Fintech founder has ominous observations about engineers on £100k salaries

Tom Blomfield's time in working fintech wasn't always fun. There was an episode involving a roast chicken while he was Starling Bank's CTO. When he left Starling and founded Monzo, there were allegations involving spying and defections in London's Finsbury Square. When Blomfield finally quit Monzo in 2021, he said he'd stopped enjoying his job and was suffering from mental health issues.  

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Despite these struggles, Blomfield can claim to have created two $1bn companies (Monzo and GoCardless). He's now a partner at accelerator Y Combinator in San Francisco. In this new context, he has time to write ruminate, write blogs, play around with AI, and post on X. The culmination of these activities has led to the post below, suggesting that if Blomfield founds companies in the future, he won't be hiring swathes of highly paid software engineers again.

Software engineers are highly-paid farmers, tending their crops by hand.

We just invented the combine harvester. 

The world is going have a lot more food and a lot fewer farmers in very short order.

— Tom Blomfield (@t_blom) March 30, 2025

Last time we looked, Monzo was paying its software engineers £111k each. That's no longer necessary. Writing on his blog, Blomfield describes his experiences with vibe coding (getting LLMs to write code based on pure vibe) using tools like Lovable, Cursor and Windsurf and thereby creating a new recipe website with no coding work himself. "I just sat laughing as the computer wrote code," he says. 

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