Comment by pj_mukh
3 days 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-sh...
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.
> quoting these people unedited
If you're quoting something, the only ethical thing to do is as verbatim as possible and with a sufficient amount of context. Speeches should not be cleaned up to what you think they should have said.
Now, the question of who you go to for quotes, on the other hand .. that's how issues are really pushed around the frame.
By unedited I mean, take the message literally and quote it to support a narrative that isn’t clear or consistent. (even internally among Amazon leadership)
Those statements are entirely consistent to me.
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.
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.