Amazon Cloud Chief Says Replacing Junior Staff With AI is 'Dumbest' Idea (yahoo.com) 50
Matt Garman, Amazon's cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don't ditch your junior employees. From a report: The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the "Matthew Berman" podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard."
"They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools," he said. "How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?" Garman said companies should keep hiring graduates and teaching them how to build software, break down problems, and adopt best practices.
He also said the most valuable skills in an AI-driven economy aren't tied to any one college degree. "If you spend all of your time learning one specific thing and you're like, 'That's the thing I'm going to be expert at for the next 30 years,' I can promise you that's not going to be valuable 30 years from now," he said.
"They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools," he said. "How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?" Garman said companies should keep hiring graduates and teaching them how to build software, break down problems, and adopt best practices.
He also said the most valuable skills in an AI-driven economy aren't tied to any one college degree. "If you spend all of your time learning one specific thing and you're like, 'That's the thing I'm going to be expert at for the next 30 years,' I can promise you that's not going to be valuable 30 years from now," he said.
How does it work? (Score:5, Insightful)
"How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?"
Well, by exercising stock options and with the parachute it’s 9 figures for me, and I’ve been gone 9 years at that point so who cares? -CEO
Re:How does it work? (Score:5, Informative)
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They ever shitcan that asshole?
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Re:How does it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
Given your handle, I would hope you remember Cover Oregon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: How does it work? (Score:2)
After seeing all of the bullshit sales tactics Oracle uses (Audit, Bargain, Cloud) I'd never work for that company. Their culture is rotten to the core.
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Well, you are talking about Oracle.
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whatabout this? (Score:3)
Mr. MANZULLO. What you see on page 11 is nothing less than staggering. Because you state that the earnings-per-share range, the minimum payout is $3.13, the maximum was $3.23, with a target of $3.18.
And just by happenstance, coincidence, you could almost say on your terms that for Fannie Mae to pay out the maximum amount in annual incentive payment awards in 1998, the earnings per share would have to be $3.23. It is below the $3.13 minimum payouts threshold, no bonus would occur.
And then you state, remarkably, the 1998 earnings-per-share number turned out to be $3.23 and nine mills, a result that Fannie Mae met the EPS maximum payout goal right down to the penny, and that if they had used the correct accounting practices—which you say in your testimony, accounting violations cannot be dismissed as mere differences of interpretation, Fannie Mae understood the rules and simply chose not to follow them, but if Fannie had followed the practices, there would not have been a bonus that year. Is that not correct?
Mr. FALCON. That is right, Congressman.
Mr. MANZULLO. Well, what are you saying here? Are you saying this is coincidence? Or did somebody cook the books to come up with $3.23 and nine mills so they got the maximum payment.
Mr. FALCON. I think what we are saying is, there are very strong appearances that the management did, in this instance, improperly defer $200 million of this $400 million expense to the next year for the purposes of achieving these bonus targets.
Mr. MANZULLO. So the main purpose was so they could get their bonuses. That is what you just said.
Mr. FALCON. Yes, in addition to the appearances of smoothing earnings. https://commdocs.house.gov/com... [house.gov]
Later...
Former Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines and two other top executives have agreed to a $31.4 million settlement with the government announced today over their roles in a 2004 accounting scandal.
Raines, former Fannie chief financial officer Timothy Howard and former controller Leanne Spencer were accused in a civil lawsuit in December 2006 with manipulating earnings over a six-year period at the company, the largest U.S. financer and guarantor of home mortgages. https://www.seattletimes.com/b... [seattletimes.com]
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I had a friend whose job at Oracle was to gin up fake demos of products that didn't exist. When the customer saw the demo and decided they wanted it, the second-tier sales staff would drag out pricing negotiations until the product was actually built. If the customer ever got anything for their trouble, it was an alpha at best.
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Totally true
Ten years from now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical high-level exec:
"Ten years in the future, I won't be working here anymore. What do I care?"
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The belief in altruism is very quaint but at odds with the actual world.
That has not been my experience. The experience I have had is that the more money you have, the less altruistic you are, hence the reason you have more money. I've had, within my own life and close circle of family and friends, a few very heartwarming stories this week about the kindness and generosity of strangers. Then again, we tend to attract people like ourselves and are repulsed by people we don't understand. We are solidly middle class and that's partly due to my own actions of not caring about hordi
Re: Ten years from now? (Score:3)
Itâ(TM)s a valid point. If you use AI to replace juniors and rely on seniors to make sure the AI isnâ(TM)t producing garbage, youâ(TM)re going to immediately run into issues when those seniors move on and the people coming in to replace them have no ability to provide checks and balances.
Using AI to help generate remedial code can be a good productivity boost, but expecting it to replace your workforce is ridiculously shortsighted.
Right idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
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We had mission statement generators and other assorted bullshit engines on the web already at 2000's, if not earlier. Turns out all you need to do the job of an exec is generative grammatics e.g. Chomsky, all of which was already sorted out in the 70's.
In pretty much every other field of human endeavour, except a few more like public relations and politics, you need your utterances to actually mean something. A lack of meaning or misrepresentation will come back to haunt you. Not so much on the top of the l
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Yep, AI should replace their most expensive employees - the C-suite.
I am just waiting for the first board of directors to realize this.
Aye replace youre ceo's etc with Ai (Score:2)
No one has learned anything (Score:2)
"How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?"
As if good IT people ever stop learning things. Pretty short sighted to focus on new(er) / cheap(er) employees, simply for their AI tools experience, over people who have more overall and relevant experience, who can add AI tools to that. But, you know, management ... Two less-experienced people at half the price of one more-experienced person isn't necessarily the deal it seems -- especially if the former is narrow and the latter is broad, 'cause you never know what kinds of problems will arise.
Guess who is next to get replaced with AI? (Score:3)
Yup. I predict this guy's job will probably be next on the chopping block.
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Bezos has probably already called Jassy and told him to dump this guy because he's not maximizing the value of Bezos' Amazon holdings.
Solution is simple: replace senior staff (Score:3)
Since replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is "one of the dumbest things ever," the solution to using AI is simple: replace senior staff.
Start with CEOs, and then everybody in the the C-Suite. Bonus, this way you get the greatest savings, since you're replacing the most highly paid people.
CEO make sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard to believe a CEO that says something intelligent. I am so used to them making jack asses of themselves. But this guy has a brain..
The world does not stay the same. Employment skills cease to be essential in a decade and in 30 years they become automated. The smart people learn new skills every year. That is what keeps you employed.
And he is totally right about training your employees. The hardest thing in the world is to find competent people. If you find them you need to keep them. When their job gets eliminated, move them someplace else within your company. If your company doesn't have a place for them then you need to expand your company and you have not been doing that.
The entire IT industry for the last 20 years (Score:2)
They want us to be cogs so they can cheaply swap Us in and out like cogs
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yeah that worked well!!
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Does it take a unique skillset to unclog a paper jam at the printer or plug in a network cable? No.
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I've encounter a lot of people that find both of those things challenging.
It's not just layoffs (Score:2)
They are cutting the dumbest junior devs, at least what I saw my company's layoffs
Expertise (Score:2)
'That's the thing I'm going to be expert at for the next 30 years,' I can promise you that's not going to be valuable 30 years from now,"
I dunno. I got started programming Acorn Risk Machines and here I am 30 years later making a decent living off of it.
I'm wondering what it will be like... (Score:2)
After many, many billions of dollars thrown in the trash, professionals having to be retrained to occupy the positions that "AIs" would replace, lost trust in companies that spent decades gaining that trust to lose it in a matter of months because of absurd damage caused by the use of "AI".
Well, except for the CEOs of these companies, who will have already jumped ship with golden parachutes in search of the next victim to destroy. Seriously, why do the owners of these com
tying dry-flies (Score:1)
Sure (Score:1)
Don't replace workers with AI (Score:2)
Give them access to AI and time to learn how to use it effectively
dead end in the making (Score:3)
AI can replace a lot of intro-level workers. Honestly, most of the stuff I get out of AI is intern-level, be it code or text.
BUT - how then, do people move up from intro-level ?
And that's the kicker. For a couple decades now, companies have essentially gone "nah, we don't train people, we hired them once someone else has trained them". Well, good luck with that when the last few places where people can gain experience fall away.
The focus on quarterly results will be the downfall of western civilization. We will be eclipsed by countries like China who have decades-long plans, even when much of the rest of their system is shit. Nobody wants to live in a dictatorship. But even fewer people want to live in a completely ruined economy.
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Actually, aren't we already eclipsed by them? They manufacture more than us for far cheaper... that's why companies are just offshoring everything but flipping burgers (give them time, and they'll find a way). If they keep 'some' manufacturing job in America, now you have to pay a new worker $13-15 an hour, and if the place is unionized, then you have to give them regular breaks and guarantee them OT and holiday pay and et cetera, et cetera.
Why do that for a high school graduate when you can have a 9-year
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Actually, aren't we already eclipsed by them?
No, not yet.
Innovation still largely happens in the West. China and others are rapidly catching up, but they're not there quite yet. And their disadvantage of cheap labour is slowly diminishing as well as the Chinese people demand that they benefit from the whole thing as well.
pay a new worker $13-15 an hour, and if the place is unionized, then you have to give them regular breaks and guarantee them OT and holiday pay and et cetera, et cetera.
That is all smoke & mirrors. How many companies from Europe do you see outsourcing to the USA because of the lower minimum wage and the weaker unions? None. Because those are just bullshit arguments they've been peddling for decad
Careful (Score:2)
No joke (Score:2)
Again, no funny on the ripe target. I was expecting at least a few hypocrisy jokes about Amazon firing people while telling "business leaders" not to.