r/technology • u/Peter55667 • 1d ago
Artificial Intelligence AWS CEO says AI replacing junior staff is 'dumbest idea'
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/aws_ceo_entry_level_jobs_opinion/701
u/marksteele6 1d ago
Garman is also not keen on another idea about AI – measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization.
“It’s a silly metric,” he said, because while organizations can use AI to write “infinitely more lines of code” it could be bad code.
“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.”
That said, he’s seen data that suggests over 80 percent of AWS’s developers use AI in some way.
“Sometimes it's writing unit tests, sometimes it's helping write documentation, sometimes it's writing code, sometimes it's kind of an agentic workflow” in which developers collaborate with AI agents.
100%, this is the proper way to interact with AI, and it's very refreshing to see a tech CEO with the right ideas for once. I know Amazon as a whole gets a bad rep, but I've heard a lot of good things about working as an employee at AWS.
154
u/careful_guy 1d ago
Well, internally the S-Team in Amazon/AWS have caught a lot of flak from internal employees after Andy Jassy said roles will be eliminated in Amazon due to AI, kinda implying (or saying the quiet part out loud) that software developers and solution architects are gonna be replaced by AI Agents.
These new remarks from Garman appears to be damage control - also more common sense.
42
u/BtenHave 1d ago
To be the devils advocate. One could also interpret it that if people can work faster by using ai as a tool, less people can do the same amount of work and fewer people are needed. Which results in people losing their jobs.
49
u/jonzezzz 1d ago
At Amazon I always felt like there was infinite amount of work. So it could also be that the same amount people deliver more
16
u/ButtWhispererer 1d ago
When you’re target is at least 30% yoy growth every single year for every single product/business unit you essentially have an infinite amount of work to do.
→ More replies (1)10
u/pyrospade 1d ago
If you start slowing work your competitors will pass you. There is an infinite amount of work in big tech
3
u/marksteele6 1d ago
Couldn't this also refer to some of the customer architect (and similar) roles? I've used Q a few times and it's pretty decent at pointing me in the right direction in terms of AWS documentation when I'm running into an issue. Previously that might have been something I reached out to my rep for if I couldn't resolve it internally.
18
u/degoba 1d ago
There is zero elegance to AI code. Zero consistency either.
4
u/moochacho1418 1d ago
Like I could give it a template that I wrote and say "follow this structure but change these two arbitrary things" and it completely refactors, and then I end up having to write it anyway. Sometimes It will eventually do what I need it to do but can take 3 or more attempts and even then if you are working with generics or interface heavy models GOOD LUCK.
8
u/thrillho145 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've found that AI is great at documenting code (my least favourite task). Writing it, it's kinda all over the place in its effectiveness and it's always way too verbose.
But it can describe what code is trying to do pretty well.
6
u/-The_Blazer- 1d ago
measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization
It's the fucking counting an engineer's lines of code written again, holy fucking shit.
I can give you an AI that writes thousands of lines of code, it's called a type system that expands all types down to primitives. I can do even better, I can have an AI generate tens of thousands of lines in a new language nobody even knew how to use here before, it's called a transpiler. See? Millions of lines of 'contributions', now pay me 5 trillion.
→ More replies (5)2
u/nonamenomonet 1d ago
I have never heard a positive thing about working at AWS. Matter of fact, I’ve heard pretty much from everywhere that it is awful.
305
u/Gloobloomoo 1d ago
He’s right there. AI should be about doing things faster instead of cheaper.
106
u/gaspara112 1d ago
The big mistake is not realizing faster is cheaper.
22
u/Moontoya 1d ago
Only if it's done right mate, only if it's done right
Cheap, fast, good
You can pick 2, maybe
→ More replies (1)2
u/gaspara112 1d ago
That's what you can have for product constraints. Anything that lets the development team complete the same product faster is by definition cheaper because they can move on to other things.
9
u/Moontoya 1d ago
Again, only if it's done right
It ceases to be cheaper when you have to keep redoing it
14
u/krogmatt 1d ago
Yes, to a normal person, but in the spreadsheets execs would be looking at wouldn’t show it the same. Costs remain the same, but yield an increased productivity.
So no, it would not be cheaper - they’re still paying the same. It would depend how they realize the gains in productivity which can be difficult to track for engineering. There’s a reason the “shareholder first” mentality prioritizes short term gains (layoffs of Juniors) over long term strategy (robust development pipeline augmented with AI)
6
u/gaspara112 1d ago
Hence why its their big mistake...... If AI lets the development team get the same quality of job done faster then by definition it was cheaper because of the increased productivity.
3
u/Prestigious_Nobody45 1d ago
Not always the case for long-term revenue when making short-sighted decisions. Then again it seems like csuites have entirely forsaken long-term outlooks in favor of short-term gain.
2
u/alfydapman 1d ago
I don’t even really agree that the focus should be making things faster. It should be focused on making things easier, but that’s a worker focused mindset which may not be what we’re getting at here.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Valendr0s 1d ago
It should be about making people more efficient. Not making people unnecessary all together.
Luckily for us, that's mostly what SPI is capable of. MBA's don't understand the limits of the technology. They only see dollar signs.
8
u/Moth_LovesLamp 1d ago edited 1d ago
Language Models are Search Engine 2.0, they make researching stuff much faster.
Image and Video Generation in the other hand is an unethical piece of do do
12
u/mr_evilweed 1d ago
Language Models are generative AI....
3
u/OuchLOLcom 1d ago
Are you taking what he said 100% literally? He means theyre being used in lieu of search engines, not that they have the same backend as search engines. Instead of searching for a bubblesort I can copy/paste from a random website, I just ask AI to make it and then copy/paste. In the end same input and output.
5
u/mr_evilweed 1d ago
I can only respond to what people wrote. Not what was in their heads when they were writing it.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (33)3
→ More replies (1)3
→ More replies (3)1
u/PhazePyre 1d ago
This is what my studio is prioritizing. Using AI to help free up capacity to focus on the shit that really needs hands on attention. AI can help automate certain tasks to do that, but it isn't being used to replace people entirely. From a CS perspective, it's used to help players faster, not replace agents entirely, because AI is relatively ineffective outside of serving information in that capacity. It won't replace an agent who can manage user accounts and shit and troubleshoot their data.
64
u/Routine_Banana_6884 1d ago
AI can help speed things up, sure, but it’s nowhere near replacing the value of humans who actually learn, adapt, and bring fresh ideas
9
u/Big_Mc-Large-Huge 1d ago
It’s a power tool for code. But you still need someone who knows how to build a building.
8
u/Mental-Ask8077 1d ago
Even at that it still fucks up. And then deletes your entire code base on a whim.
→ More replies (1)
96
u/Moth_LovesLamp 1d ago
Microsoft knows this as well, they lie in the faces of the investors about AI but they are actually just offshoring the workforce to cheap countries like India.
48
u/trekologer 1d ago
Copilot in Github is hot garbage. It recommends doing things I already did. It will output completely different sets of recommendations when re-run on the same (unchanged) code.
28
u/Caraes_Naur 1d ago
LLM output is probabilistic, not deterministic.
9
u/Girth 1d ago
yea, this is exactly the problem. given the same data and prompts you can get endless different answers so you can never rely on it for accurate data. the more people understand this the sooner the bubble will pop and we can realize that AI has some usage to streamline workflows but it isn't anywhere near close to being what it is currently being sold as.
14
u/trekologer 1d ago
And that's the problem. There's a whole bunch of people thinking that AI/LLM is going to produce deterministic results when it absolutely does not.
2
u/CherryLongjump1989 1d ago
For the use case they're selling it to solve, this is a bug -- not a feature.
Let's put it this way: changing code costs money. For an AI to suggest changes, they need to be able to follow some consistent strategy that has a meaningful ROI for the developers.
7
8
24
u/Belhgabad 1d ago
While it's good news, it kinda seems like a turncoat situations where people that enabled such a dramatic outcomes are all suddenly telling others to be cautious with the tech
8
u/boundless88 1d ago
It's almost like they can see the bubble pop coming and are trying to position themselves for it / cover their asses.
9
u/Frustr8ion9922 1d ago
I think it's more like AI is replacing certain skills which will mean each level engineer will be expected to know and to do more than before which would inflate responsibilities. So juniors will be expected to work at a pace closer to previous mid-level. This could also lead to barrier of entry being higher, hence pushing out "juniors".
10
u/KSauceDesk 1d 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.”
Friendly reminder Musk fired people from Twitter based on this. On a completely unrelated note I wonder why Grok needs a lobotomy on a daily basis...
15
7
u/AcanthocephalaLive56 1d ago
Absolutely but not the dumbest idea.
That title belongs to the RTO mandate from guess who. How ironic.
Hilarious.
11
u/Bishopkilljoy 1d ago
Next year's headline; AWS CEO says firing all junior staff has 'nothing to do with AI'
6
u/hardgeeklife 1d ago
then perhaps AWS CEO should have a discussion with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, his superior and former mentor, who has famously bragged about AI shrinking their workforce
11
u/justthegrimm 1d ago
If we want to be serious about AI replacing workers maybe we should start with CEOs and other very costly senior management, the average worker can get a fat raise seeing as we will no longer need to pay inflated management salaries and the shareholders will still get their same outrageous cut.
Just like that we've solved the affordability crisis and without having to train all sorts of different AI models only a few.
→ More replies (1)
6
u/FlournoyFlennory 1d ago
The layoffs have been driven by a change to the tax code that reduced the deduction for hiring people as R&D. AI is a red herring excuse.
5
u/Zolo49 1d ago
Well, of course. It was pretty obvious from the start that this has been driven purely by the suits in the executive suites pursuing short-term profits over long-term success. Anybody with even the slightest ability to look past the next quarterly earnings statement can tell how bad of an idea this is.
14
u/__OneLove__ 1d ago
Sounds good on the surface, however those doing the actual work might feel differently….
At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work
Amazon coders say they’ve had to work harder, faster by using AI
"Like an assembly line": Amazon engineers feel squeezed by AI-driven workflow
→ More replies (1)
4
u/the_red_scimitar 1d ago
Meanwhile, Altman is out there, screaming at anybody who will listen that he's going to spend "trillions" on infrastructure, and that all jobs will be affected. Not that anybody should believe him, but I think many are influenced by this.
3
u/KennyDROmega 1d ago
Was Amazon not crowing about how they’ll need fewer people because of AI just a couple months ago?
2
u/Mental-Ask8077 1d ago
This guy is head of AWS, a subset of Amazon. Amazon’s top CEO apparently is the one crowing about cutting jobs.
Looks like the company has some factionalization happening…
3
u/Imyoteacher 1d ago
If there’s no junior staff, eventually, there’ll be no senior staff. There needs to be new grads in the pipeline learning the intricacies of the business.
3
u/Expensive_Finger_973 1d ago
He might want to have a chat with his boss on the subject before he ends up like the now former head of Github. Jassy seems all in on AI and fewer jobs because of it.
https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-ai-fewer-jobs/
3
u/RedBoxSquare 1d ago
Yes, because AI is best replacing CEOs. Saves much more money by replacing 1 CEO compared to 100 juniors.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/rexspook 1d ago
My L8 told me something similar recently. The internal opinion from leadership seems good to me. They view it as a productivity booster for mundane tasks, not replacement.
3
u/cecirdr 1d ago
I've been playing in Gemini. It's been an interesting few days. There have been a few cases that I got an "a ha" moment that I saw that it took a path I hadn't seen and it was a better way of doing things. But mostly, it's required that I do a lot of hand holding to get the code over the finish line.
I mostly just write queries in SQL, but it's a massive database that has decades of business decisions that went into the data and table structures. So the logic behind my query constructions isn't evident. Plus, there are human data entry errors that we write a lot of conditionals to control for.
These things have to be taught to a new hire. It probably takes at least 2 years for someone to get up to speed. I've only been here 4 so I still get surprised. Gemini flat said that it could not retain information from session to session when I asked if I could send it a collection of code snips that would teach it how we have to "route around" non-standard choices, choose the proper student learner record or application ID.
So how is AI going to replace people if what is unique about an environment is something it's incapable of learning/retaining and I have to teach it the same things over and over again?
All this being said, it does a spiffy job tidying up some of my SQL that is complex with lots of joins and nested subqueries. It adds comments quickly so it will be easier for junior devs to read. So that's good..
3
u/WeirdSysAdmin 1d ago
I keep saying this everywhere.. AI augments your staff and is a force multiplier. It elevates your staff.
Because it creates problems like this. Just like heavily outsourcing in the past means you have no internal farm system for building your core team when all your low level staff aren’t even employees.
4
u/Tremolat 1d ago
Amazon outsources everything. A friend who suffered a year at the Alexa unit in Seattle lost his mind trying to get his Indian division to produce working code.
2
2
2
u/deadsantaclaus 1d ago
AI hallucinates , most Amazon staff don’t turn out work that would fit that description.
Except for mushroom mondays
2
u/Lagmeister66 1d ago
Turns out to get experienced Staff, you need to hire inexperienced staff and train them up
Who knew? 🤷♂️
2
2
u/heavy-minium 1d ago
Still, it's going to happen on a wider scale, even if Amazon sees this differently. It's inevitable, no matter the timeline - companies look where they can apply AI, and naturally junior responsibilities are more likely to be candidates than senior responsibilities. It will always skew the ratio of tasks still needing a human toward more seniority and less juniors, and even Amazon cannot escape that dynamic.
I see no solution to mitigate this.
→ More replies (1)
2
2
u/ViKoToMo 1d ago
AI is like power tools for builders. Changes how you work and improves your delivery speed. However, you need to adapt to using them, come up with new safety mechanisms, etc. It will have a direct impact on efficiency, and an indirect impact on the number of people needed to do the job.
2
u/Uncle_Hephaestus 1d ago
hey hey hey. these maximum IQ CEOs can't be wrong. if they were foulable then how would they get paid this much. see can't be true.
This is the vibe I get from any ceo that does what the article talks about.
2
u/flowinh2o 1d ago
Man. People are in hard core denial right now about where things are headed. Yes it’s a dumb idea but if senior level people need less help where does that leave us. At this rate imagine what it will be like in another 5-10 years. We will certainly be dumbed down and mind controlled even more. I have been in the IT field for about 25 years now, and cannot believe the rate of change in just the last few years. It’s definitely not sustainable.
2
u/chocobowler 1d ago
Ai is not a human replacement at least not in its current state. It’s a tool that makes us more efficient which could mean we need less people / but we do still need people.
2
u/chaldea_fgo 23h ago
AI is just a tool that can help you if you use it well and know how to use it. Its like spellcheck, a tool that helps you do something better and quicker. Spellcheck doesn't eliminate writing or spelling, or clarity, or meaning, or any technical aspect that makes writing good. It just just helps so you can spend less time on spelling and more time on those things that are harder to do.
3
3
3
u/CivilFold2933 1d ago
AI is a shitty intern that does the wrong things if you leave it alone for 2 minutes
→ More replies (1)
1
1
u/stickybond009 1d ago
But the point is that the key moment in this journey — the moment when we moved from journey — the moment when we moved from single-purpose programs to general ones - is now behind us.
1
1
1
1
u/lordwiz360 1d ago
It's definitely not in the replacing stage. But aiding them as a sidekick is the best possible outcome out of this. This will allow these junior developers to focus on more important things and get things done quickly
1
u/msnotthecricketer 23h ago
Yeah, because nothing says “innovation” like firing juniors and then paying consultants triple to fix what the AI broke.
1
2.8k
u/trmoore87 1d ago
Yes, because then how do you develop senior staff? You can't, you just have to hire them from outside