AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'

Summary

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." Garman made that remark in conversation with AI investor Matthew Berman, during which he talked up AWS’s Kiro AI-assisted coding tool and said he's encountered business leaders who think AI tools "can replace all of our junior people in our company." That 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. “How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,” he asked. “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.” Naturally he thinks AI – and Kiro, natch – can help with that education. Garman is also not keen on another idea about AI – measuring its value by what percentage of code it contributes at an organization. “It’s a silly metric,” he said, because while organizations can use AI to write “infinitely more lines of code” it could be bad code. “Often times fewer lines of code is way better than more lines of code,” he observed. “So I'm never really sure why that's the exciting metric that people like to brag about.” That said, he’s seen data that suggests over 80 percent of AWS’s developers use AI in some way. “Sometimes it's writing unit tests, sometimes it's helping write documentation, sometimes it's writing code, sometimes it's kind of an agentic workflow” in which developers collaborate with AI agents. Garman said usage of AI tools by AWS developers increases every week. The CEO also offered some career advice for the AI age, suggesting that kids these days need to learn how to learn – and not just learn specific skills. “I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you thi...