24 ms·

AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'

• ramesh31 1y ago
  No one's getting replaced, but you may not hire that new person that otherwise would have been needed. Five years ago, you would have hired a junior to crank out UI components, or well specc'd CRUD endpoints for some big new feature initiative. Now you probably won't.
  • blackhaz 1y ago
    Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call. At least in my personal case, struggling with renewal at Virgin Broadband, multiple humans wasted probably an hour of everyone's time overall on the phone bouncing me around departments, unable to comprehend my request, trying to upsell and pitch irrelevant services, applying contextually inappropriate talking scripts while never approaching what I was asking them in the first place. Giving up on those brainless meat bags and engaging with their chat bot, I was able to resolve what I needed in 10 minutes.
    • Xunjin 1y ago
      “brainless meat bags” have you ever thought they are instructed to do so to achieve product selling quotas?
      • wkat4242 1y ago
        Anyone who blindly follows orders is a brainless meat bag too.
        • Xunjin 1y ago
          Again, you assume those people have choice, you definitely should search more how people on these jobs are pressured to reach quotas and are abused in many ways. A simple search on Reddit you can see plenty of reports about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_real_face_of_call_centers_abuse/ https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_re... Abuses done by customers: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351
          • wkat4242 1y ago
            You always have a choice. These people aren't forced to work there. And they also have the ability to go whistleblower and leak internal docs that instruct them to abuse customers. Just as an example. I know I would. If someone gives you a choice A or B that both screw you over, there's always an option Z somewhere. It might be so outrageous they don't expect it but it's there. However usually it isn't necessary. I've been put in situations where I had to do something unethical. I've refused. And every time that choice was respected. Only if I'd have been punished for it would I have considered more severe options like the whistle option. But really if you take a hard stand and have good reasons, reality tends to bend a bit further than I expected. And yes I know what these jobs are like. I have worked in that industry a long time. I've seen both very good and very terrible employers. And yeah customers can also be little shits but I've learned to disconnect from that very quickly. It's easier when they're on the other side of the phone. It doesn't help them anyway. And sometimes (especially if they're not just a dick but they have a genuine reason to be angry) there's ways to flip them around, in which case that energy might be harnessed and they can become your strongest ally. Another thing I've seen that I didn't expect.
            • Xunjin 1y ago
              I'm not fully disagreeing with you, you always have a choice. However, when the market has less demand for a large unqualified workforce, you have two choices, accept to work and earn money or go back to months or even years without a way to sustain yourself/family. Don't lose sight that these jobs mostly prey on a population that is vulnerable and often does not know their rights. We could discuss in a sociological basis on how Capitalism today uses this workforce for degrading jobs, though requires a large dialogue that HN is not the place.
    • kamaal 1y ago
      Its strange you have to write this. In India most of the banks now have apps that do nearly all the banking you can do by visiting a branch personally. To that extent this future is already here. When I had to close my loan and had to visit a branch nearly a few times, the manager tells me, significant portion of his people's time now goes into actual banking- which according to him was selling products(fixed deposits, insurances, credit cards) and not customer support(which the bank thinks is not its job and has to because there is no other alternative to it currently).
    • supriyo-biswas 1y ago
      This is mostly because CS folks are given such sales and retention targets; and while I’ve never encountered a helpful support bot even in the age of LLMs, I presume in your case the company management was just happy to have a support bot talking to people without said metrics.
    • firesteelrain 1y ago
      > Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call. In IT, if at a minimum, AI would triage the problem intelligently (and not sound like a bot while doing it), that would save my more expensive engineers a lot more time.
  • sharperguy 1y ago
    On the other hand, that extra money can be used to expand the business in other ways, plus most kids coming out of college these days are going to be experts in getting jobs done with AI (although they will need a lot of training in writing actual secure and maintainable code).
    • ninetyninenine 1y ago
      Even the highest ranking engineers should be experts. I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best. Using AI isn’t rocket science. Like you’re talking about using AI as if typing a prompt in English is some kind of hard to learn skill. Do you know English? Check. Can you give instructions? Check. Can you clarify instructions? Check.
      • LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
        > I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best. Because junior engineers have no problem with wholeheartedly embracing AI - they don't have enough experience to know what doesn't work yet. In my personal experience, engineers who have experience are much more hesitant to embrace AI and learn everything about it, because they've seen that there are no magic bullets out there. Or they're just set in their ways. To management that's AI obsessed, they want those juniors over anyone that would say "Maybe AI isn't everything it's cracked up to be." And it really, really helps that junior engineers are the cheapest to hire.
      • sharperguy 1y ago
        It's interesting because usually correctly collecting requirements and specifying a program is more difficult than actually coding it. Especially when you get into things like building secure, maintainable, extendable applications, that integrate well with legacy systems and so on.
    • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
      > plus most kids coming out of college these days are going to be experts in getting jobs done with AI “You won’t lose your job to AI, you’ll lose it to someone who uses AI better than you do”
  • aksnsman 1y ago
    > well specc'd CRUD endpoints I’m really tired of this trope. I’ve spent my whole career on “boring CRUD” and the number of relational db backed apps I’ve seen written by devs who’ve never heard of isolation levels is concerning (including myself for a time). Coincidentally, as soon as these apps see any scale issues pop up.
    • shivasaxena 1y ago
      [dead]
• jqpabc123 1y ago
  He wants educators to instead teach “how do you think and how do you decompose problems” Ahmen! I attend this same church. My favorite professor in engineering school always gave open book tests. In the real world of work, everyone has full access to all the available data and information. Very few jobs involve paying someone simply to look up data in a book or on the internet. What they will pay for is someone who can analyze, understand, reason and apply data and information in unique ways needed to solve problems. Doing this is called "engineering". And this is what this professor taught.
  • qsort 1y ago
    Isn't that happening already? Half the usual CS curriculum is either math (analysis, linear algebra, numerical methods) or math in anything but name (computability theory, complexity theory). There's a lot of very legitimate criticism of academia, but most of the times someone goes "academia is stupid, we should do X" it turns out X is either: - something we've been doing since forever - the latest trend that can be picked up just-in-time if you'll ever need it
    • Loughla 1y ago
      I've worked in education in some form or another for my entire career. When I was in teacher education in college . . . some number of decades ago . . . the number one topic of conversation and topic that most of my classes were based around was how to teach critical thinking, effective reasoning, and problem solving. Methods classes were almost exclusively based on those three things. Times have not changed. This is still the focus of teacher prep programs.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • fumeux_fume 1y ago
      Parent comment is literally praising an experience they had in higher education, but your only takeaway is that it must be facile ridicule of academia.
• pj_mukh 1y ago
  Might want to clarify things with your boss who says otherwise [1]? I do wish journalists would stop quoting these people unedited. No one knows what will actually happen. [1]: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/technology/ai-will-shrink-corporate-workforce--amazon-ceo-warns https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/technology/ai-will-sh...
  • throwaway31131 1y ago
    I'm not sure those statements are in conflict with each other. “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.” - Matt Garman "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Maybe they differ in degree but not in sentiment.
  • jmull 1y ago
    Those statements are entirely consistent to me.
  • JustExAWS 1y ago
    I very much believe that anything AWS says on the corporate level is bullshit. From the perspective of a former employee. I knew that going in though. I was 46 at the time, AWS was my 8th job and knowing AWS’s reputation from 2nd and 3rd hand information, I didn’t even entertain an opportunity that would have forced me to relocate. I interviewed for a “field by design” role that was “permanently remote” [sic]. But even those positions had an RTO mandate after I already left.
    • LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
      There's what AWS leadership says and then there's what actually sticks. There's an endless series of one pagers with this idea or that idea, but from what I witnessed first hand, the ones that stuck were the ones that made money. Jassy was a decent guy when I was there, but that was a decade ago. A CEO is a PR machine more than anything else, and the AI hype train has been so strong that if you do anything other than saying AI is the truth, the light and the way, you lose market share to competitors. AI, much like automation in general, does allow fewer people to do more, but in my experience, customer desires expand to fill a vacuum and if fewer people can do more, they'll want more to the point that they'll keep on hiring more and more people.
• kamaal 1y ago
  Most people don't notice but there has been a inflation in headcounts over the years now. This happened around the time microservices architecture trend took over. All of sudden to ensure better support and separation of concerns people needed a team with a manager for each service. If this hadn't been the case, the industry as a whole can likely work with 40% - 50% less people eventually. Thats because at any given point in time even with a large monolithic codebase only 10 - 20% of the code base is in active evolution, what that means in microservices world is equivalent amount teams are sitting idle. When I started out huge C++ and Java code bases were pretty much the norm, and it was also one of the reasons why things were hard and barrier to entry high. In this microservices world, things are small enough that any small group of even low productivity employees can make things work. That is quite literally true, because smaller things that work well don't even need all that many changes on a everyday basis. To me its these kind of places that are in real trouble. There is not enough work to justify keeping dozens to even hundreds of teams, their managements and their hierarchies all working for quite literally doing nothing.
  • calvinmorrison 1y ago
    Well yeah... computers are really powerful. you don't need docker swarm or any other newfangled thing. Just perl and apache and mysql and you can ship to tens of millions of users before you hit scaling limits.
  • jvanderbot 1y ago
    Its almost an everyday song that I hear, that big companies are full of hundreds or thousands of employees doing nothing. I think sometimes the definition of work gets narrowed to a point so infinitesimal that everyone but the speaker is just a lazy nobody. There was an excellent article on here about working at enterprise scale. My experience has been similar. You get to do work that feels really real, almost like school assignments with instant feedback and obvious rewards when you're at a small company. When I worked at big companies it all felt like bullshit until I screwed it up and a senator was interested in "Learning more" (for example). The last few 9s are awful hard to chase down and a lot of the steps of handling edge case failures or features are extremely manual.
  • 1y ago
• geodel 1y ago
  Maybe source of "AI replacing junior staff" is the statement AWS CEO made during a private meeting with client.
• einpoklum 1y ago
  Simple, just replace the CEO with an LLM and it will be singing a different tune :-P
• mac-monet 1y ago
  I would bet that anyone who's worked with these models extensively would agree. I'll never forget the sama AGI posts before o3 launched and the subsequent doomer posting from techies. Feels so stupid in hindsight.
  • JustExAWS 1y ago
    ChatGPT is better than any junior developer I’ve ever worked with. Junior devs have always been a net negative for the first year or so. From a person who is responsible for delivering projects, I’ve never thought “it sure would be nice if I had a few junior devs”. Why when I can poach an underpaid mid level developer for 20% more?
    • devmor 1y ago
      I've never worked with a junior developer that was incapable of learning or following instructions unless I formatted them in a specific way.
      • broast 1y ago
        I definitely have
        • AstroBen 1y ago
          That's due to the person, not their development experience level
    • throwway120385 1y ago
      I've never had a junior dev be a "net negative." Maybe you're just not supervising or mentoring them at all? The first thing I tell all new hires under me is that their job is to solve more problems than they create, and so far it's worked out.
      • antonymoose 1y ago
        I’ve had interns be a net negative, I’ve had Juniors be a net negative, I’ve had Seniors be a net negative and even managers! Turns out some people suck, but most of them don’t suck.
• jihadjihad 1y ago
  > Garman is also not keen on another idea about AI – measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization. You really want to believe, maybe even need to believe, that anyone who comes up with this idea in their head has never written a single line of code in their life. It is on its face absurd. And yet I don't doubt for a second that Garman et al. have to fend off legions of hacks who froth at the mouth over this kind of thing.
  • exasperaited 1y ago
    All that said, I'm very keen on companies telling me how much of their codebase was written by AI. I just won't use that information in quite the excitable, optimistic way they offer it.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      I want to have the model re-write patent applications, and if any portion of your patent filing was replicated by it your patent is denied as obvious and derivative.
    • jihadjihad 1y ago
      "...just raised a $20M Series B and are looking to expand the team and products offered. We are fully bought-in to generative AI — over 40% of our codebase is built and maintained by AI, and we expect this number to continue to grow as the tech evolves and the space matures." "What does your availability over the next couple of weeks look like to chat about this opportunity?"
      • jraph 1y ago
        "Yeah, quite busy over the next couple of weeks actually… the next couple of decades, really - awful how quickly time fills by itself these days, right? I'd have contributed towards lowering that 40% number which seems contrary to your goals anyway. But here's my card, should you need help with debugging something tricky some time in the near future and nobody manages to figure it out internally. I may be able to make room for you if you can afford it. I might be VERY busy though."
• mikert89 1y ago
  This is just to walk back previous statements by Andy Jessy. Political theater
• devmor 1y ago
  It's refreshing to finally see CEOs and other business leaders coming around to what experienced, skeptical engineers have been saying for this entire hype cycle. I assumed it would happen at some point, but I am relieved that the change in sentiment has started before the bubble pops - maybe this will lesson the economic impact.
  • LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
    Yeah, the whole AI thing has very unpleasant similarities to the dot com bubble that burst to the massive detriment of the careers of the people that were working back then.
    • devmor 1y ago
      The parallels in how industry members talk about it is similar as well. No one denies that the internet boom was important and impactful, but it's also undeniable that companies wasted unfathomable amounts of cash for no return at the cost of worker well being.
• artur_makly 1y ago
  Reinforcement is the only way to fly
• JCM9 1y ago
  So to summarize: My boss said we were gonna fire a bunch of people “because AI” as part of some fluff PR to pretend we were actually leaders in AI. We tried that a bit, it was a total mess and we have no clue what we’re doing, I’ve been sent out to walk back our comments.
  • darth_avocado 1y ago
    They are still not hiring junior engineers
    • JCM9 1y ago
      Well they’re just trying to reduce headcount overall to get the expenses for AWS in better shape and work through some bloat. The “we’re doing layoffs because of AI” story wasn’t sticking though so looks like now they’re backtracking that story line.
  • daxfohl 1y ago
    Boss->VP: "We need to fire people because AI" VP->Public: "We'll replace all our engineers with AI in two years" Boss->VP: "I mean we need to fire VPs because AI" VP->Public: "Replacing people with AI is stupid"
• Martin_Silenus 1y ago
  I can't wait for that damn bubble to explode, really... This is becoming unbreathable for hackers.
  • LinuxAmbulance 1y ago
    It's already exploding. The hype train is going to keep on moving for a while yet though.
• Forricide 1y ago
  > “How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,” Pretty obvious conclusion that I think anyone who's thought seriously about this situation has already come to. However, I'm not optimistic that most companies will be able to keep themselves from doing this kind of thing, because I think it's become rather clear that it's incredibly difficult for most leadership in 2025 to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term profitability. That being said, internships/co-ops have been popular from companies that I'm familiar with for quite a while specifically to ensure that there are streams of potential future employees. I wonder if we'll see even more focus on internships in the future, to further skirt around the difficulties in hiring junior developers?
• demirbey05 1y ago
  Yesterday, I was asked to scrape data from a website. My friend used ChatGPT to scrape data but didn't succeded even spent 3h+. I looked website code and understand with my web knowledge and do some research with LLM. Then I described how to scrape data to LLM it took 30 minutes overall. The LLM cant create best way but you can create with using LLM. Everything is same, at the end of the day you need someone who can really think.
  • jvm___ 1y ago
    LLM's can do anything, but the decision tree for what you can do in life is almost infinite. LLM's still need a coherent designer to make progress towards a goal.
    • demirbey05 1y ago
      LLMs can do small things well, but you must use small parts to form big picture.
  • 1718627440 1y ago
    wget -m ?
  • isatty 1y ago
    Or you could’ve used xpath and bs4 and have been done in an hour or two and have more understandable code.
    • demirbey05 1y ago
      it is not that easy, there is lazy loading in the page that is triggered by scroll of specific sections. You need to find clever way, no way to scrape with bs4, so tough with even selenium.
• 123sereusername 1y ago
  [dead]
• fghorow 1y ago
  "Learning how to learn" is by far the most important lesson anyone can obtain. That's not just for AI/software/tech, but for anything.
  • masterpos 1y ago
    There is a dedicated website on this topic: https://learnhowtolearn.org https://learnhowtolearn.org
• fredgrott 1y ago
  that was not the kicker....it was the ending comment... Better learn how to learn as we are not training(or is that paying) you to learn...
• bwfan123 1y ago
  Looks like the AWS CEO has changed religion. A year back, he was aboard the ai-train - saying AI will do all coding in 2 years [1] Finally, the c-suite is getting it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41462545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41462545
  • N_Lens 1y ago
    It’s a requirement for the C-suite to always be aware of which way the wind is currently blowing.
    • pydry 1y ago
      An LLM would be more efficient at this task, truth be told.
      • chasd00 1y ago
        it could be if a new model was released every day where the training set included everything that happened yesterday.
    • latexr 1y ago
      It’s one thing to be aware of which way the wind is blowing, and quite another to let yourself be blown by the wind. Not to say that‘s what the AWS CEO is doing—maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I haven’t checked—I’m just commenting on the general idea.
  • n4r9 1y ago
    To be fair, the two statements are not inconsistent. He can continue to hire junior devs, but their job might involve much less actual coding.
  • OJFord 1y ago
    That's not necessarily inconsistent though - if you need people to guide or instruct the autonomy, then you need a pipeline of people including juniors to do that. Big companies worry about the pipeline, small companies can take that subsidy and only hire senior+, no interns, etc., if they want.
• lenerdenator 1y ago
  Junior staff will be necessary but you'll have to defend them from the bean-counters. You need people who can validate LLM-generated code. It takes people with testing and architecture expertise to do so. You only get those things by having humans get expertise through experience.
• failiaf 1y ago
  junior engineers aren't hired to get tons of work done; they're hired to learn, grow, and eventually become senior engineers. ai can't replace that, but only help it happen faster (in theory anyway).
• singularity2001 1y ago
  That's right it should be used to replace senior stuff right away
• stopandth1nk 1y ago
  If AI is so great and had PhD level skills (Musk) then logic says you should be replacing all of your _senior_ developers. That is not the conclusion they reached which implies that the coding ability is not that hot. Q.E.D.
• EternalFury 1y ago
  I was going to say something, then I realized my cynicism is already at maximum.
• octocop 1y ago
  but wait, what about my Nvidia stocks bro? Can we keep the AI hype going bro. Pls bro just make another AI assistant editor bro.
• pico303 1y ago
  At least one CEO seems to get it. Anyone touting this idea of skipping junior talent in favor of AI is dooming their company in the long run. When your senior talent leaves to start their own companies, where will that leave you? I’m not even sure AI is good for any engineer, let alone junior engineers. Software engineering at any level is a journey of discovery and learning. Any time I use it I can hear my algebra teacher telling me not to use a calculator or I won’t learn anything. But overall I’m starting to feel like AI is simply the natural culmination of US economic policy for the last 45 years: short term gains for the top 1% at the expense of a healthy business and the economy in the long term for the rest of us. Jack Welch would be so proud.
  • devoutsalsa 1y ago
    The whole premise is just silly of thinking we don't need juniors is just silly. If there's no juniors, eventually there will be no seniors. AI slop ain't gonna un-slop itself.
  • tombert 1y ago
    I think AI has overall helped me learn. There are lots of personal projects that I have wanted to build for years but have pushed off because the “getting started cost” is too high, I get frustrated and annoyed and don’t get far before giving up. Being able to get the tedious crap out of the way lowers the barrier to entry and I can actually do the real project, and get it past some finish line. Am I learning as much as I would had I powered through it without AI assistance? Probably not, but I am definitely learning more than I would if I had simply not finished (or even started) the project at all.
    • skydhash 1y ago
      What was your previous approach? From what I've seen, a lot of people are very reluctant about picking a book or read through a documentation before they try stuff. And then they got exposed to "cryptic" error message and then throw the towel.
      • 1y ago
• the_arun 1y ago
  Point is nobody has figured out how much AI can replace humans. People. There is so much of hype out there as every tech celebrity sharing their opinions without responsibility of owning them. We have to wait & see. We could change courses when we know the reality. Until then, do what we know well.
• farceSpherule 1y ago
  Bravo.. Finally a voice of reason. As someone who works in AI, any CEO who says that AI is going to replace junior workers has no f*cking clue what they are talking about.
• tomrod 1y ago
  My respect for people that take this approach is very high. This is the right way to approach integration of technology. Can SOME people's jobs be replaced by AI. Maybe on paper. But there are tons of tradeoffs to START with that approach and assume fidelity of outcome.
• segmondy 1y ago
  AWS CEO says what he has to say to push his own agenda and obviously to align himself with the most currently popular view.
• eurekin 1y ago
  Not often article makes me want to buy shares. Like... never. This article is spot on.
• senko 1y ago
  Did a double take at Berman bring described as an AI investor. He does invest but a more appropriate description would be "AI YouTuber". I don't mean that as a negative, he's doing great work explaining AI to (dev) masses!
• enigma101 1y ago
  finally some common sense from the detached c-suitors
• rvz 1y ago
  "AGI" always has been a narrative scam after late 2022.
• donperignon 1y ago
  "We have always been at war with Eastasia"
• elashri 1y ago
  In academia the research pipeline is this Undergraduate -> Graduate Student -> Post-doc -> Tenure/Senior Some exceptions occur for people getting Tenure without post doc or people doing some other things like taking undergraduate in one or two years. But no one expect that we for whole skip the first two and then get any senior researchers. The same idea applies anywhere, the rule is that if you don't have juniors then you don't get seniors so better prepare your bot to do everything.
• moi2388 1y ago
  I completely agree. On a side note.. ya’ll must be prompt wizards if you can actually use the LLM code. I use it for debugging sometimes to get an idea, or a quick sketch up of an UI. As for actual code.. the code it writes is a huge mess of spaghetti code, overly verbose, with serious performance and security risks, and complete misunderstanding of pretty much every design pattern I give it..
  • herpdyderp 1y ago
    The bigger the task, the more messy it'll get. GPT5 can write a single UI component for me no problem. A new endpoint? If it's simple, no problem. The risk increases as the complexity of the task does.
    • JustExAWS 1y ago
      I break complex task down into simple tasks when using ChatGPT just like I did before ChatGPT with modular design.
  • infecto 1y ago
    I agree with the article but also believe LLM coding can boost my productivity and ability to write code over long stretches. Sure getting it to write a whole feature, high opportunity of risk. But getting it to build out a simple api with examples above and below it, piece of cake, takes a few seconds and would have taken me a few minutes.
  • eloisius 1y ago
    I agree. AI is a wonderful tool for making fuzzy queries on vast amounts of information. More and more I'm finding that Kagi's Assistant is my first stop before an actual search. It may help inform me about vocabulary I'm lacking which I can then go successfully comb more pages with until I find what I need. But I have not yet been able to consistently get value out of vibe coding. It's great for one-off tasks. I use it to create matplotlib charts just by telling it what I want and showing it the schema of the data I have. It nails that about 90% of the time. I have it spit out close-ended shell scripts, like recently I had it write me a small CLI tool to organize my Raw photos into a directory structure I want by reading the EXIF data and sorting the images accordingly. It's great for this stuff. But anything bigger it seems to do useless crap. Creates data models that already exist in the project. Makes unrelated changes. Hallucinates API functions that don't exist. It's just not worth it to me to have to check its work. By the time I've done that, I could have written it myself, and writing the code is usually the most pleasurable part of the job to me. I think the way I'm finding LLMs to be useful is that they are a brilliant interface to query with, but I have not yet seen any use cases I like where the output is saved, directly incorporated into work, or presented to another human that did not do the prompting.
• mvkel 1y ago
  Agreed. LLMs are actually -the worst- at doing very specific repetitive things. It'd be much more appropriate for one to replace the CEO (the generalist) rather than junior staff.
• blitzar 1y ago
  Juniors are cheaper than Ai tokens and easier to fire and hire.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > “Often times fewer lines of code is way better than more lines of code,” he observed. “So I'm never really sure why that's the exciting metric that people like to brag about.” I remember someone that had a .sig that I loved (Can't remember where. If he's here, kudos!): > I hate code, and want as little of it in my programs as possible.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    [UPDATE] Is this a source?: https://softwarequotes.com/quote/i-hate-code--and-i-want-as-little-of-it-as-possibl https://softwarequotes.com/quote/i-hate-code--and-i-want-as-...
• butbuttbutbut 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • isatty 1y ago
    That’s a shit article by Thomas, people should stop quoting it.
  • varelse 1y ago
    [dead]
  • mxhwll 1y ago
    [flagged]
• latexr 1y ago
  Remark is at 12:02 in the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfocTxMzOP4&t=722s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfocTxMzOP4&t=722s
• rsynnott 1y ago
  The bubble has, if not burst, at least gotten to the stage where it’s bulging out uncomfortably and losing cohesion.
• catigula 1y ago
  No it isn't, he's lying. Sorry guys. Claude code is better than a junior programmer by a lot and these guys think it only gets better from there and they have people with decades in the industry to burn through before they have to worry about retraining a new crop.
• loeg 1y ago
  Sometimes, the C suite is there because they're actually good at their jobs.
• tananaev 1y ago
  As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. AI is not going to replace everyone tomorrow, but I also don't think we can ignore productivity improvements from AI. It's not going to replace engineers completely now or in the near future, but AI will probably reduce the number of engineers needed to solve a problem.
• thallavajhula 1y ago
  Finally someone from a top position said this. After all the trash the CEOs have been spewing and sensationalizing every AI improvement, for a change, a person in a non-engineering role speaks the truth.
• lbrito 1y ago
  >teach “how do you think and how do you decompose problems” That's rich coming from AWS! I think he meant "how do you think about adding unnecessary complexity to problems such that it can enable the maximum amount of meetings, design docs and promo packages for years to come"!
• oblio 1y ago
  I heard from several sources that AWS has a mandate to put GenAI in everything and force everyone to use it so... yeah.
• htrp 1y ago
  > “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.” Instead you should replace senior staff who make way more.
• scotty79 1y ago
  Are we trying to guilt trip corporations to do socially responsible thing regarding young workers skill acquisition? Haven't we learned that it almost always ends up in hollow PR and marketing theater? Basically the solution to this is extending education so that people entering workforce are already at senior level. Of course this can't be financed by the students, because their careers get shortened by longer education. So we need higher taxes on the entities that reap the new spoils. Namely those corporations that now can pass on hiring junior employees.
• revskill 1y ago
  Everything is boiled down to lambda calculus.
• varelse 1y ago
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• Sparkyte 1y ago
  It is too late it is already happening. The evolution of tech field is people being more experienced and not AI. But AI will be there for questions and easy one liners. Properly formalized documentation, even TLDRs.
• nlawalker 1y ago
  The cost of not hiring and training juniors is trying to retain your seniors while continuously resetting expectations with them about how they are the only human accountable for more and more stuff.
• mattmaroon 1y ago
  Why do so many people act like they’re mutually exclusive? Junior staff can use AI too.
• nextworddev 1y ago
  The amount of developer cope here is over 9000
• tehjoker 1y ago
  Unfortunately, this is the kind of view that is at once completely correct and anathema to private equity because they can squeeze a next quarter return by firing a chunk of the labor force.
• jryio 1y ago
  In the last few months we have worked with startups who have vibe coded themselves into an abyss. Either because they never made the correct hires in the first place or they let technical talent go. [1] The thinking was that they could iterate faster, ship better code, and have an always on 10x engineer in the form of Claude code. I've observed perfectly rational founders become addicted to the dopamine hit as they see Claude code output what looks like weeks or years of software engineering work. It's overgenerous to allow anyone to believe AI can actually "think" or "reason" through complex problems. Perhaps we should be measuring time saved typing rather than cognition. [1] vibebusters.com
  • DirkH 1y ago
    Give it a year or 2. Its not like 2 years ago everyone wasn't saying it would be 10+ years before AI can do what it does now.
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >Its not like 2 years ago everyone wasn't saying it would be 10+ years before AI can do what it does now. So far I don't see that notion disproved. Ai still doesn't truly "reason with" nor understand the data it outputs.
  • JustExAWS 1y ago
    As if startups before LLMs were creating great code. Right now on the front page, a YC company is offering a “Founding Full Stack Engineer” $100K-$150K. What quality of code do you think they will end up with? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/text-ai/jobs/OJBr0v2-founding-full-stack-engineer https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/text-ai/jobs/OJBr0v2-f...
    • zdragnar 1y ago
      Notably, that is a company that... adds AI to group chats. Startups offering crap salaries with a vague promise of equity in a vague product idea with no moat are a dime a dozen, and have been well before LLMs came around.
• dcchambers 1y ago
  A lot of companies that have stopped hiring junior employees are going to be really hurting in a couple of years, once all of their seniors have left and they have no replacements trained and ready to go.
• hazek112 1y ago
  Well yeah, they're just doing this with H1B's and OPT. The other kind of "AI".
• throwaway63467 1y ago
  I mean I used Copilot / JetBrains etc. to work on my code base but for large scale changes it did so much damage that it took me days to fix it and actually slowed me down. These systems are just like juniors in their capabilities, actually worse because junior developers are still people and able to think and interact with you coherently over days or weeks or months, these models aren’t even at that level I think.
• cwoolfe 1y ago
  I'm a technical co-founder rapidly building a software product. I've been coding since 2006. We have every incentive to have AI just build our product. But it can't. I keep trying to get it to...but it can't. Oh, it tries, but the code it writes is often overly complex and overly-verbose. I started out being amazed at the way it could solve problems, but that's because I gave it small, bounded, well-defined problems. But as expectations with agentic coding rose, I gave it more abstract problems and it quickly hit the ceiling. As was said, the engineering task is identifying the problem and decomposing it. I'd love to hear from someone who's used agentic coding with more success. So far I've tried Co-pilot, Windsurf, and Alex sidebar for Xcode projects. The most success I have is via a direct question with details to Gemini in the browser, usually a variant of "write a function to do X"
  • svara 1y ago
    > As was said, the engineering task is identifying the problem and decomposing it. In my experience if you do this and break the problem down into small pieces, the AI can implement the pieces for you. It can save a lot of time typing and googling for docs. That said, once the result exceeds a certain level of complexity, you can't really ask it to implement changes to existing code anymore, since it stops understanding it. At which point you now have to do it yourself, but you know the codebase less well than if you'd hand written it. So, my upshot is so far that it works great for small projects and for prototyping, but the gain after a certain level of complexity is probably quite small. But then, I've also find quite some value in using it as a code search engine and to answer questions about the code, so maybe if nothing else that would be where the benefit comes from.
    • mavilia 1y ago
      > At which point you now have to do it yourself, but you know the codebase less well than if you'd hand written it. Appreciate you saying this because it is my biggest gripe in these conversations. Even if it makes me faster I now have to put time into reading the code multiple times because I have to internalize it. Since the code I merge into production "is still my responsibility" as the HN comments go, then I need to really read and think more deeply about what AI wrote as opposed to reading a teammate's PR code. In my case that is slower than the 20% speedup I get by applying AI to problems. I'm sure I can get even more speed if I improve prompts, when I use the AI, agentic vs non-agentic, etc. but I just don't think the ceiling is high enough yet. Plus I am someone who seems more prone to AI making me lazier than others so I just need to schedule when I use it and make that time as minimal as possible.
• lvl155 1y ago
  Current generation of AI agents are great at writing a block of codes. Similar to writing a great paragraph. Know your tools.
• mhh__ 1y ago
  AWS is a very infrastructure intensive project with extremely tight SLAs, and no UI, makes a lot of sense.
• yoyohello13 1y ago
  Finally some fucking sanity from a megacorp CEO. Been a long time.
• ConanRus 1y ago
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• underlipton 1y ago
  They're deliberately popping the bubble. If they'd actually thought this and cared, they'd have said it 2 years ago, before the layoffs. Stop getting played.
• alecco 1y ago
  Perhaps I'm too cynical about messages coming out of FAANG. But I have a feeling they are saying things to placate the rising anger over mass layoffs, h1b abuse, and offshoring. I hope I'm wrong.
• m3kw9 1y ago
  Junior is just the lower rank, you will still have a lower rank, fine, do t call it junior
• thefz 1y ago
  [flagged]
• subhashp 1y ago
  Makes sense. Instead of replacing junior staff, they should be trained to use AI to get more done in less time. In next 2-3 years they will be experts doing good work with high productivity.
• cambaceres 1y ago
  > “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?” In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great. We discovered that reasoning and critical thinking is impossible without a foundational knowledge about what to be critical about. I think the same can be said about software development.
  • rkomorn 1y ago
    Most of what I remember of my high school education in France was: here are the facts, and here is the reasoning that got us there. The exams were typically essay-ish (even in science classes) where you either had to basically reiterate the reasoning for a fact you already knew, or use similar reasoning to establish/discover a new fact (presumably unknown to you because not taught in class). Unfortunately, it didn't work for me and I still have about the same critical thinking skills as a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau.
    • darkwater 1y ago
      > Unfortunately, it didn't work for me and I still have about the same critical thinking skills as a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. Why do you say so? Even just stating this probably means you are one or a few steps further...
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        Perhaps you overestimate me (or underestimate Beaujolais Nouveau (though how one could underestimate Beaujolais Nouveau is a mystery to me, but I digress)). But also, it takes a lot of actual learning of facts and understanding reasoning to properly leverage that schooling and I've had to accept that I am somewhat deficient at both. :)
        • 1y ago
• Borg3 1y ago
  Of corse it is... You should replace your senior staff with AI ;) Juniors will just prompt it then....
• arisAlexis 1y ago
  Hopium for the masses
• jimbo808 1y ago
  Hey at least there's one adult in the room in the big tech sphere.
• VagabundoP 1y ago
  Two things that will hurt us in the long run, working from home and AI. I'm generally in favour of both, but with newbies it hurts them as they are not spending enough face to face time with seniors to learn on the job. And AI will hurt them in their own development and with it taking over the tasks they would normally cut their teeth on. We'll have to find newer ways of helping the younger generation get in the door.
  • kisamoto 1y ago
    I would argue that just being in the office or not using AI doesn't guarantee any better learning of younger generations. Without proper guidance a junior would still struggle regardless of their location or AI pilot. The challenge now is for companies, managers and mentors to adapt to more remote and AI assisted learning. If a junior can be taught that it's okay to reach out (and be given ample opportunities to do so), as well as how to productively use AI to explain concepts that they may feel too scared to ask because they're "basics", then I don't see why this would hurt in the long run.
  • xz0r 1y ago
    A weekly 1 hour call, where pair programming/ exploration of an on-going issue, technical idea would be enough to replace face to face time with seniors. This has been working great for us, at a multi billion dollar profitable public company thats been fully remote.
• mintaka5 1y ago
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• charlieyu1 1y ago
  The same CEO that pushed employees back to the office?
• buyucu 1y ago
  Don't let his boss hear him :)
• lazarus01 1y ago
  > I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you think for yourself? Independent thinking is indeed the most important skill to have as a human. However, I sympathize for the younger generations, as they have become the primary target of this new technology that looks to make money by completely replacing some of their thinking. I have a small child and took her to see a disney film. Google produced a very high quality long form advert during the previews. The ad portrays a lonely young man looking for something to do in the evening that meets his explicit preferences. The AI suggests a concert, he gets there and locks eyes with an attractive young woman. Sending a message to lonely young men that AI will help reduce loneliness. The idea that you don't have to put any effort into gaining adaptive social skills to cure your own loneliness is scary to me. The advert is complete survivor bias. For each success in curing your boredom, how many failures are there with lonely young depressed men talking to their phone instead of friends? Critical thinking starts at home with the parents. Children will develop beliefs from their experience and confirm those beliefs with an authority figure. You can start teaching mindfulness to children at age 7. Teaching children mindfulness requires a tremendous amount of patience. Now the consequence for lacking patience is outsourcing your Childs critical thinking to AI.
  • petralithic 1y ago
    You should read the story The Perfect Match from the book Paper Menagerie and other stories by Ken Liu, it goes into what you mentioned about Google.
    • lazarus01 1y ago
      Thanks for sharing. There is also a movie called Her, with Joaquin Phoenix and ScarJo. Absolutely brilliant.
      • petralithic 1y ago
        Yes, however Her is a bit more optimistic and doesn't really delve into the data collection and usage aspects, it's more similar to a romance with some sci-fi aspects at the end.
• neuroelectron 1y ago
  CEOs that get paid the most don't care about problems like that.
• newsclues 1y ago
  Rather than AI that can function as many junior coders to enable a senior programmer to be more efficient. Having AI function as a senior programmer for lots of junior programmers that helps them learn and limits the interruptions for human senior coders makes so much more sense.
• terminatornet 1y ago
  Sounds like someone got the memo that the bubble's about to burst.
• tonymet 1y ago
  If AI is truly this effective, we would be selling 10x-10Kx more stuff, building 10x more features (and more quickly), improving quality & reliability 10x. There would be no reason to fire anyone because the owners would be swimming in cash. I'm talking good old-fashioned greed here. You don't fire people if you anticipate a 100x growth. Who cares about saving 0.1% of your money in 10 years? You want to sell 100x / 1000x/ 10000x more . So the story is hard to swallow. The real reason is as usual, they anticipate a downturn and want to keep earnings stable.
  • Viliam1234 1y ago
    Exactly. If the AI can multiply everyone's power by hundred or thousand, you want to keep all people who make a positive contribution (and only get rid of those who are actively harmful). With sufficiently good AI, perhaps the group of juniors you just fired could have created a new product in a week.
    • tonymet 1y ago
      even within the AI-paradigm, you could keep the juniors to validate and test the AI generated code. You still need some level of acceptance testing for the increased production. And the juniors could be producing automation engineering at or above the level of the product code they were producing prior to AI. A win win ( more production & more career growth) In other words, none of these stories make any sense, even if you take the AI superpower at face value.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• fabioyy 1y ago
  I do not agreed. Its was not even worth without llm. Junior will always take a LOT of time from seniors. and when the junior become good enough, he will find another job. and the senior will be stuck in this loop. junior + llm, it even worse. they become prompt engineers
• butterisgood 1y ago
  Agree. AI is, so far, almost as good as StackOverflow, except it lies confidently and generates questionable code.
• nektro 1y ago
  so refreshing to see this view from someone in a position high up like his
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  To maximize the effectiveness of a software development organization, you need to keep people for more than a few years, so they can absorb institutional knowledge and keep it from being lost. If only your senior devs know how the system works, you're in dire straits because they'll have a bad day and leave. Or you'll have too many of them and big egos will clash. (Not to mention, senior devs do not have "beginner mindset" and often miss the forest for the trees). Or at the very least your payroll will be larger than it needs to be, paying for all those seniors. Ideally, you want to hire junior developers, and in-parallel, level up both their dev skills and institutional knowledge. This isn't exactly rocket science, and I'm pretty sure software development leaders have known this for 4+ decades, but for some reason the current crop of leaders don't "get" software. I think a lot of wisdom was destroyed in the dot-com bubble crash, and the survivors, or the ones that grew up in the rubble (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Github) were the only ones who maintained these principles. Everyone else got a generic MBA running the show.
• Michael_Keller 1y ago
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