Techstrong Gang – September 25, 2024

Hi, everyone. Happy Wednesday, a Fire Sale at Intel. Who would've thought, what's the future of software engineering jobs in this AI era?

Speaking of ai, will AI force the platform engineering issue? Finally, you are watching Text Drunk Gang. Hi everyone, it's Alan Shival here at Techstrong.

Welcome to another edition of Techstrong Gang, our daily show where we talk about, well, quite frankly, whatever we find interesting. Um, and we've got a few interesting topics to talk about today. We've got a great bunch of folks here for our assembled gang.

Let me, uh, introduce our gang members for today. First of all, joining us from Charlotte. She is a, uh, literal Swiss army knife for developers and ops and DevOps, and everything in between Cloud.

It's our friend Hope Lynch. Hey, hope Welcome. Hi, Alan.

Thank you for having me here today. You know, I am, uh, very interested in our topics that we have along Oh, you, and you always have good stuff to say about 'em, so thank you. Thank you.

Speaking of good stuff to say, say about them. We're happy to be joined by our resident Futura of DevOps app Dev Analyst. I don't know if I got that right exactly, but nevertheless, it's Paul Nadi.

Paul, why don't you set it straight with, did I, did I have that right, Alan? Great to be here. Great to be here with the team.

Uh, yeah. No, I'm practice lead, um, practice, uh, lead for the, uh, app dev practice at future. Yep.

Perfect. Joining Hope and Paul at my side here in Boca Raton, at least for a few more days until the playoffs begin and the Yankees are on their way to their 29th World Championship going and only Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you looking Forward to Being?

I hope I didn't jinx us. I'm looking forward to being in El, in El Bronx, in, in El Bronx, in No Bronx. All right.

Um, so guys, I I, I let it off all kinds of stories flying around with Intel for sale. I don't know if they're for sale, if it's solicited unsolicited, but you know, when there's smoke, there's fire. But is it a fire sale?

Um, you know, uh, first there was a lot of stories out there about Qualcomm, which, you know, you could see that kind of makes sense, right? I guess. Um, but now the big thing is, you know, the PE vultures and sharks are a, and, and there's money being banged, you know, tossed around 5 billion, 6 billion.

Look, that's not gonna buy Intel. But Mike, what do you think? I think there's a lot of drama here.

I haven't seen this kinda show since, you know, barbarians at the gate for HBO, it starts. Yeah, remember that? Be like that.

Pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's just gonna be this, like this for months to come. And I don't think Apollo, uh, the management company is gonna necessarily buy Intel for 6 billion, to your point. But they did Chip to build a manufacturing plant in Ireland with Intel for the next wave.

It almost seems to me. And then I thought also the biggest thing that happened was that Intel talked about co-designing an AI chip with Amazon. I think that ultimately that's what they're gonna become, is more of a designer shop, and what they're moving towards is the manufacturing side of that is gonna be outsourced to a lot of different companies that may have been former parts of Intel.

And we're gonna see this be a trend. We already see it in, most of the chips are designed by somebody else in manufactured in Taiwan. So I think they're moving to more of that arm model, and they just got caught on the back end of it, a little bit too slow.

The number that troubled me most was 2 billion in cash flow for a bus business that needs 10 billion to run minimum. So, you know, there was some concern here about how sustainable intel is, and that's where that fire sale conversation is coming from. So designed in California by Apple is, that's their model.

Yeah. So I, I, I agree. I, you know, the, the story is that they're gonna spin the fab business out as a separate unit.

I don't know if it's gonna be a totally independent entity, but it's certainly a separate unit. And then, so you'll have a design and then a, a fab, you know, businesses under the umbrella. Um, I, you know, Paul, hope, let me let you guys weigh in here before I weigh in with my thoughts on it.

Sure, absolutely. Um, you know, I think when we look at Intel, there's a lot of concern and challenges that are happening within the, the market. Um, you know, and I think Intel has kind of fallen short on, on expectations.

Um, there is a lot of, you know, desire to kind of, you know, regain that market share that they had, right? And this influx of money is driving kind of towards that goal. Of course, we're seeing that as an opportunity to, to help drive Intel's value up.

Um, but I'll speak, um, Mike, what you were talking about, uh, you know, with regards to where the company is pivoting, um, in, in my world, I'm less about the infrastructure in that, in the chip set, but more about the software side of the business. And, um, when I, when I think about, um, you know, Intel's software business, right? I think about the, you know, the, the, the products that they have to offer, which, you know, whether it's the Open Vno toolkit or the open source projects, or the, or the one API runtime, you know, I, I think about what they're, what they're, uh, trying to achieve, right?

And when, when I look at my research and I see that 20% of respondents and our latest app dev research indicate that application portability is critical to their organizations across infrastructures, across environments, across, uh, you know, locations and such, and 67% of respondents indicated that's very important to them. I think that the, um, the one API strategy that Intel is driving towards is really going to help accelerate what Mike was going after, right? Which is build faster, accelerate that API kind of delivery across different environments.

And the, you know, when we look at Intel one, API, the, the DPC plus plus and C plus plus compiler, it really does provide the developers with the ability to be more portable as well as, you know, rely on their existing and future gpu, uh, seek BU and, and AI accelerators to kind of help drive towards that unified approach. Um, you know, we, we see that 48% of developers are, are developing in a heterogeneous environment across CPUs, GPUs, and, and, and like for ai um, applications. This is an area where unified architecture is really helping to drive that, that, you know, a, a approach.

I think that's where Intel is going to help grow. And even if it, um, kind of spins this part of the business off to the side and kind of runs it as an independent business, it's really gonna help drive that, uh, that AI adoption more of a software front. I think Intel has always kind of missed that software boat.

Um, and they do it again, right? You see Nvidia pushing cuda, and that kinda locks everybody into their GPU stack. Um, Intel has that one API, but they never really came around and said, there's a couple of open source alternatives to Cuda, and the Intel doesn't seem to be driving that very hard.

And, uh, it's almost like they become too reactionary and they're always on their heels. Very, very much so. And the point that you just raised that I think is, is applying the pressure and also probably nudging the interest of, of companies like Qualcomm and the Apollo group, right?

They, you're seeing what's happening with Nvidia and can we get any, any of that, even if it's third place or fourth place, right? Um, maybe a little bit of a turnaround story because, uh, Intel, um, you know, they fall on hard times a bit. They are also having some financial challenges, uh, as you said, uh, they're still competing with Samsung and TSMC, uh, for chip manufacturing.

So they, they, they need something, something has to take hold, whether it is an investment or a buyout, um, yeah, they, they need a savior. So let me give you the shimmy take on this, okay? First of all, as it relates to the Intel software stack.

Very nice. Paul, I appreciate the metrics you, you cited there, but I don't think literally the proverbial flea on the elephant or pimple on the elephant in, in terms of the Intel business. Let's be clear, we're all of an age here.

Well, Paul, hope, Paul, hope you're the youngest here, but, of course, but you know, Mike and I are of an age where Intel is chips, Intel, you know, it was the Wintel empire growing up for me, or not growing up. But, you know, in my, in my career, it's always been the Wintel Empire. And now, of course, Apple's in there.

But Intel is an American institution. It's a strategic asset of the United States of America. And yes, we are all GPU crazed right now.

And so if you don't have a GPU story, you know, it's, it's kind of like with the data center business went in when cloud exploded. If you don't have a cloud story, who the heck's gonna need a data center? You know?

So they came up with a private cloud and all that, and it's taken almost 20 years for the data centers now to become what, you know, invaluable. They get right at a premium. I, I don't think Intel is ready to be, have their bones picked over yet.

And I think the folks at Barron's are smart, and that's why they're making this deal, right? Because the Wheel of Karma goes round and round, and it's a b***h and g this current GPU craze and one company having, you know, 98% market share on GPUs isn't gonna last forever. So do you think quality is quality?

Do you think They have time? That's the question. Yes.

I, 'cause I think, I think between the money they get from CHIPS Act, and will they get bought, perhaps, will they take in equity stakes from outside people? Yes. I'm surprised I don't see Warren Buffet at their door right here, because it is a typical buffet, right?

Buy low, buy low, sell high. That's what Apollo's doing. They're already partnered with them.

Let them take another 6 billion stake for very favorable terms, because when that wheel goes round, they're gonna be sitting in the catbird seed with it, and that investment's gonna pay off handsomely. Alan, I would, I would, uh, I would echo, you know, just to, just to be clear on my statements, I agree with you a thousand percent. I mean, the software business at Intel is a small little, you know, yeah.

Almost se to their business, right? Uh, but, but with that said, there's enough effort there, there's enough initiative there to either spin that off its own initiative, uh, you know, maybe even create a sub-business out of it, uh, that would, you know, that would kind of help drive that unification across, uh, heterogeneous environments. Uh, until no doubt it's a ship company.

It is a, it is a, uh, company that's built on hardware, and it's, that's where their heritage is, and that's where they're going to be moving forward. Uh, the question is, is are they going to evolve with the times? And, and that's a, that's a big, big question right Now.

And I think that the difference too, is what N NVIDIA's up to is they understand that GPUs may not last forever. So they're building a software stack that is a credible part of their business. I think when Wintel was coming along, Intel was overly dependent upon Microsoft.

And Microsoft woke up one day and said, oh, by the way, we can use all these other processors to run Windows. And Intel's been kinda like trying to figure out what their next great thing is ever since, in my opinion. I I don't disagree with that.

They missed, they certainly missed the arm, the arm race. Mm-Hmm. Uh, that being said, look, this recent deal with Amazon to design, uh, uh, AI chips, these kinds of things, being, no matter what happens in this election coming up, I think the, the path is clear.

We want manufacturing here in the us. We don't wanna wake up one day and our beepers are blowing up, and our walkie-talkies and Intel stands to be the biggest beneficiary of the CHIPS Act, and of the billions of dollars that have been set aside to, to kickstart technology manufacturing here. So do you think Pat Gelsinger over at Intel should get out the Lee a Coca playbook and start saying, you know, I need a bailout from the US to, I, I think in essence, that's what the CHIP act may wind up being for Intel.

But they need, you know, a, you need a Lecoq to lead, follow, get out of the way person for this. But number two, you need something you had to hang your hat on. The AI chip with Amazon could be something, the separate fabrication where, you know, we're, we're manufacturing chips for Qualcomm and whoever else, Qualcomm, stop having your chips manufactured in China.

Have them done here by Intel. Um, I, I think the US government can force the issue of devices here in the US need to be manufactured here in the us. So, and, and I'm a free trade kind of person, but I think that's where we're headed.

Couple Of weeks ago, the head of the Department of Commerce, United States government sent that very message to folks and said, you know, we would appreciate it, suggestion if you would use the Intel fabs, but I don't know if anybody else got the memo. I, I think there's gotta be a stick behind that. But I, I do think, look, we spoke about it, uh, in Monday's show, I, I guess was when we discussed the Lebanon situation.

This is a, a, a clarion call to supply chains throughout the world. If you don't have complete control of your supply chain, and if your supply chain is a, is a, uh, critical infrastructure of your national interest, you're making a big mistake and you're looking for trouble. And I think that is what's coming out of what we spoke about Monday, and that's what can save Intel.

You heard it here first. Are we, are we betting that Intel gets acquired, or do we think Intel continues as a standalone company? That's a good, good question.

Hope, what do you think? I, I just feel acquisition is, it just feels farfetched to me, right? Um, if I were coming in with a bag of money, and especially if this is not a business I've been in before, right?

I, I want to prop them up, support them, make sure I get my investment back by some multiple, right? But if I go in and now I'm taking it over and I'm making all of it my problem, that is a completely different proposition. All right.

My next question, who's making the movie Netflix or HBO Barbarian's at the gate? Two? Yeah, I, you know, in today's world, it could be any number, it could be Paramount, assuming they're still in business, they don't get bought or, uh, or Prime Amazon.

Who, who that? Well, I, I don't think Amazon can do it or Apple. 'cause they're gonna be in the movie.

So that could, yeah, This is a third show, Paul, but I, I, I, Paul, you think standalone or acquisition, I think it's gonna re Intel. I have to reinvent itself. I mean, there's definitely a change and changes are coming.

Uh, I have no question. I think the investors for, you know, to, to hope's point, I mean, if there's investment in the company and an influx of money, it's gonna reinvent itself to a way that we probably don't, won't recognize Intel in the next five, 10 years. I think if PAC comes in and changes it to more of a, uh, uh, adapting towards the market needs and the market growth that's happening, and the change in AI that's happening, look, we're seeing across the board in this, in the software development side, that new tech stacks are being put in place like such.

For example, web assembly, that's harmonizing the underlying architecture. Doesn't matter if it's a MD intel arm, doesn't matter. You're running it on a, a, a web assembly, a web application in 2022.

I would've thought that was an Intel. I look at it and go, not an issue in 2023 when they started incorporating, you know, multithreaded ness and, and, and, uh, dot net applications in, um, in, in web assembly changes the dynamic. And it's, I think that type of technology is going to make the infrastructure invisible.

And the, the, the chip sets are not going to matter moving forward as long as they can produce the results they need to support the, the business logic above. I, you know, I, I don't disagree, but it, but, but hardware does matter. I think that's the last end of the last year or two.

Look at Nvidia, and I'll give you another dark horse with Intel Dell Maybe. Anyway, I, I'm gonna vote for investment. I'm voting, you're voting investment too.

'cause creating another monopoly is a bad idea. Absolutely. And we need strong US based companies here.

I like to see Dell invest, but Michael, write a check, uh, August note though, I, I've gotta tell you, um, I'm, I'm trying to line up Daniel, Daniel Newman at fu who obviously covers the, uh, chip market is always on CNBC. And those, hopefully we'll have something maybe tomorrow from Daniel and his take on it. But for now, let's take a break.

That's enough on Intel. We're gonna come back and talk about a small thing like the future of software engineering jobs. You're watching Text Day In a world where every line of code powers the future, every keystroke can introduce new threats.

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Register now and secure your place in tomorrow's world. All right, folks, we're back, and the folks over at the Wall Street Journal wrote an article saying that, well, the number of software engineering jobs are down significantly, at least in terms of listings. And that's not a surprise given the current state of the economy, but what it is to be a software engineer is changing.

And that's a big question. And it's not clear to us whether or not it's the economy or whether or not people are trying to figure out what a software engineer is before they go higher, the next wave because of the, in the introduction of AI into all these workflows. Um, hope, I know you're close to this whole subject, let's start with you.

But, um, what do you think is going on here in this job market, and what are you hearing from folks in terms of what, what are they looking for for software engineers? Yeah, there's definitely some recalibration happening. Uh, partly because everyone is looking for an AI skillset.

So if you are an engineer with an AI skillset, you know, ML ops, AI ops, uh, maybe you have some DA data engineering skills, um, that can go along with it, you probably are still somewhat in demand. But for other engineers, other software engineers, especially those that are very, very entry level, um, they are being automated and AIed, uh, to the side because automation is taking care of a lot of the repetitive things. Um, those tasks that don't require as much creative thought and deep thinking.

AI is coming along and, and, and scooping those away as well. So, um, I, I think though, I think there will be somewhat of a comeback, however, because we are still at such an early stage of what organizations are realizing they can do with ai, and I am saying beyond generative ai, I think it's, it's awakened people's imagination and helped them start to investigate AI more. And the things that the engineers will do, some of those things have been there for years, uh, possibly even for decades.

But they've, uh, enterprises just have not shown that deep of an interest, but now it's, it's a little easier to approach. I think they're gonna shift more roles in that direction. Paul.

Yeah, you know, look, I mean, I, I, I agree with a lot of what hope said, but let me add a different perspective. Um, I think that this article and the media in general, this is just another case of the media over emphasizing looking for click vapor. Hey, you gotta jump on, read my article, right?

I mean, look, this is, this is throughout my entire career and all of our careers, we've had a natural herding of the, you know, culling of the herd. Uh, you know, that happens within organizations to kind of restructure retool re refocus on things. But I'll throw some data out there just because I, I, it kind of aligns to what hope was saying, also aligns to where the market's going.

There's definitely an interest for, you know, uh, uh, re software engineers that understand AI tool sets. No question. But what we're seeing in our research is, Uh, 67% of organizations are looking to hire it gen, uh, it generalists over specialists moving forward.

And the reason behind that is because they, one, that the skill gap issue is a real thing. They can't find people that know how to do the, the job. S uh, second, what they're doing is they're pushing the level of complexity back to vendors.

They're saying, vendors, you need to solve this problem, and our generalists can do the deployments. So the role of the software engineer is not going away. The role of the software engineer is, is, you know, is is going to continue to go move forward.

The generalist approach is from our data is really where organizations are hiring. Um, they're looking at that because one, they're available, and two, they're pushing that complexity back on the vendors to fix it. Now, hope brought up a good point.

The, this tool set of tech stack has been available for a long time. Automation has been, it's not new, right? This is something that's been available for a long time and organizations haven't been able to capitalize on it.

Now, there's an incredible push right now to, uh, incorporate automation into those, uh, call a tedious or redundant tasks to focus more on innovation than focus on maintenance. In fact, I'm, I run a trending study every year, and not surprisingly, over the last five years, we've seen a third of software developers spend their time on innovation, and 66% of their time is spent on maintenance. Organizations need to move away from that, especially those organizations that heavily rely on their software to generate revenue for their business.

They need to continuously innovate, right? And so utilizing automation and AI tech stacks in order to get you there, that's how you're gonna, uh, move to more towards that, uh, innovation versus, uh, maintenance mode. But that's where I think it's going.

I mean, this is not, again, I, I don't, I never, well, I don't look at the media as a, a source of truth at all because it's just about, you know, let me click on my article and read it. It's, it's the top headline to catch it. But other than that, it's, uh, it's really about what natural attrition that's happening within, within organizations.

I think that they needed to look a little deeper into this, right? So are the number of software engineering jobs down yes. Or are the most of those jobs that are down probably from tech companies?

Absolutely. Um, we put together every Monday, uh, list called the five great DevOps Job Opportunities. And we put this together every weekend, and we look at this thing, and what you see in there, if you kind of pok in the data a little bit, and the listings, is that the number of jobs for traditional enterprises for software engineers, they're still looking hard and heavy for those folks.

And they would happily take, um, some of the folks who have worked for tech companies, but those jobs are not in San Francisco and the Bay Area. They're in places like New York and North Carolina and Texas, and even here in Florida. So I think people who are software engineers may have to look beyond their current regional areas.

And I think that's a big part of what's going on in this whole analysis. Um, and also if you look at it, um, one of the things that is apparent is the number of people applying for jobs on LinkedIn for software engineers is up. So you might have seen back in a couple of months ago, maybe, you know, the listing would say, 25 people have applied for this.

Now it's like, well, a hundred people have applied for that. So there's definitely more people applying for those jobs, but I'm not seeing, um, the num the demand for software engineering decline outside of the core tech sector. Yeah, and one of, one of the other points that I, I think is, is valid here as well, um, over the course of my career in technology, I, I have seen, you know, salaries start out somewhat normalized, and then, you know, they really inflated.

And now a lot of those salaries seem to be settling back down to earth, uh, a bit. So when you have software engineers who were, uh, at FANG or in, in that rarefied air somewhat, and now there are layoffs and they are looking for roles, most of those people are going to go toward the same roles that have those higher salary requirements. So there are organizations who are struggling to find software developers because the salaries that they will pay, maybe they're in middle America, maybe they are somewhere in rural North Carolina, um, are not going to be, uh, the salaries of those tech centers.

So that has to play out somehow, uh, as well. Yeah, we're, well, we're okay. I, I agree with both what ho what you said and what Mike was talking about, but you know, I take companies like, and I'm just gonna throw a company out there not, um, endorsing or not or saying anything.

I take a company like Oracle, right? Oracle in the Northeast and the New York, Connecticut area had six different offices pre covid. They have zero offices now in the Northeast, right?

And all of the employees in the northeast. That doesn't mean the employees are not in the northeast, they just work from home, right? So we are, we have to get rid of this mindset of all the, all the innovation and software engineering are, is, is out of California or out of a specific region.

It is a global effort now. And you know, if we're, if we're around the, you know, the, this just call it domestically around the states, those jobs are available. Those skills are available regardless if you're in rural North Carolina or you're in the valley, those jobs are there, and you can get them done remotely.

Because look at companies like Oracle that are doing this, right? Um, and most companies are, I'm, I'm a believer. I am, believe me, I am absolutely a believer.

Um, I am, I am one of those people's, no borders, let anyone work where they want. But, uh, whether it's a small sample size or a large, there are still people who say, I looked at this remote role, but I must live in a certain state. Um, even in that state, maybe I can only live in certain cities.

Then I will go to ler comment about normalization or harmonization of salaries. Yes. If, if some, if a position, if somebody was blessed to have a job that was paying an ex, you know, a huge salary and that job then went away, they have to have realistic expectations of what that role was being.

True. Very true. That's hard.

It's hard. So I have some thoughts on this one too, just a few. Just a few.

First of all, in my entire career, there's never been a technology innovation that didn't end up creating net, net plus new jobs. And I think the same is gonna be true for this AI thing. Let's not make it the AI boogeyman that's killing all the jobs.

Number two, I think as much as, you know, those, those Oracle jobs, Paul, those were salespeople. 'cause it was e it was great being an Oracle sales guy in New York. You made a million bucks a year and, and now not having to go to the office and do it from home and, you know, take, go into Wall Street once a week or into Manhattan.

It's a great day. There weren't, there weren't people sweat shopping in Oracle software development hubs on Madison Avenue or something, you know, those were sales jobs. Um, I do think we are seeing a great rebound of companies saying, Hey, you gotta come into the office.

Amazon's done it. Dell has said you could stay home, you'll just never get a promotion, right? But otherwise, come in the office, people are coming back to offices.

I will tell you, as a CEO, I think people working from home, unless they're a very responsible person in the exception, rather than the rule, your organization is much more efficient working in the office together. The, the communication, there's a lot of reasons, but it's much better. That being said, I think the future is this, we probably have 27, 30 million developers in the world today heading to 40 million or so in 10 years.

I think in 15 years though, with the advent of ai, we're gonna have 500 million developers. I think everybody's gonna be, every software engineer will be a developer because it takes nothing, it'll, it will take very low. There's a very low barrier bar to entry to develop software when AI can write it for you.

Excuse me. But that's gonna create other opportunities. Some of them are obvious and some of them are not so obvious for a lot of jobs around software engineering.

And that's why I like that. We call it software engineering. And not just development, whether it's ops or something else, there is necessity is the mother of invention, and there's gonna be a ton of opportunities here.

So don't, you know, don't throw away your computer science degrees just yet and go take pharmacy or something. Um, there's, you know, there's gonna be a lot of opportunity. And a thing I've always learned, and I was told this as a, as a young man, smart people find opportunity in every nook and cranny.

And, and there will be opportunities here. So don't discourage, don't despair, but I don't know if I'd live in rural North Carolina. Good.

I think I, that was a good way to end that. Yeah. And you know, who knows there might be software engineering hubs in the Bronx now because, well, we can do, there Probably is.

There probably is. I've heard we will see Uhhuh. All right, we're gonna take a break here on Textron Gang, and we're coming back with our last block, which is will AI force the platform engineering issue?

I feel a disturbance in the force. Mike, you're watching Textron gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, well, coming off that last conversation, we aren't gonna talk a little bit about, well, what impact will AI have on software engineering? We've heard about the rise of platform engineering and trouble with platform engineering is you asked 12 people what it means, and you'll get 15 explanations.

So, um, one of the issues though that's pretty clear is that it's getting more complex to develop software in the sense that there are lots of AI models that people are using and there's different kinds of them, and you have to manage which one to use at what particular point. It's not just gen ai, there's causal ai, there's predictive ai, and all these things go into software development now. So hope, I love to get your insight here, but is on the one hand, it's easier to build software, but managing the whole process seems like it might get more complex as I have all these different AI agents that I'm using for different tasks.

Agreed. Um, platform engineering to the rescue. So, uh, platform engineering definitely can help by using a lot of the same tools that platform engineering already uses.

Um, bringing in some standardization, uh, having a standardized framework to manage the operational complexity that comes along with AI systems, how to integrate the development and operations to AI in a way that is scalable and also sustainable. Because AI does not live by itself, uh, on an island. It has to be part of, um, the SDLC has to be part of the workflow, has to be part of the way this is and work gets done.

So platform engineering definitely will be a critical enabler for this. And making sure that organizations aren't just overwhelmed and overrun, overrun by the complexity that's going to be part of it. Paul, you wanna weigh in here a little bit.

What are you seeing in terms of what does the software engineer of the future need to be? And, um, there was an article, somebody was interviewing Kelsey Hightower, who, you know, came to fame as a result of his work in Google and Kubernetes, and he was just saying, ignore Gen AI for now until we see what it becomes and what we become. Yeah, well I, you know, I mean, I think I'll echo a lot of what folk was talking about.

When we look at the, at the, uh, the CICD pipeline and across, say, zero day one to day two, build, release and operations, anything that touches with the SDLC, uh, it needs to be optimized and have, uh, operational efficiencies in order to get the code out the door. I mean, business KPIs are trying to push bus push code out the door very rapidly. And in fact, we see in our research that 24% of organizations wanna push code out the door on an hourly basis, yet only 8% are able to do so.

And part of the reason they they do that is because they don't have these operational efficiencies within their CICD pipeline. The other fact is we see that there's an incredible boost of applications being created, far more applications, 50 to a hundred percent more applications being created now than just three years ago with the same or fewer resources. So in order to continue to grow and continue to build this momentum of what businesses business KPIs are driving for these software developers to create these applications, they're going to need to use the appropriate tech stacks in order to do so.

Gen a, gen ai and natural language and, and ways to, uh, you know, drive and build your code is a tool, it's a tool to make it faster. I mean, you can use a hand screwdriver and screw the, the screw into the wall. You can use a drill, right?

Um, I think gen AI is the drill, right? And if you have to release code faster, if you have to create those applications faster with fewer resources, you need to be more optimized to do so. And I think that's where the AI trend is going to kind of help push this out.

You know, if you look at the article that we're, they're in our notes for this block. It's about, you know, you've got 150 different models. How, how do you, how do you herd those cats?

And then you mentioned you ask people what, uh, platform engineering is, you get a bunch of answers, here's what it is. And, and you can diverge where you'd like, but at the end of the day, it's setting up a platform with guardrails so that we could go faster in development. Much like if you've ever driven a, a, a, been on like a Mag L train or a high speed train, well, not here in the US but in China, right?

There's guardrails, this thing goes on, and it, and those guardrails, you know, help guide the chain and allow it to achieve, you know, 200 mile an hour speeds. To me, that's what platform engineering does here. And there's no reason why we can't use AI to help us with those platform engineering guardrails.

But once those guardrails are in place, and it may mean cutting back from the 150 different models in production and standardization on certain models, but once they're in place, we, you know, we should be high speed bullet trains in terms of, uh, development and, and software engineering. It should allow us to go faster with less friction. And I, I think that's always been the goal before a, before AI during AI and, you know, anything that comes in the future.

And again, smart platform engineers, just like smart people everywhere will harness AI to make that better and doable. Well Hope. Do you think the platforms that we have in place today are gonna be extensible enough to manage all these models?

Or do we need to kind of go back into the whole stack and say, we gotta modernize this thing? 'cause we have, you know, to your point about guardrails, I was just reading this article about EVs are so heavy that they're blowing right through the guardrails we have. And we might have to replace every guardrail that's on the highway because we have all these EV vehicles now.

Mm-hmm. Is DevOps gonna have the same kind of experience where the CICD platform that was built and deployed 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago wasn't designed for this? Oh, I definitely see innovation coming.

Um, two things I think that are going to really force, force this issue even more. Um, one security and compliance, uh, massive amounts of sensitive data potentially being run through, uh, some of the models, maybe now prime targets for some security vulnera vulnerabilities, challenges with compliance. Uh, this is going to be so complex.

Different models handling different data sources, um, that have varying levels of sensitivity, all maybe converging to a single application. So platform engineering will have to figure out, uh, how are we going to offer the built in security protocols and the automation? We're we need to manage identity, we need to manage access control, we need to manage data governance across all of these.

And hopefully most of this is automated. That is not something that can be managed team by team and ensure that your enterprise is, is meeting the standard, but also, uh, monitoring and observability for AI models. AI models.

I think that is going to be so crucial. And we already know a lot about monitoring and observability, but now what do we need to monitor and look for in production environments, uh, for these, uh, now are we also looking at, uh, drift bias degradation over time? Uh, platform engineering will have to take another look at the toolkit and, and see what has to be done.

Yeah. Hope, the, the interesting, I, I'm glad you brought up the monitoring and observability piece. One of the things that kind of comes to mind very quickly is in our research we see that, um, 75% of respondents indicate that they use six to 15 different observability tools to understand what's going on within their environment, yet they're only monitoring and observing 54% of their high valued application.

So they're not even looking at their entire environment, right? So they're using this complex environment with all these tools and it, it doesn't make it easy, right? Not to mention that they have to put the underlying tech stack in place in order to run what they're trying to build.

So there's definitely an evolution coming. There's definitely a, a kind of a, I would call it a unification of the management side of it as well as a unification of the tech stack to get it to, to get it done. Yeah, I think there's gonna be, in the average enterprise, three years out, thousands of these AI models running around, they're getting smaller and more domain specific, and that's awesome.

They're gonna be better and smarter, but the management and the orchestration and the degradation of these platforms is gonna be a huge headache. I, I think that's why you gotta set up guardrails. But I smell opportunity.

I'm the optimist. I'm that little boy who looks in that room and says there's a pony there somewhere. I could smell it.

Um, anyway, I think this is a good time to call a wrap on this version of Textron Gang. I hope you at home have enjoyed, uh, today's, uh, today's show. I had a lot of fun.

I hope Mike and Paul and hope you guys did too. It was, and you know, these are gonna be themes I think in stories we're gonna be coming back to. But for now, I'll point you, we have a tech Field Day live going on today, I think, following this that people will be able to join in on as well as our whole tech trunk TV lineup.

So stay tuned for that. And we'll be back here tomorrow with another great Tech trunk gag. But until then, is Alan Shimmel for Techstrong and we're out.