AI and Oracle

A long time ago in the 1990s I was starting out in software. Going to university Computer Science and alternating with co-op work terms.

I was talking to the father of a friend. He was high up in the Coast Guard. A good man. He knew about ships and navigation. He knew enough about computers to use them. 

He asked me if I could build systems in Oracle. Not knowing much I said I could work building applications with Oracle. I added might be more suited to working on the Oracle database itself. Like I said I didn't know much at the time, and didn't realize how little I knew. Every co-op student and entry level goes through this.

Then as now, of course there are a few hundreds of people working on Oracle, DB2, Sybase (now SQL Server). Working on the database itself. This is dwarfed by the many thousands of developers working building applications on these databases, and by many DBAs administering these estates.

So the Coast Guard man was right. He understood Oracle. Oracle is the business applications that run on Oracle, and the developers who know how to build and operate the business applications.

Years ago where I work now. We brought in this scaled agile SAFe consultant. We were in a big conference room at a local hotel for a few days. He described software development as unchanged since the 1950s. Chiselling out code line by line. I've been paid good money in software chiselling out source code line by line for over 25 years now.

So now there's this new, more recent thing around AI. It seems AI can be made to do more of the work, including writing the code. Like computers, AI is powerful. Computers are powerful but to be useful they need people, developers to write code for the applications that run on the computers.

AI and LLM are also powerful. Even in these early stages they have demonstrated some powerful capabilities, impressive possibilities. The AI requires humans to direct it, to provide inputs, tasks to perform with detailed instructions. The term prompt engineer has emerged as a new job category.

So with AI it may unfold similar to Oracle. There will be jobs at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc. building and tuning the large language models, innovating in AI itself. Most of the jobs will be people who are able to work with AI, getting the AI to produce valuable business applications. 

AI may create a challenge of displacing some or perhaps most traditional coding positions. There may also be opportunity in AI around prompt engineering. This should be well suited to people capable of getting paid to write code.

The top of the heap pulls back

There have been some changes in the recruiting landscape. Back in 2021 I noticed a lot of reaching out on LinkedIn. Even recruiters from top of the heap FAANG were reaching out sending unsolicited messages.

That is no longer the case. At the peak I was being contacted by some recruiter around once a week on LinkedIn. In 2023 this slowed to around once a month.

The top firms went from hiring to shrinking. Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all shed thousands of employees. An recruiter from Facebook who had contacted me updated her LinkedIn to no longer with Facebook, and the dreaded green Open for work badge. I deleted her from my contacts. 

A guy I know from wayback was at AWS. He seemed to survive the first Amazon round. At an end of year lunch another individual from back then mentioned he's no longer at AWS. I checked LinkedIn and it seems he got caught in the second big Amazon layoff wave. As of mid 2023 his time at AWS seemed to abruptly end.

And so it goes. I'm sure the top firms are still hiring exceptionals for key roles. You can get on there but it's hard now, like historically it was hard to get on at Google.The indiscriminate growth and hiring, and them reaching out first era has ended for now.

There was a lot of swirl for those like me who stayed where they were during the great resignation of 2020-2022. We lost people to Microsoft and AWS. It was disruptive. I do hope for a balanced market where there are good jobs available to those who are seeking new work, and quality candidates available for employers who want to hire.