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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'

#421

Post by 9rx »

dragonwriter wrote: post #384
9rx wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While, again, anyone can define words as they see fit, most people consider the "junior" and "senior" labels to apply to the activity being conducted, not something off to the side. As the job is to use AI tools, these most experienced people would be considered "seniors" by most. Nobody was ever suggesting that you should cut good help because they're juniors in knitting or dirt biking.

No, the job is to develop software. Using AI tools is one piece of the job. Having less experience with the job overall and more experience with one piece is a thing that happens.

The job is never to develop software. The job is always to solve problems for customers. Developing software is just a tool in the toolbox. As is, increasingly, using AI. As such, it is valuable to have those who are experienced in using AI on staff.

Which is nothing new. It has always been understood that it is valuable to have experienced people on board. The "cut the juniors" talk has never been about letting those who offer value go. Trying to frame it as being about those who offer experiential value — just not in the places you've arbitrary chosen — is absurd.

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

#424

Post by jacquesm »

pests wrote: post #345
ChuckMcM wrote: post #210

Earlier 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…

Some random musings this reminded me of. I graduated HS in mid 2000s and didn't start using a calculator for math classes until basically a junior in college. I would do every calculation by hand, on paper. I benefited from a great math teacher early on that taught me how to properly lay out my calculations and solutions on paper. I've had tests I've turned in where I spent more paper on a single question than others…

Not only that: I suspect you already have an inkling of the range of the expected outcomes for the answer in your head just looking through the problem and any answers that fail that test will cause you to pause to re-check your work.

This aspect is entirely missing when you use an oracle.

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

#425

Post by jacquesm »

testing22321 wrote: post #423
jacquesm wrote: post #422

Obviously. If you don't have junior devs you will never have senior ones either. It's implicit.

I guess the theory is that in 5 or 10 years when that becomes a problem AI will replace the seniors too.

Magical and wishful thinking in my opinion.

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

#427

Post by twosdai »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #271
jaapbadlands wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a wrong take. People learn plenty while using AI. it's how you use it that matters. Same issue happened years ago if you just copied stack overflow without understanding what you were doing.

Its no different now, just the level of effort required to get the code copy is lower.

Whenever I use AI I sit and read and understand every line before pushing. Its not hard. I learn more.

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

#428

Post by al_borland »

orliesaurus wrote: post #44
orliesaurus wrote: post #37

Interesting take... I'm seeing a pattern... People think AI can do it all... BUT I see juniors often are the ones who actually understand AI tools better than seniors... That's what AWS CEO points out... He said juniors are usually the most experienced with AI tools, so cutting them makes no sense... He also mentioned they are usually the least expensive, so there's little cost saving... AND he warned that without a…

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 work at a place with lots of rules around what can and can’t be used. When someone new start we end up spending a lot of time policing to make sure they aren’t using stuff they should be.

A very basic example were the interns who constantly tried to use Google Docs for everything, their personal accounts no less. I had to stop them and point them back to MS Office at least a dozen times.

In other situations, people will try and use free tools that don’t scale well, because that’s what they used in college or as a hobby. It can take a lot of work to point them to the enterprise solution that is already approved and integrated with everything. A basic example of this would be someone using Ansible from their laptop when we have Ansible Automation Platform, which is better optimized for running jobs around the globe and automatically logs to Splunk to create an audit trail.

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

#429

Post by iyihz »

jauer wrote: post #407
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...

I've worked in various teams on the infrastructure side of a FAANG from early career/L4 to sr staff eng/L7 and have always been encouraged and rewarded for asking questions, even when those questions have led to unexpected multimillion dollar costs and in one case a loss of ~1% of fleetwide compute capacity. I think this comes down to how you go about asking. You have to take the time to understand what is and how it…

How did the questions lead to costs? Like your questions highlighted issues that already existed that you all then had to fix?

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

#430

Post by golly_ned »

zahlman wrote: post #418
pnathan wrote: post #101

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas. But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. Food for thought.

> But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm. I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash. Nothing is preventing you from studying how the bugfix works once it's in place. Nor is there any reason this use of AI should cause you to lose skills you already have.

I haven't seen things work like this in practice, where heavy AI users end up being able to generating a solution, then later grasp it and learn from it, with any kind of effectiveness or deep understanding.

It's like reading the solution to a math proof instead of proving it yourself. Or writing a summary of a book compared to reading one. The effort towards seeing the design space and choosing a particular solution doesn't exist; you only see the result, not the other ways it could've been. You don't get a feedback loop to learn from either, since that'll be AI generated too.

It's true there's nothing stopping someone from going back and trying to solve it themselves to get the same kind of learning, but learning the bugfix (or whatever change) by studying it once in place just isn't the same.

And things don't work like that in practice any more than things like "we'll add tests later" end up being followed through with with any regularity. If you fix a bug, the next thing for you to do is to fix another bug, or build another feature, write another doc, etc., not dwell on work that was already 'done'.

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