Key Takeaways
- Dhanji Prasanna is the Chief Technical Officer of fintech company Block, which runs Cash App and Afterpay.
- On a podcast, Prasanna said that engineers should focus on purpose over perfect code.
- Block processed over $66 billion worth of payments for the quarter ending June 30, a 10% year-over-year growth.
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 truly matters is solving real problems for users.
On an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast,” released on Sunday, Prasanna said that “a lot of engineers think that code quality is important to 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 addresses user 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 rom 2008 to 2011, as a software engineer and technical lead, per his LinkedIn), the company acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Google engineers were shocked by YouTube’s “terrible” code architecture, Prasanna said. Yet YouTube outperformed the better-constructed Google Video and became one of Google’s biggest success stories.
Prasanna said that the lesson there was that “perfect code doesn’t make a great product — solving real problems does.” 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.”
Block, the company he works at now, employs nearly a thousand engineers, about 36% of the company’s total employees. The growing fintech firm processed over $66 billion worth of payments for the quarter ending June 30, a 10% year–over-year growth. The company operates Cash App, a mobile payment and banking app used by 57 million people globally every month, as well as Afterpay, a buy-now-pay-later service.
Other tech executives have emphasized coding as an essential skill, even in the age of AI. OpenAI researcher Szymon Sidor said in August on an episode of the OpenAI podcast that high school students should still learn how to code, arguing that the practice develops problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
“One skill that is at premium, and will continue being at premium, is to have a really structured intellect that can break complicated problems into pieces,” Sidor said on the podcast, adding that “programming is a fine way to acquire that skill.”
Meanwhile, Google’s head of research, Yossi Matias, told Business Insider last year that coding is like basic math, a foundational discipline everyone should learn.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presented a different perspective, focusing on AI capabilities to take over coding. Huang said in June on stage at London Tech Week that since AI now enables non-technical users to write code by giving prompts in plain English, there’s no longer a need to learn coding languages like Python and C++ to develop code. The practice of prompting AI to write code is known as “vibe coding” and means that even non-technical users can quickly create apps and webpages.
Big Tech companies are increasingly tapping into AI to write new code, instead of asking human engineers to manually write it.
In April, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that AI wrote “well over 30%” of new code at Google, higher than the 25% indicated last year. In the same month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that AI is writing up to 30% of code for the company.
Key Takeaways
- Dhanji Prasanna is the Chief Technical Officer of fintech company Block, which runs Cash App and Afterpay.
- On a podcast, Prasanna said that engineers should focus on purpose over perfect code.
- Block processed over $66 billion worth of payments for the quarter ending June 30, a 10% year-over-year growth.
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 truly matters is solving real problems for users.
On an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast,” released on Sunday, Prasanna said that “a lot of engineers think that code quality is important to 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 addresses user needs — not on how clean the code is.
