so what is the take away message? fire only the senior devs cause they cost too much and can't use AI?
AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
251–260 of 554 posts
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
ON TOP OF IT ALL, juniors are the ones who bring novel tools to the desk MOST times...i.e. I had no clue the Google IDE gave you free unlimited credits despite the terrible UI...but a young engineer told me about it!!
I'm just shocked people aren't clueing into the fact that tech companies are trying to build developer dependence on these things to secure a "rent" revenue stream. But hey, what do I know. It's just cloud hyper scaling all over again. Don't buy and drive your own hardware. Rent ours! Look, we built the metering and everything!
I'm clued in to that but at this point who cares. All the models are fungible for the coding assistance use case.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#253The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense. What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the r…
"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.
Company culture. Some companies I worked for would fire you for questioning decisions. Others, welcomed criticism. You don’t really know which environment you’re in until someone says something. Are you going to take the risk and be the first?
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process? I would argue a machine that short circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse documentation is actually harmful long term...
Struggling with poorly organized docs seems entirely like incidental complexity to me. Good learning resources can be both faster and better pedagogically. (How good today's LLM-based chat tools are is a totally separate question.)
Nobody said anything about poorly organized docs. Reading well structured and organized complex material is immensely difficult. Anyone who’s read Hegel can attest to that.
And yet I wouldn’t trust a single word coming out of the mouth of someone who couldn’t understand Hegel so they read an AI summary instead.
There is value in struggling through difficult things.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
My prediction is that this will actually get better, because the cost to find and fix with AI is so much lower in time investment.
The problem is human, not technical. Companies and managers need to start caring about the details instead of crossing items off a list. Until we see that culture shift in the industry, which might never happen, AI isn't going to help—if anything, it'll make the problem worse as devs rush to deliver on arbitrary deadlines.
Well the reason I think it might be different is that I am noticing a material change in my behavior.
I have always cared a lot about quality and craftsmanship. Now when I am working and notice something wrong, I just fix it. I can code it entirely with AI in the time it would've take me to put it on an eternal backlog somewhere.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged. Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...
Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments. This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business which distorts or reduces their visibility and understanding.
One of the most regulated industries, aviation requires crews to go through crew management training where it's explicitly trained for lower level staff to raise concerns in spite of perceived superior knowledge.
Some of the biggest accidents have happened directly due to this. Like Tenerife where the flight engineer had been listening to the radio and raised doubts about the runway being free but was ignored by the overconfident captain.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#257The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense. What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the r…
So, I think there are two models. One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak. Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experie…
That second model is basically the hospital model.
You have 1 veteran doctor overseeing 4 learning doctors. For example operating rooms do this, where they will have 4 operating rooms with 4 less experienced anesthesist and then 1 very experienced anesthesist who will rotate between the 4 and is on call for when shit hits the fan.
Honestly I think everyone here is missing the forest for the trees. Juniors their main purpose isn't to "ask questions", it's to turn into capable seniors.
That's also why the whole "slash our junior headcount by 3/4th" we are seeing across the industry is going to massively, massively backfire. AI / LLMs are going to hit a wall (well, they already hit it a while ago), suddenly every is scrambling for seniors but there are none because no one wanted to bear the 'burden' of training juniors to be seniors. You thought dev salaries are insane now? Wait until 4-5 years from now.
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#258> In fact, 30% of companies that laid off workers expecting savings ended up increasing expenses, and many had to rehire later.
Such as (cough...) Amazon?
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is always my question: "... because the genie, used well, accelerates learning." Does it though? How are we defining "learning" here? The example I like to use is that a student who "learns" what a square root is, can calculate the square root of a number on a simple 4 function calculator (x, ÷, +, -) if iteratively. Whereas the student who "learns" that the √ key gives them the square root, is "stuck" when…
You still need to be curious. I learn a ton by asking questions of the LLMs when I see new things. “Explain this to me - I get X but why did you do Y?” It’s diamond age and a half - you just need to continue to be curious and perhaps slow your shipping speed sometimes to make sure you budget time for learning as well.
I think that's the "used well" in "because the genie, used well, accelerates learning".
Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search is easily the best feature of AI/LLMs.
Which was trained on a pre-AI internet. What's going to happen in coming years when new tech comes out but perhaps isn't documented the same way anymore? It's not an unsolvable problem, but we could see unintended consequences like, say where you must pay the AI provider to ingest your data. Similar to buying poll space or AdSense or whatever they call it for search engines
If you release a new piece of technology from 2025 onwards and don't invest a decent amount of effort into producing LLM-friendly documentation (with good examples) that a user can slurp into their coding agent you're doing your new technology a disservice.