An Amazon exec says junior developers have the most to gain from AI, not the most to lose
Tech leaders have been warning that AI is coming for junior developer jobs, but one Amazon executive says entry-level engineers shouldn't be worried — and they might actually have the most to gain.
Rory Richardson, director of go-to-market for generative AI at Amazon Web Services, said that AI is leveling the playing field between junior and veteran developers.
"A lot of studies that we're seeing as far as the impact of generative AI on this particular population is about getting your most junior noobs more performant," she said on an episode of the "Digital Disruption" podcast that aired Tuesday.
AI tools that use natural language make it easier for early-career developers to learn and contribute, Richardson said.
"I don't see anyone being left behind in this, mainly because it's so darn easy to use," Richardson said. "It's not like you have to learn a new programming language. It's all through natural language."
She sees the biggest shift coming for newcomers rather than veteran developers. "It's opening the aperture of who's going to be able to relate to the technology," Richardson added.
Richardson's optimism stands out in an area where layoffs have been widespread and job postings for software engineers are down more than a third from five years ago.
This month, Google's Jeff Dean said AI may perform at a junior coder's level "within the next year-ish." Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott predicts "95% of code is going to be AI-generated" within five years, while Anthropic's Dario Amodei expects AI to be writing "essentially all of the code" by next year.
Richardson instead sees AI as changing what entry-level developers do, rather than replacing them.
She compared it to when graphing calculators reshaped database administrator jobs. "We're gonna see that same shift within all of our job families, I think, over the next two years," she said. "What they actually do is probably going to change as well, meaning you're going to not see this area as just a cost center that you have to maintain old code."
Richardson said that when her kid is applying for a job in 2027, they probably wouldn't relate to computer language in the same way.
"But the role of invention, context switching, synthesis, those higher-order ideas that make humans super valuable are going to be even more valuable," she said.
The real risk, Richardson said, isn't being too junior but refusing to adapt. "Grit, creativity, those are those are still very important, the most human things possible," she said.
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