Firing junior workers because AI can perform tasks is a misguided approach. Junior employees are among the least expensive and are highly engaged with AI tools, making them valuable for learning and long-term capability building. Hiring recent graduates remains important to teach software construction, problem decomposition, and critical thinking to sustain organizational expertise. Measuring AI value by percentage of code produced is a poor metric because higher output can mean poorer quality, and fewer lines of code can be preferable. AI usage among developers is widespread and growing, supporting tasks from unit tests to documentation and agentic workflows.
"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."
"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."
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