Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. Happy Mother’s Day to anyone celebrating today. I’m Alistair Barr. I’m subbing in this week to get some practice ahead of Tech Memo, a BI newsletter launching very soon. It’s a weekly inside look at Big Tech — what you need to know, what it’s like to work in Silicon Valley, and how to get ahead. I’m paying for two kids in college right now, so do me a solid and sign up here!
On the agenda today:
But first: Working in Big Tech is changing radically.
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Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
For decades, Silicon Valley has suffered from a shortage of technical talent. This place is a software-production engine, and smart, young, hungry engineers have been its main fuel source. They work night and day, churning out code for websites, apps, search engines, social networks, and more.
The companies that won recruited and retained the best talent. The result was a race to lavish employees with juicy salaries and huge stock awards. Perks were plenty: free massages, laundry service, and delicious food served on cushy campuses.
Like all powerful trends, though, this is ending. Don’t get me wrong. Tech companies are still hiring a lot of software engineers, and compensation is holding up so far. But the intensity, borne out of this talent supply-demand mismatch, is waning.
Generative AI is another big factor. Turns out, AI models are really good at writing and checking software code, changing the power dynamic between Big Tech and employees. It’s the topic of a story by BI reporters Eugene Kim and Hugh Langley.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist who advises the White House on AI, puts it well. “The ramifications of moving from a world of code scarcity to code abundance are profound,” he wrote on X recently.
There’ll be A LOT more code, and way more software products that are updated and improved quicker, changing how developers work. Eugene’s exclusive on Amazon’s secret AI coding project, called Kiro, is a good example. “With Kiro, developers read less but comprehend more, code less but build more, and review less but release more,” the company wrote in an internal document.
Here’s another, more disruptive, potential outcome: Everyone can become a developer. In the past, if you wanted something technical done, you had to ask your well-paid, overworked engineering colleagues for help. Now, with AI tools, maybe you can do some of this yourself. Cursor, Vercel, Replit, and Bolt.new are just a few of the new low- or zero-code AI-powered services that help users solve problems with plain English instructions.
All of that means the pool of available developers is likely to grow massively, and Big Tech companies will have to do a lot less talent-chasing.
Kiersten Essenpreis for BI
It’s not a simple “yes” or “no.” Recent economic uncertainty and steep prices have tainted the housing market for buyers. But they also have more options — and bargaining power.
In BI’s second installment of its six-part series on making major life decisions, senior real estate reporter James Rodriguez broke it all down.
Robin Marchant/Getty, Sean Gallup/Getty, Tyler Le/BI
Tesla plans to launch its robotaxi service in Austin this June, stepping on Waymo’s turf. But the two companies’ approaches to driverless vehicles are pretty different.
BI compared their tech and business strategies to understand how each will gain ground. One company stands out as more autonomous.
Lower- and middle-income people have scaled back spending, but the wealthy haven’t. Love ’em or hate ’em, rich people are propping up the US economy right now.
However, there are risks to having the economy depend on a small group of people. If things go south for the wealthy, they’ll take everyone else with them.
The BI Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York. Elizabeth Casolo, fellow, in Chicago.
