Thanks to AI, everyone will be able to code. But a staff engineer at Netflix said that he tells recent grads that doesn’t mean their job prospects are hopeless.
“We’re going to see some amazing things, but our hunger for more functionality, more apps, more ecosystems is just gonna get higher, and higher, and higher,” Anthony Goto said in a recent TikTok video. “So, in the end, I think this is gonna be another, essentially, level of programming language, a high-level programming language.”
New grads ask me all the time if AI means software engineers are done. Especially those preparing for Netflix interviews. This fear has happened before. AI is another layer of abstraction, not the end of engineering. #Netflix #NetflixInterview #SoftwareEngineer #TechCareers #AI
Goto, who has 15 years of experience his time at Netflix and Uber alone, said that AI-related worries are among the top concerns he hears when he talks with recent graduates or employees he’s mentoring.
And to be fair, there is no shortage of takes about the future value of computer science degrees and the overall worth of coding knowledge, given the rapid advancements of agentic AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude, which has led to “vibe coding.”
One way to stay competitive, Goto said, is for newer engineers to make sure they learn System Design.
“System Design is exactly what I am trying to ensure newer engineers get a handle on,” he said. “In the future, we may likely end up wielding system design like a tool.”
Goto points to the video game industry as an example of what’s to come. Rapid advancements since the introduction of Doom in 1993 have spawned an industry that rakes in over $100 billion and regularly draws on Hollywood talent for its biggest releases.
“Picture someone from the year 2000, 2010, they go back in time, they go to John Carmack, and they say, ‘Guess what? In the future, we’re gonna have these things called video game engines,” Goto said.
Last year, Carmack, a video game legend who was the lead programmer of Doom, said that software progress has made some of the early grunt work he did “as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance.”
“Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering,” Carmack wrote on X in April 2025.
Game engines are now so powerful that they are used to create immersive digital sets and environments, such as those featured in Disney’s hit series “The Mandalorian.”
Goto admits that his prediction could very well be inaccurate, but based on the trajectory of past technological advancements, he sees a clear need for engineers.
“We’ve seen this many times before, where we abstract things away in a really powerful way,” he said. “And what it really does is democratizes the process.”
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