AI Killing Engineering Jobs Is “the Biggest Load of BS”

A year ago VCs were telling Parker Conrad that software engineering was months away from mass unemployment. His update: salaries are higher, the market is tighter, and a great engineer is worth more today than ever. The Rippling CEO joins Sam and Jess (no Morins this week) to argue that the only moat left in AI is seeing the problem before your customer does, that good gross margins are a sign nobody is actually using your product, and that Rippling isn't a software company at all. Sam counters with his own setup: a private notes file he hands to four different agents so they race each other to finish things he never asked them to do. Jess brings the mood from New York, where the money people think the $8 trillion CapEx bill doesn't pencil out and financing is about to get much harder. Plus Deel fighting a federal grand jury subpoena, Anthropic's IPO date, and Sam's plan to pay people minimum wage with a 5% shot at a million dollars.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:14 Parker Conrad Joins, No Morins This Week
02:13 Everyone Watched the Election on Prediction Markets, Not TV
04:09 The Blue Wave, and Why the Market Went Up Anyway
07:48 Hyperscalers, Data Centers, and Builds That Just Got Harder
09:27 California's Wealth Tax Fails
10:24 Why Paper Billionaires Can't Pay a Wealth Tax
12:17 The Financing Trick Where One Investor Sets the Headline Price
13:06 New York's Mood: AI Financing Is Drying Up
13:45 Sam: We've Run Out of Money in the World
15:09 Parker: Good Gross Margins Can Be a Bad Sign
15:30 Anthropic's IPO Date and OpenAI's Approach to Margins
16:44 Rippling's IPO Plans and the Public Market Retirement Community
18:26 The SaaS Apocalypse That Didn't Happen
19:00 "Rippling Is Not a Software Company"
20:29 AI for Boring: Government Forms, Faxes and Fraudulent Audits
25:36 The Only Moat Left Is Seeing the Problem First
28:01 Sam's Notes File and the Agents That Compete Over It
29:32 Instinct Keeps Asking Jess the Same Question
30:02 Today's Agents Are Shitty Assistants
30:49 Permissions Architecture as the Real Advantage
32:21 Where Rippling Makes Margin and Where It Makes Zero
33:19 Usage Pricing and Deleting the Bottom Half of a Job
34:36 What You're Really Selling Is a Promotion
36:04 Software Written at Installation Time
37:26 Why You Shouldn't Vibe Code Permissions
38:07 AI Is Excellent at Using Software, Humans Are Not
39:42 Should an AI Negotiate Your Pay?
41:05 Rippling's $17M Seed and Two Years Before the Starting Line
42:07 Why Reversibility Decides How Fast You Can Move
44:52 The Deel Lawsuit and a Federal Grand Jury Subpoena
46:06 Sam: Your Job Doesn't Look Fun to Me
48:40 The Engineer Layoffs That Never Came
49:25 Random Reward Payroll, a Very Bad Idea
51:26 Overrated and Underrated in Silicon Valley
54:01 Sam's New York Marathon
55:14 Starting a Company: The Narrow Ray of Daylight

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Connect with our guest:
Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling: x.com/parkerconrad
Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.