the higher level developers. But if you were a young person coming outta school, I, I got a call a couple weeks ago from a recent college grad.

He had a psychiatry psy psychiatry degree bachelor's, and he said, you know, I'm really thinking about going to a code bootcamp and becoming a software developer. If you're that kid, is that what you wanna do? Or do you go to an AI bootcamp and become an AI engineer or an ai, whatever the word is.

If it was your kid, what would you tell him? I'd tell 'em to go into data science. I told them that too, by the way.

Um, yeah, data science engineers are probably gonna be a much, far more in demand, but a lot of people don't like that kind of work. It can be pretty tedious. Development's a lot more fun.

But if you really wanna make sure you're gonna have a job in the future, data science engineering is, or platform engineering. Mm-hmm. So, so long then, let me ask you about this.

'cause you tracked this AI pretty closely, but some of this is a moment in time, and I think some of the execs, when they say they're gonna eliminate this, that, and the other accounting on the reasoning capabilities of the AI models to become more advanced than they are today. So when is your sense of how smart will the LLMs get and will they be able to take on more of these developer software engineering tasks that today maybe they can't? Um, yeah, so I feel, I think that AI coding assistance are definitely getting better with each generation, and they may be able to absorb, uh, a good amount of the work that, with the coding and stuff.

But, um, also because of that, companies are less keen on hiring junior developers especially. So the apprenticeship is fading, which means that, uh, it would be increasingly trick year to train the next batch of, uh, junior software architects. Um, also the no-code, low-code, uh, applications, they have a role to play in this because, uh, more employees are now writing applications using ai.

But also it's important to remember that the overall tech industry and AI evidently has a role to play in this, but the industry is emerging from volume hire to hiring that matters. So instead of recruiting a large number of, uh, people, companies are now choosing to hire, uh, more experienced people who can do more and can do better, and then ramping up their output, uh, using ai. So senior software architects and developers are now using AI generated code in many cases and using AI to debug or, you know, and testing codes.

Um, but so largely experts believe that the size of development teams is going to shrink over the years, and it feels like that has already begun. But to what extent that is going to be, and definitely, I don't believe that it's going to wipe out developers and AI is going to consume all of that, uh, all of their responsibilities anytime in the future. I, I just think it's a shift.

It's a shift. I mean, think about when we went, you know, we go back some years, we think about when we went from the mainframe to distributed platforms, you could say that there was a decrease in the number of cobalt developers who were being hired during that period of time, which was solely true. It did.

But many of those COBOL developers, me being one of them, said, Hey, I'm gonna go learn to be to, you know, write a presentation manager, um, application and learn a database manager and become an OS two bigot. So it's about pivoting for a lot of these developers. And they have, they have to start pivoting and if they wanna stay, uh, relevant and the ones who aren't are gonna find that they don't have a lot of job openings.

But just a point, um, just in personal experience, you know, we have in our open source community, um, we have college kids that show up, uh, and, you know, want to get experience through the open source process. So far, all of them have gotten entry-level coding jobs. All of them have gotten in entry-level coding jobs on applications that are using ai.

Now, are they an AI developer? I can't say, I wouldn't call them an AI developer, but they are entry-level jobs teams that are working on AI applications, and there was an entry-level spot for them. Interesting guy, Alan pointed out this, pointed out several times that, um, in the industrial revolution, there was this widespread feeling that people were gonna lose jobs.

And what happened instead was people became, workers became more productive. I think this is a little bit different. Um, I'm not sure exactly how, but it's kind of like giving everybody, it's not just coders.

It's, I mean, think about doctors and lawyers, right? Um, part of the fundamental skillset now, um, and going forward is going to be the use of AI assistance for whatever it is you're doing. And I don't know about you, but my general experience with, with, with coding and, and with programming is that, um, for almost any application or service, it's almost a bottomless pit of features and enhancements and, and and so forth.

I mean, the, the, the, the paradigm between perfecting and releasing, um, in code development, uh, that's why I've been saying since the beginning that, uh, the, the, one of the big benefits of AI is quality. Because you can get, move, maybe move that needle closer to perfecting while still releasing thanks to your AI assistant. The thing is that so far the AI assistance, uh, uh, in coding seems to be about an inch deep.

But it appears by its nature, by the way it was trained, it is, it simulates depth. So that's what we all need, need to learn. But Alan, you know, you could be right.

We could just be doing more coding better with the same number of folks in the end. You know, I, I, let me give you a real world example. I did an interview last week with a developer advocate from a company called Postman.

Uh, you could go look it up on text, on tv. It's not, this isn't about Postman per se, it's about him. He, he was a, he's been a developer for, I don't know, 15 years and years.

We transitioned to developer advocate and we were talking about this issue of developers and ai and he said, you know, my sister called me last week and she's opening a bakery, and I'm her brother and I'm her IT person. As most of us in the IT world. Are we, we are the IT person for our family members who are non it, right?

We're tech support. And, um, my sister said, I need a website for the bakery. Do you know anyone I could hire or could you do it for me?

I know you're busy. He said, well, let me, let me, let me ask you a couple questions. You know, what color scheme are you looking for?

What's the vibe you want? What do you want to say? 7 of Claude Sonnet came out.

He went into sonnet. He said, build me a website. And it was for GoDaddy was the host, build me a website for GoDaddy.

This is, this is this, this, that, and that. He said a half hour later, her website was up and running, doing e-commerce even, right? You could order cookies online.

And he said, I, if you would've told me five years, 10 years, 15 years ago, that that's what it was gonna take to put up a website. And granted, this isn't an enterprise application, but it was a damn nice website and it was everything this woman wanted. And it was in 20 minutes from inception to, to, to production.

That's the world we're living in right now. You are talking to someone who went from being a lawyer to doing websites back in 94, 95 whenever it was. And it was, you know, it was revolutionary.

Right? Now, look, this is, this is baby stuff, baby stuff. Here's, here's, here's the bias.

I keep hearing in all the conversations that I'm having with people, if I'm a senior developer or engineer, they go, great, I don't need all these junior guys and I'll just automate all this function and I'll do that myself. Then you go talk to the junior guys and they go, great, we don't need these senior guys. 'cause I can do all this stuff myself.

So I can't figure out which end of this thing is gonna wind up being the front of this thing. Well, the senior guys to the senior guys might wanna get rid of the senior guys 'cause they're more expensive. But on the other hand, if it's left up to the senior guys, they'll get rid of the junior guys because they want to keep their jobs.

Yeah. So, uh, just just to point to our, our, the listeners here. If you are looking for a job, there are two things that you should really think about.

Make sure that your LinkedIn profile looks awesome. Um, make sure you have everything on there that you have in terms of skills. I would even say if it's a skill that you know, but you have not actually used it in a job, list it and make sure your GitHub profile is awesome because more employers are looking at the, your GitHub profile as much as they are your LinkedIn profile.

So resumes and cover letters are all well and good, but when it, it boils down to evaluating somebody before you get the phone call. They're gonna look at your LinkedIn page, they're gonna look to how, how you, uh, brand yourself and they're gonna look at your GitHub profile. Yeah, no, interesting.

So keep that in mind. Great advice. That Is really, except it's not a person reading it, it's an AI agent that's looking at it first.

Eventually there's a person looking at it there. The AI agent only looks at your, your resume and that's the problem. Alright, let's take a break here on Textron Gang.

We're gonna come back and, you know, speaking of old and new and senior and junior developers, is the dividing line between, do you use Rust or see in your Linux? com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more.

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Home of Security Bloggers Network. Hey folks, we're back. And one of the great things about open source and one of the bad things about open source is everybody can see everything and everybody's very transparent.

So in the land of Linux, KERS, there's been this kind of debate going on where, uh, Linus Tovo who runs that project, pretty much wants everybody to use Russ so they can have more memory safe code in the operating system. And this is a good thing from a cybersecurity perspective, but there's a little pushback in the community and, uh, Linus is busy trying to rail everybody back in. But this conversation seems to be going on elsewhere.

Everybody is trying to figure out, well, how do I get rid of these languages that are deemed to be unsafe? And that includes jobless C and a lot of this old stuff in favor of what they call memory safe languages like Rust. Um, Alan, what's your take on what's going on here?

But it seems to me that, um, there's resistance to change. Hi, boomer. Oh, Okay.

And we're done. That was a good, that, That's what this is coming down to, to me folks, right? A so I get it, I get, but you know, the, the old guard is digging in their heels saying, Hey, we, we've been working in sea forever our whole careers.

We know every nook and cranny. We know how to avoid that memory leak. We know how to avoid, make it more secure.

We know everything we need to know about c I'm so damn comfortable in it. Why would we think it's changing in the next generation? I'm sorry.

And Rus is harder to learn too. Russ is not an easy language to pick up. It's hard.

I've looked at it and said, I'm glad I'm not coding 'cause I wouldn't wanna learn this, but maybe it's not a one or the other option, right? I mean, most of the kernel's written in, see, they're not gonna throw that all out and start rewriting the entire kernel in rust. Why not?

Who would be a huge undertaking? And I don't think They're not gonna throw out working code, but over time, as you replace Over time, new modules, new modules, I'm guessing that they're probably gonna move to Rust. Uh, you know, why not?

I mean, that would, that makes sense to slowly move over to Rust if that's the direction they choose to go. You could have kept stuff in COBOL or web or assembly language or you know, all look time marches on computer language languages. March on, right?

There was a time where the lamp stack was PHP, now everything's Python. Um, Russ Golan another, you know, go Golan, another, uh, modern kind of, uh, uh, languages. Um, c was not perfect.

C was perfect, was also not perfect Java for, you know, the tremendous success in what Java's done for code mobility and everything. A lot of security issues there. You know, over time I've come to the trust, Linus Corvallis kind of guts on these things.

And clearly his gut is telling him moving the rust is a smart thing for the Linux kernel. Um, I I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say if he feels that strongly about it, there's probably something to it. But I think you're touching on the problem there, Alan.

It's a meta problem. It's not a technical one so much I think, which is, um, how what, uh, Lin's, uh, four vault's influence is, is outsized. And I mean, he deserves it, but it's outsized in a corporate decision.

So, lemme let me just back up one second. It's really hard to make a change. It can be really hard to make a change.

And I sympathize with the desire to keep things simpler in such a large project. One language, um, more developers who know it and understand it, it's what they're used to. But then you're ossified in terms, in terms of being able to move forward sometimes and a corporate decision or a committee decision or whatever.

These things get considered and debated and then a roadmap and a plan is put together and all that other sort of thing. But that's not how the foundation is running because of Al's outside influence. He can't really, he neither does he, can he, nor do I think he wants to dictate anything, but when he advocates for something, it creates, you know, a a lot more stress than in a more, I don't know, egalitarian or corporate kind of process.

And I think that's kind of what's going on here. I think if you pulled anybody out and said, um, should, should the language in which the lice Colonel, uh, uh, is programmed, never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever forever change. Should it always be c forever, they would say probably no.

Very few people would say that there should be no room for change. So then it's not a question of whether, but when and how you do it, You know, I can't help, but I'm sorry, go ahead, Mike. This is, and I'd love Tracy's opinion on it.

'cause I think this is a change management issue writ large, right? So if somebody will sit down and say, we should write this in Rust, and then they'll look around their squad and go, who here knows Rust? And then you hear crickets, so then they just keep going back to Java to guy's point.

But what does it take to get, uh, development team to learn a new language? How long does that take? I mean, you're talking about significant training and that might take years to make that transition.

Tracy, what do you think? Well, to be quite honest, the, the truth is there's not a lot of developers that no see anymore, right? So Seed development has, you know, dropped off Java, replaced it.

So if you're looking at, uh, a group of seed developers who are maintaining the kernel then, and you want to take advantage of the security, uh, features of Rust, then you would think that those seed developers would be okay to move to rust. But as Alan points out, they do get, they really develop, you know what software languages is like religion. You're asking them to change the, you're asking them to change religion and it is extremely difficult for them to change religion.

It really is. It's so hard for developers to pivot. They get so stuck in the mud.

But with regards to the, the benefits to the kernel itself, if we are building a more secure kernel, it's easier to maintain because of some of those, the memory management that it has. I can't imagine why they would continue writing it and see, I really can't. But we ha they have to change religion and the culture of developers is very odd.

They, they really dig in, they love their code, they really, really love their code. And to see it move to something else, um, is hard for them. But new modules, Hey guys, hey ladies, whoever you are working on that, I think that you're gonna be coding and rest very, very soon if you're gonna continue on that project.

Look, resistant, the change, there's always resistance to change. Change is hard, right? Especially in software development where it is you, right?

It's akin to religion, right? I've seen the, the, the, the squabbles between Java and C folks back in the day. net?

Oh, you were less than human, right? And, And yeah, they are, we are less than human. I'm a dotnet programer.

I'm, yeah, actually, you know, so an alien in disguise. This, this is Visiting you guys. Yeah, That's software.

That's what makes it fun though, right? It, you know what's interesting is when you go to large enterprises and say, what, what, how many in what languages do you guys support over here? The average large enterprise probably supports seven to 12 different computer languages.

And they have different teams for every language. And that's not the most efficient way of doing things, I'll tell you that. So I am, I'm, I'm going through my mind.

It's to see if I can think of a single instance in history where there was a mass religious conversion that was peaceful and I'm coming up blank. So, well, we might, we might be seeing it with Elon in Doge. I'm only kidding.

Hey, we gotta call a wrap on this version of the Gang. Guys, it's been real. It's, it's been a, a really great discussion on some really great topics here.

I hope you've all enjoyed it. We have a full text on TV schedule following this immediately. So stay tuned wherever you're watching this, unless you're just watching this as a podcast or something, go, go find, go to Textron tv.

Go to our YouTube channel. Go to any of our sites, check it out. Guy Tracy Sagner.

Mike, thanks for joining us today. For now is Alan Shimel. We're out.