Citadel Securities' C++ guru says the world is "chronically short of skilled programmers"
Despite assertions that AI has killed the software developer, some of the biggest names in the space think AI will only increase prospects for engineers. One such believer is Herb Sutter, a technical fellow at market making giant Citadel Securities.
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In a recent blog post, Sutter said that programmers are in high demand and that "AI is not changing this." Behind GPUs and power, he said that talent is the third-largest bottleneck for engineering today and that "we are chronically short of skilled human programmers." This presumably isn't a problem for Citadel Securities itself, which has a penchant for hiring engineering prodigies and is on track to pay its staff an average of $2m last year as of September
Sutter said that people who believe AI will "put a large fraction of programmers out of work are fooling themselves," and that human coders will be "needed more than ever." Others in finance seem to agree with him; a Bloomberg survey late last year of senior financial services employees revealed that the majority expected their teams to get bigger thanks to AI.
Some developers will benefit from AI more than others. Citing a report from SlashData published last summer, he noted that both C++ and Rust had the largest proportional rise in users, and said he expects them to rise more in the future thanks to a cultural shift occurring in AI.
Sutter said that power is the most significant limitation, not chips. As the power requirements increase, Sutter said that "the future is enduringly bright for languages that are efficient in 'performance per watt' and 'performance per transistor.'" Rust and C++ are two of the best major languages in that regard. C++ in particular has a long history of paying massive sums to engineers writing the lowest latency code.
Sutter said that C++ has been "continually evolving to stay relevant to the changing hardware landscape." C++26, the soon-to-be-released new edition of the language, has increased its capability for parallelism (running software on different pieces of hardware at the same time to lower latency) on modern technology.
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