Reddit CEO Steve Huffman feels AI won’t impact entry level jobs for new graduates — Here’s why

Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman doesn’t think AI is a death knell for the software engineering community. In a podcast, the executive said he believes AI can increase engineer productivity by 50-100% and will have no impact on entry-level jobs for new graduates.

Speaking on ‘Sourcing with Molly O’Shea’, Huffman was excited about AI but called it a “moving target” with tools that are “changing very quickly”.

“(AI) is really evolving. It’s a very moving target. The tools change very quickly. So my own experience – I’m a programmer, my first love is programming, so I’ve done it almost every day since I was little. (But) something happened in December… new (AI) models came out and I haven’t read let alone written a line of code since December,” he told the host.

‘The fun part of artificial intelligence is that it develops rapidly’

But even then, productivity increased, according to Huffman. “I’ve produced a lot more,” he added, even though I haven’t worked on code since last year.

“There’s code and AI on one side. I don’t even have an editor anymore. It’s just AI. Suffice it to say, it’s changing really quickly. Our bottleneck at Reddit right now is actually code review because we can produce so much code, but we need to review it and distribute it,” he added.

Huffman added that the challenge, or “the fun part” with AI, is that “I don’t know what the tools will be in a month. It’s evolving really quickly. So I think you can’t marry any one tool or way of working right now.”

‘It has no effect on the number of employees, we want to hire new graduates’

When asked if AI productivity would lead to a reduction in headcount at Reddit, Huffman said the opposite was true. “It is not possible for artificial intelligence to change our number of personnel in any way. We are a construction company and therefore we need to know everything we want to build in order to reduce the number of engineering personnel,” he said.

The executive said AI has made the company’s engineers “50%, 100% or even 10 times more productive,” so instead of reducing numbers, “we’re just going to build more stuff. We’ve got a lot of work to do.” He added that Reddit is scaling teams and using AI to build more.

When asked about the impact of entry-level jobs, Huffman felt that recent graduates have an advantage in the world of AI. He explained: “The kids graduating from college right now have learned how to program with AI. They’re really good at it. That’s why we’re going to focus on new graduates because they’re much more AI natives.”

He thinks older software engineers are more resistant to adopting AI and view coding as a “craft” and a “hobby.” But young people “don’t have that baggage.”

“They’re just writing with AI. And I think there’s a lot of reasons to hire new grads. Also, the best new grads, if you don’t hire them as fresh grads, you’ll never see them. They’ll never be in the job market again. They’re too valuable to ever let them into the job market. So if you don’t hire them when they’re young, you’ll never see them. Or if you do, they’ll be 100 times more expensive. So you’ve got to get them right out the door,” he added.

How AI impacts business is a wait-and-watch game. In particular, the February report of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that the unemployment rate was 4.4%, or 7.6 million people, similar to last year’s 4.1% (7.1 million people).