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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'

#501

Post by TeMPOraL »

rsanek wrote: post #226
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…

"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.

There are kinds of questions that you can ask to signal your seniority and matureness. There are other kinds of questions that, should you ask them, will leave people wondering what the hell have you been doing for the past N years and why they're paying you senior-level salary.

A lot of early signs of problems, such as critical information becoming tribal knowledge instead of being documented, are revealed when asking the second kind of questions.

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

#502

Post by TeMPOraL »

noisy_boy wrote: post #432
tpoacher wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in fairness, these do not sound like "dumb" questions. Some questions really are dumb and bring no value to the table. The key is knowing which is which, and that is the part that comes with experience.

> Some questions really are dumb and bring no value to the table. They do tell you that the person asking them either isn't getting it, which is valuable information, or that they are trying to ask questions for the sake of it, which is also valuable information.

Which is exactly what the OP was saying - these are the kind of questions that are often needed, but that seniors won't ask because it'll make them lose face. Juniors are the ones allowed to "not get it".

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

#503

Post by nopurpose »

darth_avocado wrote: post #398
rsanek wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It depends on the company and the people around you. At one company, my quarterly feedback was that I don’t ask too many questions in meetings, which was mostly due to the fact that the project was pretty straightforward and requirements were hammered down on a document. In another company, asking questions got me the feedback that I was maybe not experienced enough to manage the project by myself, which I was comple…

> my quarterly feedback was that I don’t ask too many questions

Sounds like your manager felt that he need to provide at least some feedback and it is best/safest he could come up with.

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

#504

Post by laz »

doctaj wrote: post #436
rsanek wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

There’s also the benefit of being naive - like, juniors can be seriously audacious when they haven’t been burned a million times. I miss having excitement and optimism.

The Facebook "little red book" had a quote in it along these lines:

When you don't realize what you can't do, you can do some pretty cool stuff

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

#505

Post by p_l »

jorvi wrote: post #257
ebiester wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fred Brooks proposed "surgical team" structure, where as people gain experience they "bud out" new teams - i.e. the most senior after "the surgeon" ultimately leave team to become "surgeon" of a new team

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

#506

Post by ygouzerh »

neilv wrote: post #388

> “Number one, my experience is that many of the most junior folks are actually the most experienced with the AI tools. So they're actually most able to get the most out of them.” Would that experience be from cheating on their homework? Are you sure that's the skill you want to prioritize? > “Number two, they're usually the least expensive because they're right out of college, and they generally make less. So if you…

I feel the majority of junior job-hopping is due to the fact that they are often hired for really low, and then proposed just an incremental raise after two years. Instead, if they change company, then they got a big jump.

At least, that's what I saw happening here in Hong Kong for juniors I worked with, not sure for other areas.

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

#507

Post by gosub100 »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #475
simonw wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought this was always true? What’s new about documentation being important?

If LLMs get more popular, fewer people will actually "browse the web" which could reduce the need for it to be published. At the least, fewer people will ask stack overflow questions for the LLM to learn from. So there could be an island of knowledge where LLMs excel at topics that had mass volume published before AI, and be much less useful for new tech developed after.

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

#510

Post by t43562 »

johnfn wrote: post #339
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…

> 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. This seems almost entirely wrong to me? That anyone, at any level of seniority, can ask "dumb qu…

People who are new to the business should be able to challenge the assumptions that the business has built up over time and ceased to question.

They are the most insecure, however, no knowing who will be annoyed, shown up, embarassed by that question if it suggests that some past decisions were wrong.

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