Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has dismissed the idea of replacing junior employees with AI, calling it “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Speaking with AI investor Matthew Berman, Garman discussed the role of AI in software development and promoted AWS’s Kiro AI-assisted coding tool. He said he’s met business leaders who believe AI can fully replace junior staff, but warned that such a strategy would be disastrous for long-term talent development.
“Junior people are probably the least expensive employees you have, and they’re the most engaged with AI tools,” he explained. “How’s that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything? 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.”
Garman stressed that AI should be used to support learning and problem-solving rather than as a shortcut to cutting jobs. He noted that AWS’s own developers are increasingly using AI to boost productivity, with more than 80 percent of them already leveraging tools for unit testing, documentation, code generation, and “agentic workflows” where human and AI collaborate.
He also criticized the growing industry trend of measuring AI’s effectiveness by the percentage of code it produces. “It’s a silly metric,” he said. “You can write infinitely more lines of code, but if it’s bad code, it doesn’t matter. Oftentimes fewer lines of code is way better than more.”
Beyond coding, Garman offered career advice for the AI-driven era. Instead of focusing solely on narrow technical skills, he said the next generation of workers needs to cultivate critical thinking, creativity, and the ability to learn continuously.
“I 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?”
According to Garman, the rapid pace of technological change means careers will no longer be sustained by mastering a single skill set. Instead, adaptability and problem decomposition will define long-term success in the age of AI.