The CEO of Amazon Web Services, Matt Garman, had some choice words for companies looking to replace junior engineers with AI.
He suggested that replacing junior engineers with AI was “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” He went on to say:
They’re probably the least expensive employees you have. They’re the most leaned into your AI tools.
How’s that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?
My view is you absolutely want to keep hiring kids out of college and teaching them the right ways to go build software and decompose problems and think about it, just as much as you ever have.
He also gave some career advice, which I agree with:
I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you think for yourself? How do you develop critical reasoning for solving problems? How do you develop creativity? How do you develop a learning mindset that you’re going to go learn to do the next thing?
I think the approach for software engineers and students just getting into the workforce needs to be one of flexibility. Established software engineers may need to expand their skills to become more of a generalist, rather than just a “backend developer” or just a “mobile developer”.
At minimum, they need to stay on top of the latest developments and learn the new tools. This was already necessary in the fast-moving field of tech, but we’re advancing at breakneck speeds now.
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