“It’s over”: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt mourns the loss of programmers

Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, regularly attends events these days to give his opinion on current tech topics. Just a few weeks ago, at a graduation speech at a university, he spoke about artificial intelligence – and was booed by those present. At a conference he spoke again about AI, but struck a somewhat more critical tone.

From programmer to AI manager?

According to Schmidt (via inkl), the era of traditional coding work is over. He says, “If you’re still writing code in the traditional way today, stop it. It’s over.” According to the ex-Google CEO, the best programmers no longer enter lines themselves, but rather let AI do the work. At the end, the coders only check the result.

Schmidt shows this using an example working day of AI coders: “The way state-of-the-art coding is done now is that the programmers wake up and go to the office. Because they are social, because they sit there, but they don’t have too many friends. So they sit in their office and gather ten Claude friends or ten Gemini friends.”

The ex-Google CEO adds: “You give them objective functions and they watch them write the code. Then they go to lunch and make sure beforehand that the tasks they give the AI ​​are long enough so that they can continue working during their break. Then they go back to the office and do something else, and then it’s time to go home and see the family.”

For Schmidt, this development is anything but desirable: “Can I tell you what’s really going on in my head? I’m mourning. I’m mourning because I started as a programmer when I was 13 or 14 and those days are now over. How can your entire identity and career as a programmer, as a computer scientist, simply be over? You should actually continue to grow like your children and grandchildren.”

Do you still know these programs?