One of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard
The grey hair problem nobody put in the quarterly report.
Hi! I’m Peter, CEO of Kickresume, and these career-related stories caught my attention this month — and might catch yours too.
Today’s story: The grey hair problem nobody put in the quarterly report
Handpicked remote job paying in $$$: Junior remote roles edition!
Random piece of career advice that actually works: Green flags to look for in a company when you’re early in your career
Surprise at the end: FREE access to Kickresume Premium for 7 days
It’s not every day that I feel like I’ve been gaslit. But yesterday was that day.
I came across what seemed like a hot take from the CEO of Amazon Web Services. He talked about junior developers.
My first reaction was “ooh, this is going to be controversial!” I even made a cup of tea and closed my other tabs like a responsible adult.
But as I read it, I realized the only thing controversial about it was that I found it controversial. When in reality, it was just basic common sense —something that wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow a couple years ago.
Which means that somewhere between 2022 and now, I got gaslit.
Anyway. Here’s what he said.
This guy’s crazy, he’s talking sense
Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS, thinks replacing junior developers with AI is —and I’m quoting here — “one of the dumbest ideas” he’s ever heard.
He said that to his fellow executives who were treating this as some kind of revolutionary strategy.
Those are strong words. Especially coming from the guy who’s running one of the biggest cloud platforms on the planet.
And before you say that it’s obvious… I agree. It is.
But even in hindsight I’m not surprised I found it controversial at first.
It’s a big departure from the usual tech CEO script I’ve been hearing for the past few years.
There’s Dario Amodei of Anthropic for example, who has been cheerfully predicting AI will eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.
Or Sam Altman of OpenAI who explicitly compared AI agents to “relatively junior employees”... essentially arguing that AI is already doing their job.
And many other influential people, all arriving at slightly different conclusions that somehow all end in bad news for junior employees.
Which is why someone saying it’s one of the dumbest ideas he’s ever heard caught me off guard. But very quickly I realized I wasn’t surprised because I disagreed.
I was surprised because it was refreshing to finally hear someone way more important than me say that.
And unlike most people who call something dumb on the internet, he actually explained himself and gave 3 solid reasons why:
Junior developers are often the most AI-native people in the room.
“My experience is that many of the most junior folks are actually the most experienced with the AI tools. So they’re actually most able to get the most out of them.”
I can attest to this. About half of our development staff at Kickresume is relatively fresh out of school. And they’re not struggling with AI tools. If anything, they’re the ones showing the rest of us how to use them.
They’re not actually your biggest cost problem.
“They’re usually the least expensive because they’re right out of college, and they generally make less. So if you’re thinking about cost optimization, they’re not the only people you would want to optimize around.”
That’s also just... true. If cost is the concern, junior developers are arguably the last place you should be looking.
And finally, there’s the third one which has been bugging me throughout this whole junior-replacing conversation.
Where do seniors come from, exactly?
Speaking of junior developers–some of ours helped build this app!
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Since you’re making such good choices today, here’s one more: Kickresume mobile app.
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Seniors don’t grow on trees
Oh, right, all seniors were juniors once. And that’s true for every role, not just software developers.
So, what happens when the seniors leave?
Matt Garman put it this way: “At some point, that whole thing explodes on itself. If you have no talent pipeline that you’re building and no junior people that you’re mentoring and bringing up through the company, we often find that that’s where we get some of the best ideas.”
If there’s not enough new people coming in, and the seniors are slowly aging out of their roles, you will find yourself in a pretty tricky situation in a couple of years.
There’s not going to be enough mids and seniors left, and those that will be available, will be pretty expensive.
It’s always worked the same way: hiring juniors today is how you build the senior talent for tomorrow.
The inevitable flip side of that is: replacing your juniors with AI today means you won’t have senior talent tomorrow.
Well, not tomorrow, obviously. But eventually. And eventually has a way of arriving… eventually. (Not my most elegant sentence.)
That assumes, of course, that anyone is actually thinking that far ahead.
The current junior-replacing frenzy does make you wonder, though…Is the concept of thinking about the future limited to robot apocalypse nowadays?
I don’t think so…
But I do think that thinking about the future of people seems to be in short supply right now.
At least among the people whose literal job it is to make sure their companies have a future. (Because regular people worry about their jobs? They’re thinking about the future plenty…)
It’s more that somewhere along the way, a lot of tech leaders started making decisions based on what does this do for our stock price this quarter instead of what does this do for our company in 10 years.
Now, I’m not sitting here pretending AI isn’t going to change things. It already has and I’m very aware of that.
The junior developer role as of now is already different from what it was five years ago. And five years from now it’ll look different again. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The role evolves. Humans evolve with it.
What doesn’t work is removing a whole generation entirely.
And that’s also where my advice for you comes from.
The part Matt Garman didn’t cover but I will
The entry-level tech market is rough right now. That’s just true.
At the same time, the companies cutting juniors today are going to spend a lot of money hiring senior talent in a couple of years. Assuming they can find any.
Which means the junior developers who survive this period are going to be enormously valuable when that arrives.
So in practical terms?
Look for companies that have actually come out and said something publicly about their commitment to junior hiring.
AWS is one. IBM is another. They exist.
One more thing: if you get into a company with seniors who are actually willing to mentor you, stick around for that. You’ll thank yourself in a couple of years.
Handpicked remote jobs of the month
A small but useful update to this section: these jobs now live on our own job board.
Which means you can apply directly from the Kickresume app and prepare for the interview there too.
Anyway, here are some handpicked junior roles that might be of interest to some of you.
#1 Junior Software Developer at Orases
💰$60,000 - $90,000 annual US base range 💰
#2 Junior Data Analyst at Calibrate
💰$60,000 - $65,000 annual US base range 💰
#3 Junior Video Editor at Orchestra
💰$62,000 - $72,000 annual US base range 💰
#4 Junior Project Manager at Aggreko
💰$75,000 - $115,000 annual US base range 💰
Random piece of career advice
What are some green flags to look for in a company when you’re early career?
Short answer: look for companies that invest in you, not just hire you.
Here’s what that actually looks like:
They can name people who grew internally. Ask in the interview: “Can you give me an example of someone who started in this role and moved up?” If they have to think about it for too long, that’s your answer.
They have a learning budget and they can tell you what it is. “We encourage learning” is not a budget.
They have a structured onboarding. Not “here’s your laptop, good luck.” A company that has thought about how to bring new people up to speed is a company that has thought about keeping them.
They can tell you what happened to the last person in this role. Promoted? Moved internally? Left after three months? Ask. It’s not a rude question.
Their senior developers have been there a while. High senior turnover means something is wrong.
If you’ve scrolled this far, you deserve something nice. How about this?
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If there’s ever a time to have a great resume ready, it’s now.
Catch you later!
Peter
Great post, really enjoyed it and just noded all the way :)
Excellent. I've been thinking about this quite a bit.