Key Takeaways
- Dhanji Prasanna is the Chief Technical Officer of fintech company Block, which operates Cash App and Afterpay.
- On a podcast, Prasanna said engineers should focus on purpose rather than perfect code.
- Block processed more than $66 billion in payments for the quarter ended June 30, up 10% year over year.
Dhanji Prasanna, the Chief Technical Officer of fintech company Block and a former Google software engineer, says that “code quality doesn’t make you successful” – what really matters is solving real problems for users.
In an episode of “Lenny’s podcast,” which was released on Sunday, Prasanna said that “many engineers think code quality is important for building a successful product.” In reality, “the two have nothing to do with each other,” he added. According to Prasanna, a successful product depends on how effectively it meets the user’s needs – not on how clean the code is.
Prasanna illustrated his point by drawing on an example from his time at Google. Before he started working at Google (he worked there from 2008 to 2011, as a software engineer and technical leader, according to his LinkedIn), the company has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Google engineers were shocked by YouTube’s “terrible” code architecture, Prasanna said. Still, YouTube outperformed the better-constructed Google Video and became one of Google’s biggest success stories.
Related: Morgan Stanley has developed an AI tool to solve the most annoying part of coding. Here’s how it works.
Prasanna said the lesson there was that “perfect code isn’t a great product; solving real problems is.” He urged engineers to prioritize purpose over technical perfection.
“Just focus on what we’re trying to build and who we’re trying to build for,” Prasanna advised. “All this code can be thrown away tomorrow.”
He employs Block, the company where he now works almost a thousand engineersapproximately 36% of the company’s total workforce. The growing fintech company processed more than $66 billion in payments for the quarter ended June 30, up 10% year-over-year. The company operates Cash App, a mobile payment and banking app used by 57 million people around the world every month, as well as Afterpay, a buy-now-pay-later service.
Related: There are new rules for ‘Buy now, pay later’ programs – here’s what you need to know
Other tech executives have emphasized coding as an essential skill, even in the age of AI. OpenAI researcher Szymon Sidor said in an August episode of the OpenAI podcast that high school students should still learn to code, arguing that the practice develops problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
“A skill that is, and will continue to be, very important is having a really structured intellect that can break complicated problems into pieces,” Sidor said on the podcast, adding that “programming is a great way to acquire that skill.”
Meanwhile, Google’s head of research, Yossi Matias, said this Business insider last year, coding was like basic math, a fundamental discipline that everyone should learn.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presented a different perspective, focusing on AI capabilities to take over the coding. Huang said on stage at London Tech Week in June that since AI now allows non-technical users to write code by providing prompts in plain English, it is no longer necessary to learn coding languages such as Python and C++ to develop code. The practice of asking AI to write code is known as ‘vibe coding’ and means even non-technical users can quickly create apps and web pages.
Related: The CEO of a multibillion-dollar Vibe Coding company says you can break into tech without a computer science degree
Big Tech companies are increasingly using AI to write new code, rather than asking human engineers to write it manually.
In April, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said said that AI wrote “more than 30%” of new code at Google, more than the 25% indicated last year. In the same month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that AI writes up to 30% of the code for the company.
Key Takeaways
- Dhanji Prasanna is the Chief Technical Officer of fintech company Block, which operates Cash App and Afterpay.
- On a podcast, Prasanna said engineers should focus on purpose rather than perfect code.
- Block processed more than $66 billion in payments for the quarter ended June 30, up 10% year over year.
Dhanji Prasanna, the Chief Technical Officer of fintech company Block and a former Google software engineer, says that “code quality doesn’t make you successful” – what really matters is solving real problems for users.
In an episode of “Lenny’s podcast,” which was released on Sunday, Prasanna said that “many engineers think code quality is important for building a successful product.” In reality, “the two have nothing to do with each other,” he added. According to Prasanna, a successful product depends on how effectively it meets the user’s needs – not on how clean the code is.
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