Where this was said
Security Engineers as Real Engineers: The Talent Convergence
At 14:30 · chapter starts 14:20
De la Garza shares a telling anecdote: a family member at a large American corporation described AI tools reducing the need for manual code writing, prompting the company to redeploy engineers to the security team. The talent that security teams could never afford — or couldn't attract over software engineering salaries — is suddenly available. Escobar confirms that at Datadog, security engineers are now paid on par with software engineers, treating the roles as functionally equivalent [1] — Joel de la Garza "Security engineers at Datadog are paid the same as software engineers. AI is redistributing engineering talent — as demand for tier-1 coder…" 14:00 . De la Garza frames this as the culmination of a thesis he's held for a decade: that security engineers would eventually become 'real engineers.' The DevEx team at Datadog is even co-investing in the same agent monitoring tooling as the security team, because the data they each need overlaps significantly. The silos are dissolving.
Datadog pays its security engineers on par with software engineers, reflecting a broader convergence of the two roles in modern tech companies.
Developers have always cared about security. The problem is the security team's ask: fix 1,000 scanner tickets, none of them relevant to what you're actually building. Security teams that generate noise lose all credibility with the engineers they depend on.
