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AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

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Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#271

Post by bigstrat2003 »

jaapbadlands wrote: post #195
beAbU wrote: post #128

Earlier 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...

Feel free to waste your time sifting through a dozen wrong answers. Meanwhile the rest of us can get the answers, absorb the right information quickly then move on to solving more problems.

And you will have learned nothing in the process. Congratulations, you are now behind your peer who "wasted his time" but actually knows stuff which he can lean on in the future.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#272

Post by AdrianB1 »

iwontberude wrote: post #236
47928485 wrote: post #211

Earlier 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.

I don't know how to calculate "usually", in my experience people who question decisions in my company are shot down because the decision makers are usually (no pun intended) very incompetent and the questions make that visible, even if not intended. Many companies that I know are so corrupt that competent people are considered to be dangerous for the status quo.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#273

Post by wizzwizz4 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #181
beAbU wrote: post #128

Earlier 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...

1965: learning how to punch your own punch cards is part of the learning process 1995: struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process 2005: struggling with stackoverflow and learning how to find answers to questions that others have asked before quickly is part of the learning process 2015: using search to find answers is part of the learning process 2025: using AI to…

This is both anachronistic and wrong.

To the extent that learning to punch your own punch cards was useful, it was because you needed to understand the kinds of failures that would occur if the punch cards weren't punched properly. However, this was never really a big part of programming, and often it was off-loaded to people other than the programmers.

In 1995, most of the struggling with the docs was because the docs were of poor quality. Some people did publish decent documentation, either in books or digitally. The Microsoft KB articles were helpfully available on CD-ROM, for those without an internet connection, and were quite easy to reference.

Stack Overflow did not exist in 2005, and it was very much born from an environment in which search engines were in use. You could swap your 2005 and 2015 entries, and it would be more accurate.

No comment on your 2025 entry.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#274

Post by iwontberude »

mikrl wrote: post #269
iwontberude wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business Is this a bad thing though? If some technical decision has downside risk, I’d reasonably expect: - the affected stakeholder to bring it up - the decision maker to assuage the stakeholder’s concern (happy path) or triage and escalate

I think you are right. It's still worth encouraging people to question decisions even though most of the time it won't be the right compromise for the business.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#275

Post by jplusequalt »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #166
GeoAtreides wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning. This is "the kids will use the AI to learn and understand" level of cope no, the kids will copy and paste the solution then go back to their preferred dopamine dispenser

I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers, because I wanted to understand why it did what it did. It saves me a lot of time trying to fix things that would have never worked, so I can just spend time analyzing success. There might be value in learning from failure, but my guess is that there's more value in learning from success, and if the LLM doesn't need me to succeed my time is better spe…

>I've learned a lot of shit while getting AI to give me the answers

I would argue you're learning less than you might believe. Similarly to how people don't learn math by watching others solve problems, you're not going to learn to become a better engineer/problem solver by reading the output of ChatGPT.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#276

Post by AdrianB1 »

ebiester wrote: post #231
alexgotoi wrote: post #192

The 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…

With the subjective view on what a junior is, I think the 70-30 - or higher - model is used in any company I ever interacted with. For this evaluation I consider junior=someone with less skills than needed to do the job autonomously/require direction and supervision most time, senior=someone that can work autonomously.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#277

Post by kjellsbells »

dejj wrote: post #267
alexgotoi wrote: post #192

The 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…

Agree. > cargo-culting Stack Overflow What do you mean by this? I understand “cargo-culting” as building false idols, e.g. wooden headphones and runways to attract airplanes that never come.

It means to copy code or instructions from a site into your own project without having any comprehension of how or why it works.

example: you have a Windows problem. You search and read that "sfc /scannow" seems a popular answer to Windows problems. You run it without ever understanding what sfc does, whether the tool is relevant to your problem, etc. You are cargo culting a solution.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#278

Post by filoleg »

mjr00 wrote: post #33
frostiness wrote: post #17

I can't help but feel this is backpedaling after the AI hype led to people entering university avoiding computer science or those already in changing their major. Ultimately we might end up with a shortage of developers again, which would be amusing.

I went to university 2005-2008 and I was advised by many people at the time to not go into computer science. The reasoning was that outsourced software developers in low-cost regions like India and SEA would destroy salaries, and software developers should not expect to make more than $50k/year due to the competition. Even more recently we had this with radiologists, a profession that was supposed to be crushed by de…

You nailed it on the head, down to the exact examples.

I was still in high school in 2010, and was told the same thing about outsourcing to India/SEA/etc. making a CS degree/career (in the US) a terrible choice. It wasn't just random people saying this either, I was reading about it in the news, online, had some family acquaintances with alleged former software dev career, etc. I didn't listen, and I am glad I didn't.

As I was graduating from college, and deep learning was becoming a new hot thing, I heard the same thing about radiologists, and how they are all getting automated away in the next 5 years. I had no plans to go to med school, and I didn't know anyone at the time who went through it, so I didn't know much about the topic. On the surface, it seemed like a legitimate take, and I just stored it in my head as "sounds about right."

Cue to now, I know more than a few people who went through med school, and am in general more attuned to the market. Turns out, all of that was just another genpop hype, those news articles about "omg radiologists are all getting replaced by computers" stopped from showing up on any of my news feeds, and not a single radiology-specialized med school graduate I know had any issues with getting a job (that paid significantly more than an entry level position at a FAANG).

I have zero idea what point I was trying to make with this comment, but your examples mirror my personal experience with the topic really well.

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#279

Post by startupsfail »

sailfast wrote: post #223
alexgotoi wrote: post #192

The 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…

I think the biggest challenge now becomes how more seasoned engineers teach juniors. The AI makes the ramp a lot easier but you still do best when you understand the whole stack and make mistakes. It’s damned near impossible to figure out where to spend your time wisely to correct an assumption a human made vs. an AI on a blended pull request. All of the learning that happens during PR review is at risk in this way a…

Junior engineers now learn from AIs. And AIs now learn from RL cost functions. And RL cost functions are being set by PhDs, with little to no production grade engineering experience ;)

The result is interesting. First, juniors are miserable. What used to be a good experience coding and debugging, in a state of flow is now anxiously waiting if an AI could do it or not.

And senior devs are also miserable, getting apprentices used to be fun and profit, working with someone young is uplifting, and now it is gone.

The code quality is going down, Zen cycle interrupted, with the RL cost functions now at the top.

The only ones who are happy are hapless PhDs ;$

Re: AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

#280

Post by orliesaurus »

salawat wrote: post #67
orliesaurus wrote: post #44

Earlier 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!

you will be able to run code assistants on your own machine soon, just like how you can run intense graphical simulations (videogames?) thanks to GPUs
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