Amazon Web Service (AWS) CEO Matt Garman has issued a blunt message to enterprises thinking of replacing junior developers with AI, suggesting it’s the “dumbest thing” he’s ever heard.
Garman's comments came during a recent podcast appearance with Matthew Berman where the chief exec discussed the company’s current AI strategy and the technology’s impact on the industry.
The AWS chief’s stance on the topic follows repeated warnings that AI will disrupt white collar work across a range of industries, particularly entry-level roles where enterprises look to replace junior staff and automate processes.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that entry-level workers are firmly in the crosshairs as a result of AI and automation, but it’s safe to say that Garman isn’t convinced.
Focusing specifically on junior developers - another area where notable concerns have been raised - Garman said they represent a vital part of a company’s long-term talent pipeline.
“That’s like, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools.”
“How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,” he added.
“My view is that 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.”
Garman’s outlook on the matter echoes previous comments from industry figures on future prospects for junior developers.
Earlier this year, outgoing GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke said junior developers will still be vital despite claims that AI has the potential to replace them.
Once again, Dohmke’s stance centered around the fact these up-and-coming developers are “AI native” who’ve frequently used the technology during college, or even earlier at school.
AI will be a net positive for enterprises and workers
Garman suggested that AI will ultimately be a net positive for enterprises, providing they avoid reactionary moves like workforce cuts in favor of the technology.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to be in technology,” he said. “I’m on the much more optimistic side.”
A key appeal of the technology lies in taking away the “toil” that workers across a range of professions currently deal with, Garman noted. Equipping them with the technology will enable them to focus on the “things that they’re excited about”.
It’s a common talking point among proponents - and crucially, providers - of the technology over the last two years: freeing people up to do the more ‘rewarding’ aspects of their job or to focus on creative endeavors.
Few have been able to fully articulate how that will work in practice long-term, but Garman still stuck to this particular talking point.
“I think if you look at a lot of white collar jobs today, the vast majority of things that people spend their time doing is not the things that they would ever tell you they get excited about for their job,” he said.
“It’s not putting my numbers into this particular system, or pulling a report together so that I can report on the thing that I’m doing, or trying to collate a bunch of information so that I can actually understand what it is that I want to work on.
“I think people would love to spend more of their time on that creative aspect, on the driving aspect of doing interesting analysis, on doing the parts of their job that they love and not the parts that they don't.”
Ignore the AI code generation hype
AWS has observed positive signs on the appetite for AI tools internally, Garman noted. Around 80% of developers are using AI in their workflows “in some way”, he told Berman.
“Sometimes it's writing unit tests, sometimes it's helping write documentation, sometimes it's writing code,” he said. “And that number is going up every single week.”
AWS isn’t alone on this front, of course. Developers at other major industry competitors such as Microsoft and Google are even going so far as to write code using AI.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently revealed that over 25% of the company’s internal source code is AI-generated, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai boasted similar figures last year.
But Garman thinks this is a “silly metric” by which companies are measuring the success of their own internal gains with the technology.
“I think for a while, for the last year or two, people have been excited about bragging about the number of lines of code that have been written by AI,” he said. “It’s like a silly metric.”
“There might be bad code, by the way. Measuring lines of code is never actually the best metric. Oftentimes, fewer lines of code is way better than more lines, so I’m never really sure why that’s the exciting metric that people like to brag about.”
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