Asked whether Rippling still hires 'real' engineers now that AI supposedly makes them replaceable, the Rippling CEO rejects the premise. The line gave the episode its title.
…that compute taxes and, you know, take, because payroll, you know, payroll systems, the way to think of them is that they are data pipelines of organizational data that end in money movement and regulatory filings. And so the fidelity and the integrity of those data pipelines needs to be very high.
You're not convincing Sam at this point. You're talking about. Keep going, keep going.
All of the rules are out there. And so there is this interesting thing where payroll is one of these domains that is actually externally specified. And so it's very hard. The rules are not always clear, but they are, the rules are externally specified. And so if you get them into the system, you can have payroll systems that are not built, but are grown out of that underlying rule set and data set of what the regulations are. And just, you know, there are not a lot of domains where you can do that. I think there is room for some really sexy stuff from like, you know, so engineers, you should come work on this. Your problems are the ones that always make money. Wait, you're still hiring engineers. You're not hiring Vibecode product generalists, like actual engineers? Because if you're hiring those, they need jobs, Parker. So like you're going to like hire all of them. That is the biggest load of bullshit. The idea. I remember when all the VCs were telling me a year ago that nine months from now, software, there's going to be mass unemployment with software engineering. And you look today and like salaries are higher, the market's…
I'd like to go on record saying this is a bad idea, but yes, go.
You can do that today in your Riplane. Like in Ripley AI, you could go in, you could tell it to build you an automation that runs twice a month that goes through, like create a custom skill. That it just runs twice a month that goes through every employee, assigns them a random number and adjusts a…
Okay. I would like to go on record saying that'd be horrible for your employees and their predictability about because not everyone's a rich startup employee, Sam. Most people want the paycheck reliably.