Comment by bigbadfeline
2 days ago
> When your senior talent leaves to start their own companies, where will that leave you?
The CEO didn't express any concerns about "talent leaving". He is saying "keep the juniors" but he's implying "fire the seniors". This is in line with long standing industry trends and it's confirmed by the flowing quote from the OP:
>> [the junior replacement] notion led to the “dumbest thing I've ever heard” quote, followed by a justification that junior staff are “probably the least expensive employees you have” and also the most engaged with AI tools.
He is pushing for more of the same, viewing competence and skill as threats and liability to be "fixed". He's warning the industry to stay the course and keep the dumbing-down game moving as fast as possible.
Well that's even stupider. What do you do when your juniors get better at using your tools?
The 2010's tech boom happened because big tech knew a good engineer is worth their weight in gold, and not paying them well meant they'd be headhunted after as little as a year of work. What's gonna happen when this repeats) if we're assuming AI makes things much more efficient)?
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And that's my kindest interpretation. One that assumes that a junior and senior using a prompt will have a very close gap to begin with. Even seniors seem to struggle right now with current models working at scale on Legacy code.
Maybe the head of AWS knows the current AI hype cycle is just that.
100%, and this is him selling the new batch of AWS agent tools. If your product requirements + “Well Architected” NFRs are expressed as input, AWS wants to run it and extract your cost of senior engineers as value for him.
Also fits in very well to amazon's famously low average tenure/ hiring practices.