ChatGPT in the company, juniors and the IT salary bubble

Summary

Petar Dzhuganski's NeChoveshki resursi is a podcast about business and management; this episode is about programming, over beer. Rossen Genchev calls himself a first-generation programmer of the years after 1989, who learned to code in the clubs of the Palace of Pioneers and wrote his first game in the sixth grade, a clone of Super Artillery. The socialist IT industry, he says, was built to copy rather than create: people spent their days localising stolen software, and pay did not follow what they made.

For him ChatGPT is the game-changer of game-changers. People will not be replaced by ChatGPT but by people who work well with it, so everyone he works with has been told to use it every day: to discuss solutions, fix problems, optimise, write tests. His company has built Prompt Flow, close to LangChain, which splits a complex task into subtasks and puts the results back together; its platform for business software, being renamed Zmei, replaces forms with a conversation and hands the client the generated source code. Juniors will be hit hardest, because onboarding them is costly; service companies that live on small projects will struggle; and the salary bubble, a software engineer earning six times a mechanical engineer, will deflate.

The second half is about teams. He likes the office but has no settled view on remote work: people have families and a 40-minute commute each way. He does not want to grow aggressively, because culture is what a company most often loses when it grows; the leader should be the general with the machine gun beside you, taking the ugly part of the code and doing the review. The juniors he wants are engineers for whom programming is also a hobby. He administers the DevBG group, about 53,000 people, which he calls a jungle; with Boby Simandov he created Dev.bg, whose sites draw about 1.5 million visits a month. He recommends Silicon Valley to every entrepreneur.

Key moments

1. 00:54A first-generation programmer after 1989, who learned to code at the Palace of Pioneers.
2. 04:33The socialist IT industry copied instead of creating, and that drained people's creativity.
3. 19:26Not ChatGPT but people who use it well will replace the rest; everyone he works with uses it daily.
4. 21:58Prompt Flow: complex tasks split into subtasks and put back together, close to LangChain.
5. 24:22Zmei: a conversation instead of forms, over public data, your own database and your mailbox.
6. 31:50Positive laziness: every technology that saves time will win.
7. 47:40The junior sector will be hit hardest: onboarding is costly and pays back only after two or three years.
8. 52:57The IT salary bubble: a software engineer earning six times a mechanical engineer is not normal.
9. 1:23:47Lead like a general with the machine gun beside you: take the ugly code, do the review.
10. 1:28:57DevBG: about 53,000 people, left to their own subculture except for what is offensive.