Amazon sends chills through its workforce with mixed message memo about AI use

A lot of software engineers feel bleak about the future of the profession Corey Quinn Corey Quinn Special to El Reg Published sat // UTC Backbone of a beast – charting Nvidia's rise to networking titan 21 hours ago Domestic droid gone amok? Don't worry, you're covered 1 day ago Google's search revenue Ferrari hits an AI-powered speed bump 1 day ago AWS installs an AI accelerator every 14 seconds and eyes $1 trillion annual revenue 2 days ago Oracle wants to bill you for every AI task, not just every seat 2 days ago There's a ridiculously simple test you can use to figure out whether AI mandates at a given company are well-considered, or are being shoved out the door by out-of-touch buffoons: What happens when an engineer documents that AI made a task worse? Are they taken seriously, or are they marginalized and eventually managed out? Conveniently, this week Amazon published a treatise , a VP/Distinguished Engineer/Final Boss of Their Independent Contributor Technical Career Track, on the role of the developer in the age of AI. It was originally an internal missive sent to their software engineers and their managers back in September, which is an interesting lag for a document that sounds this confident. It also maps exceedingly well to what other organizations are struggling with. I think it's a good document, but I can't help but view it with a somewhat cynical eye. I see it as an attempt to make the future of the profession of software engineering feel less bleak. And it's feeling mighty bleak for a lot of folks right now. This treatise comes at a time of dramatic upheaval. Tech as an industry is no stranger to change (usually at 3AM, heralded ), but something about the current AI-ification of the world strikes many of us as fundamentally dissimilar from previous revolutions. Folks are scared about their career prospects. "Should I give up tech and get into farming?" is a sincere question multiple people have asked me. Tech is already a goat rodeo, so you've got a leg up if you do? In May, Amazon wisely shut down KiroRank, an employee-built cash incineration leaderboard that ranked people , after the obvious thing happened: people spun up junk tasks to climb the ranks. This is now called "tokenmaxxing," and the Terkowitz treatise specifically calls it out as being at odds with "frugality." Meta did the same thing with "Claudenomics" and 85K employees that same week.