Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”<\/p>\n
Garman made that remark in conversation<\/a> with AI investor Matthew Berman, during which he talked up AWS\u2019s Kiro AI-assisted coding tool<\/a> and said he’s encountered business leaders who think AI tools “can replace all of our junior people in our company.”<\/p>\n That notion led to the \u201cdumbest thing I’ve ever heard\u201d quote, followed by a justification that junior staff are \u201cprobably the least expensive employees you have\u201d and also the most engaged with AI tools.<\/p>\n \u201cHow’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,\u201d he asked. \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Naturally he thinks AI \u2013 and Kiro, natch \u2013 can help with that education.<\/p>\n Garman is also not keen on another idea about AI \u2013 measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a silly metric,\u201d he said, because while organizations can use AI to write \u201cinfinitely more lines of code\u201d it could be bad code.<\/p>\n \u201cOften times fewer lines of code is way better than more lines of code,\u201d he observed. \u201cSo I’m never really sure why that’s the exciting metric that people like to brag about.\u201d<\/p>\n That said, he\u2019s seen data that suggests over 80 percent of AWS\u2019s developers use AI in some way.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes it’s writing unit tests, sometimes it’s helping write documentation, sometimes it’s writing code, sometimes it’s kind of an agentic workflow\u201d in which developers collaborate with AI agents.<\/p>\n Garman said usage of AI tools by AWS developers increases every week.<\/p>\n The CEO also offered some career advice for the AI age, suggesting that kids these days need to learn how to learn \u2013 and not just learn specific skills.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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?\u201d<\/p>\n Garman thinks that approach is necessary because technological development is now so rapid it\u2019s no longer sensible to expect that studying narrow skills can sustain a career for 30 years. He wants educators to instead teach \u201chow do you think and how do you decompose problems\u201d, and thinks kids who acquire those skills will thrive. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-361771","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115066165174148439","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}