Why Engineers Inherit the Earth in the AI Era

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV. My next guest is Ariel Assaraf, CEO and co-founder at Coralogix. Ariel, welcome back to Techstrong TV.

It's been too long. Thank you very much. Great being with you again, Alan.

How have you been? How are things going? It's been crazy.

I think last time we spoke was a few years ago. Yeah. We were still a small company.

Now about 600 people global. Wow. So with the whole push to cloud and AI, it's been great for us, and obviously very happy to chat again.

Absolutely. Hey, before we talk about Coralogix, and we have a topic of discussion, I want to spend a few moments talking about you. Actually, I'm not going to talk about you.

You're going to talk about you. They probably didn't see you a couple of years ago when you were on here. Yeah.

Give them a sense of who you are, how you came to co-found Coralogix, what your passion was, what was driving you. Yeah. I could say I started my career at the Intelligence Unit.

Spent a few years there, where I think it was the best school for high volumes of real-time data that you have to make it work. So after a few years there, joined Verint systems, a homeland security company as well. Back then, I think it was separate on Nasdaq, now it's called Cognite.

Also a few years there. And just the type of challenges I dealt with on both was mainly around how do you get real-time data in a way that helps people take action and become more proactive. And so, at Verint, every deployment was tens of millions of dollars, remote deployments for massive government customers.

And the cycle that we've seen back then, was just impossible. And so we went out, and we added a few products that were out there in the market. " Which was a complete mistake, because when we went out and we tried to do the same, only better, for the first four years, things didn't go well at all, until we kind of found our way and decided that we're going to flip the architecture, analyze all the data in stream, and then write it to the customer's own storage.

Basically build a data lake to the customer's own storage and run our analytics on that, and that changed a lot. The company has grown, I want to say 50x in five years from- Wow ... a revenue perspective.

5 million up until that point. Six years later, we're at 550 million. Wow.

So it's been a hell of a ride, this past journey now. Good for you, my friend. That's excellent.

For our audience out here, they like what you hear, they want to go check out more. Give them the glide path. What's the on-ramp?

com. You can start your own account. We give a very generous free forever plan that includes all features.

Basically, in Coralogix, all plans include all features, so it's very easy to work with it. You set up your collector, it could be eBPF, could be OTel, could be reading directly from your cloud, whether it's Azure, Amazon, GCP, and you just get started. If you want to become an expert, there are certification paths that you can take.

A full course with an official certificate if you want, of a user or an admin. And Coralogix has about 5,000 accounts right now that are using Coralogix. It's very widely spread.

Obviously, there's about a tenth of that's managed accounts, but- Right ... there's a huge amount of small startups and one-man shows. What's also important for viewers to hear is, if you're working on a good cause, and you don't have the budget, you can reach out over our chat, which is 24/7, and say, "Here's my good cause, and I need a larger account for free for this," and Coralogix always supports that.

Love it. Good for you. Good on you.

Good. com? com.

Excellent. All right. Ariel, now that we've kind of gotten that out of the way, let me pivot to our topic of discussion today.

Obviously, here we are almost five minutes in, we didn't mention AI once. Well, you mentioned AI. Yeah.

That's not true. I said it once. But we haven't...

Right. But it's still an achievement. I still take that as an achievement.

Absolutely. Not bad. We didn't make it the focal point.

Yes. But the fact is, we're seeing the pen-- And I've been through tech cycles for 35 years. We're seeing the pendulum, I think, starting to swing a little bit back.

" We don't need software developers, we don't need software coders, we don't need engineers, DevOps, security. We don't need anyone. It could do everything.

Marketing, done. And now people are getting a little buyer's remorse saying, "Well, it doesn't do everything, and we still maybe need people to watch it. We still need humans in the loop.

" Some people are saying that. Other people are still on their exploratory paths. But it's certainly, I think, true with software Right?

Whether we're coding and so now the popular term is software engineer versus it used to be a developer or a coder. What's your take on this? I think the magnitude of change is real.

This is a technology shift like we've never seen before. But if you go to previous historical large technology shifts and improvements, you'll see that essentially it created a whole new level of engineering and a whole new level of expertise that was required from more people, not less. So if you go to the Industrial Revolution, yeah, it sparked a huge change in quality of life and production, and the efficiency that factories and workshops got at that time was incredible.

And every machine could produce a lot more, but it didn't mean that you don't need people anymore. It just meant that now you got to operate this machine. You can't be just some guy that knows how to use a hammer and a pin.

Now you got to understand the machine and the floor and your specific role and how to operate things. And so we could produce more, but we still need the people. They just need to up-level their engineering skill.

And what supports more people doing more production is that the demand from the market and the world has changed. We live a much more comfortable life today than 200 years ago because we have so much products. Yeah.

We have so many products. We're using, we're consuming so much. It's our demand and the comfort level that we need in our life that's driven a lot more production with a lot more people doing a lot more work and being a lot more educated about how to do it.

And so I think we are at the very ti-- AI is great, and we're seeing it, and it's funny, we're in this echo chamber, you and I, everyone talk about AI, and companies are talking about their efficiency, and we did gain a lot of efficiency on our engineering teams and our sales teams, even our finance teams. But where's AI in our day-to-day? It's nowhere.

There's like, your industry, your just day-to-day stuff, education, transportation, medicine, communications, everything is still the same. Yes, there are pockets of efficiencies here and there, but what do we expect or what are people going to expect 10 years from now, five years from now? Are these robots that are doing a lot of the stuff that you hate doing, and there are already companies working on this.

Is this new medications that are coming out every other month solving terrible disease that were uncured until today? Is it less work? Before the Industrial Revolution or just even 100 years ago, people used to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week.

Is the work week going to be four hours, but just with a lot more expertise and a lot more efficiency and production in it? And so what's going to be required from professionals, just like every other revolution, by the way, a much smaller scale than Industrial Revolution, you look at what happened to system engineers and hardware engineers, not the ones that design hardware, but the people that maintain data centers. What happened to them in the cloud?

People said, "Well, I don't need system engineers anymore," right? " Well, the platform engineer and the DevOps engineer are doing a lot more than system engineers used to do back then. Because now there's a lot more complexity and there's a lot more demand.

We use a lot more software in every aspect of our lives. Uptime requirements are completely different. When I go to the on-prem days of Verint, 99% uptime was considered incredible.

People now won't even answer your phone calls if you're not doing four nines. And so the expectation from the consumer has changed, and the level of expertise and the level of software or devices that you need to operate change. So I think we're going to see more engineers.

We're going to see less coding, but engineers existed way before coding. They existed for thousands of years. We're going to see more of them doing more for their organizations.

Everything from design, finance, hiring. People are already talking about agent-to-agent sales. But the essence of problem-solving, breaking down a problem, understanding the need and the demand, and then solving it, that's not going to go anywhere.

That's still an issue. AI is not going to understand a problem on its own, break it down, solve it, deliver it, understand if the customer is happy, maybe for simple things. But the big problems that we need to solve, they're not going to go anywhere, and we're still going to need the engineering skills that we need today.

You touched on a lot of things. I'm just finishing up a book, it's being edited right now, on what I call the indispensability trap. When you look at historic ways of things that have become technologies that become indispensable, they follow a certain pattern down that commoditization path, where the real wealth is created, what you build on top of that commodity level.

And oftentimes it's the government, it's society, it's market pressures that force the commodity You mentioned the move from, let's say, regular internet data centers to the cloud. The commercial internet itself, I lived through it. It's in this book I gave.

I sat in a building in Houston one day at the top of this tall skyscraper, listening to eight people tell me how they were going to buy my $1,200 a megabit a second bandwidth here, pass it around the table, and sell it back to me for $700 a megabit a second here, because we were locked into this long-term contract. " So that company was Enron. They were crooks.

Right. Yeah. So the internet itself, the very phone system that the internet kind of was built on to begin with, has followed a similar path.

The electricity, think about before there was electricity and the grid and the engineering that took place there. The railroads here in the US. The US, in 50 years, built, I forget what it was, 140,000 miles of railroad tracks, 5X what the rest of the world had together.

Most of the railroads wound up going bankrupt because it was the people who sent stuff on the railroads. Sears and Rockefeller sent his oil over the railroads. That's where the money was.

I think we're seeing a similar thing play out here. And I wrote an article about this a few weeks ago. It's the engineers who inherit the Earth, because today they might be software engineers.

Tomorrow, they might be quantum engineers. The day after that, they might be, or the years after that, they're nuclear fusion engineers. It really goes to, what is an engineer?

In my mind, an engineer is like a builder. You said problem solver, right? Yep.

I think that's a good definition. They're builders. They solve problems.

They make things happen. They use the tools, and all of these things we're talking about are just tools, man. It's tools.

Yeah. It's technology. So I agree with you.

I think that's where we are. Look, Ariel, it's easy for you to say. You raised $500 million.

I'm sitting here at my age. I've done my thing. Yeah.

For the kids out here who are graduating college now and finding a hard time, having a hard time finding jobs, it's easy for us to say this, but they got to believe that that's what it's going to be. What do you say to them? So I think it's mostly about understanding what's your passion about problem-solving, again.

It all comes back to that. If you pride yourself in the cleanest code or just learning how to work the system, that's not going to work. And you know what?

We're talking about graduates. I got kids, young kids. You're trying to think of my seven-year-old and what her life's going to look like in 20 years.

It's kind of scary. It is. And you're trying to understand, as a parent, it used to be an easier path.

I'll just make sure she does her homework. She's good at math, good at English, and she's going to go to a good college, and if she's an engineer, she's going to make a good living. It's not going to work like that anymore.

How do you develop the curiosity, the grit, the wanting to solve problems, the independence that it requires? And it's just like, again, every revolution had that because people- Yeah ... a small mom-and-pop business 25 years ago, they didn't have to understand technology at all.

You just make great tacos and people will show up. And now these days, you got to understand social media, and you got to do remarketing, and you got to- Distribution, yeah ... club.

And you got to make sure that you're interacting with people based on best practices that giants have created, like Starbucks and McDonald's. And the efficiency- But do you still have to make good tacos? Yes.

That doesn't change, right? Right. But the core is, the problem-solving is people are hungry, and they need something fast and tasty and healthy to eat for lunch.

That didn't go anywhere. Yeah. All the tooling around it is something that you need to learn now.

You need to adapt. You need to learn a new world because that alone is not going to make the cut anymore. But if you don't have that, then it's not going to go anywhere.

And beyond that, if you have everything, but you don't have a good cook. And it's all about even that very simple example. Even a lemonade stand, at the end of the day, is what is the problem?

How am I solving it? How am I making the product better in a way that people will like it? And then all the rest comes around it, and obviously technology and how do you make sure that people hear about you and so on and so forth.

So when we look internally in Coralogix, we've gained massive efficiencies with AI. I'd say, without exposing too much, but the production of features that we define as major features is over 10X now. It was six months ago.

Wow. And the amount of bugs that we open and close, we used to have this constant gap that more was opening than closing every month. Yeah.

For the first time in history now, it's flipped, because we started with one product- Good for you ... and we became eight products. So we had a lot more going.

Now it's flipped. We're actually closing more than we're opening. But- It's amazing ...

" ... " It makes no sense. Yeah, but you hit it on the head.

That's almost the insanity that we've been through, I think, over the last year, and I think people realized there was a lot of babies thrown out with bathwater there. Yep. And the problem is you can't go rehire those people, right?

You got to figure it out. And the best example, look at the companies that are leading AI in the world. They have the highest ratio of engineers out of all companies.

Well, no. Drop it, OpenAI. I'll give you a perfect example.

I don't know if you saw, you probably did. Apple sued OpenAI- Yeah ... on Friday it was announced.

Part of the claim... Well, the claim is they stole IP from Apple. But as part of the suit, it came out, OpenAI has 400-plus ex-Apple engineers, people, working on whatever it is.

That's the whole point about this suit. OpenAI- Yeah ... hasn't even said what they're coming out with.

But they did spend $6 billion on Jony Ive's company, right? They got 400 ex-Apple. Now, you're blaming OpenAI for hiring those people?

Maybe you shouldn't have fired those people. Maybe you shouldn't have laid them off. Maybe you shouldn't have let them go, right?

Yeah. I think it's really good proof to the fact that this is still the biggest asset. An organization that's re-engined has to finance the go-to-market and engineering.

Engineering. And what I think we're going to see with AI, when there's strong foundations. Their strong foundation today is internet.

So they're all on this infra, like you said, on that railroad of internet. Right. That's how everyone communicate, that's how the tools that they're using and the SaaS products they're using in sales and finance and engineering.

Now there's a new foundation of AI, and it's going to converge them, it's going to push them a lot closer. And people adjust to the infrastructure that they're running on. Yeah.

If the infrastructure is AI, then finance need to be more of an engineer, and go-to-market need to be more of an engineer, and engineers need to be super engineers and architects. And so the bar now is much higher to even call yourself an engineer. And me and my co-founder, we talked about this a lot.

We said there are a lot of people that never wanted to be engineers. I'm young, I'm 37 now, and Alan, you look back on your career 30, 40 years ago, most engineers, and those are the people that I see that are later in their career, they always wanted to be engineers. Right.

They went on a very specific path through school. They were like, "Ever since I was a kid, I would-" Absolutely "... " But now it's not the case.

You got a lot of people that just said, "Well, coding is fast, easy money. I don't have to work as hard. " So I just picked that over college.

I never thought I'm going to be an engineer. Right. I like to ask on interviews every time I interview anyone for any role, by the way.

I ask, "How did you get to that? " Because it's always fascinating. I saw how it changed, and suddenly engineering now, it has become just something that is just a good job, so people just want to do it.

And I think we're going to, again, churn into a point where the engineers that you'll see are people that really- Want to ... thrive and love problem-solving and engineering and complex issues. And the free riders that were just, "Hey, I can code," and anyone who can code makes $200,000 a year, those are going to be in trouble if they don't reinvent themselves.

So I spoke to the CEO of JFrog yesterday, who's very inspiring. Good friend of mine. Shlomi?

Yeah. He's an inspiration for me. " How do you get reborn as an expert of this domain now?

And I think a lot of engineering, ourselves, by the way. Me as a CEO, I'm still finding my way. There are a lot of things that I used to think make me a great CEO.

For instance, I have really good memory. I was in the details of everything. I can look at 100 channels in Slack and tell you what's going on in each and every one of them.

Does that even count today? " And get a really good summary. Suddenly, that capability is not even special.

And so- You know what? Yeah. So let me give you a little experience.

We're way over time. We got to end this pretty soon, but this is how I come to think. Because I'm like you, I had total recall when I was much younger, and I could do those kinds of things, too.

I almost look at things today, though, with AI, between internal memory and an external data card or something, an external hard drive. Right? What can I offload onto that external hard drive that's accessible to me anytime on my phone or wherever I am, and it's there, versus what do I really need to know right now on what I'm working on here, right here.

Yeah. It's almost like that. But you're 37, God bless you.

You're going to be reinventing yourself every year for the next 20 years, man. That's just the way it is. Sounds like it, yeah.

But it's great. Anyway, Ariel, this was a 25-minute, 15-minute interview, but it's all good. I want to wish you continued luck with Coralogix.

Don't be away so long. Come back and keep us posted. For sure.

Thank you very much. Always a pleasure talking to you, Alan. My pleasure.

Ariel Osherov, CEO, Co-founder, Coralogix, here on The TechFront TV. We're going to take a break. We'll be back.