Microsoft Chief Product Officer's Message For Coders After Laying Off 6,000 Employees

Aparna Chennapragada, the chief product officer (CPO) of experiences and devices at Microsoft, has said she "fundamentally disagrees" with the notion that coding careers are obsolete and computer science irrelevant. Ms Chennapragada's statement came on the heels of the tech giant laying off nearly 6,000 people, roughly 3% of its global workforce.

Learning to code has become more valuable than ever, even though the way we code is changing with time, Ms Chennapragada said during Lenny's Podcast.

"A lot of folks think about, 'Oh, don't bother studying computer science or the coding is dead,' and I just fundamentally disagree," she said.

"If anything, I think we've always had higher and higher layers of abstraction in programming," she added.

Microsoft, which is marking its 50th anniversary this year, emerged as one of the first companies to double down on artificial intelligence (AI) when the tech sector witnessed the historic launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

The job cuts at Microsoft come as the company continues to invest aggressively in AI. In April this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI now wrote up to 30% of their codes in certain projects. This raises questions about the demand for human programmers in future.

But Ms Chennapragada argues that AI represents just another layer of abstraction in the evolution of programming, highlighting they don't program in assembly anymore.

"Most of us don't even program in C, and then you are kind of higher and higher layers of abstraction," she said and suggested that engineers might become "software operators" instead.

There will be an "order of magnitude more software operators", she added.

"Instead of 'Cs,' maybe we'll have 'SOs,' but that does not mean you don't understand computer science," she said.

For project managers, Ms Chennapragada is expecting modified responsibilities, focused on "taste-making and editing".

The lay-offs came as part of Microsoft's effort to cut costs while channelling billions of dollars into AI, something even Google is doing.

"We continue to implement organisational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace," a Microsoft spokesperson said.