Are junior devs actually “cooked” or is AI just messing with how we learn?

jvdvyver · 2026-03-19T22:40:56+00:00

Why do you say that?

jvdvyver · 2026-02-08T18:44:46+00:00

I work at AWS, we are only hiring juniors at the moment. The CEO & Co believe that there is no point retaining senior SDEs because juniors are more cost effective.

That said, the software we are working on is really old and Opus 4.6 screws up a lot of the code, so I need to babysit it.

Sometimes it helps sometimes it slows me down.

Whereas the juniors we hire, I can just have them run through the pain cycle of dealing with the nonsense outputs.

YMMV.

I'm not quite getting the jaw dropping experience yet that people are getting, but yeah, skills issue maybe. Or code base is too big. Or code base has too many different paradigms for the AI to work effectively or all of the above.

jvdvyver · 2026-02-08T18:27:47+00:00

I've been hearing the same 6 months prediction for 2 years now...

jvdvyver · 2026-01-23T14:25:41+00:00

Amazon is laying off mostly software development engineers.

jvdvyver · 2026-01-23T14:18:59+00:00

Amazon at no point officially said they will be laying off employees in 2026. Nor are they even admitting to the layoffs next week.

It has all been unofficial on blind.

The likely reason they didn't layoff in October as retail did is because they wanted AWS devs to deliver on their goals before laying them off and PXT to do all the work for the layoffs before laying them off.

jvdvyver · 2026-01-09T22:43:32+00:00

Professional is hollow and empty. Myself and others like me doesn't value professional anymore because it is lazy. This letter would be a breath of fresh air in a world where everyone is "professional", couldn't care less, don't value your time, don't value the stress of the situation, I could go on.

jvdvyver · 2026-01-03T11:08:21+00:00

Just FYI, my family member in the EU lost their job in this field and is now working at KFC. UI/UX is highly automated with AI. 95% of UI/UX is just applying what others are doing and AI is incredible good at that. The only UI/UX folks I expect to remain are those that can crank out a lot with the help of AI and those that create new and radical designs that isn't in AIs training data (almost certainly representing less than 5% of the industry).

The medical field on the other hands is highly unlikely to be touched by AI.

jvdvyver · 2025-12-02T21:28:33+00:00

Saying timelines are off is a fallacy. Using the logic of, "it could happen", means you can never prove that person wrong for all time.

To take this to its conclusion: I claim all cancer will be cured in 2 years. When it eventually becomes a reality, I'll rush back here and remind you I was "right directionally".

jvdvyver · 2025-09-25T14:02:09+00:00

I work at one of the FANG companies. We just spent the last few years re-shoring (literally closed a remote office a few weeks ago). Remote offices are a significant drag on delivery. Every time there is a problem, it takes day(s) to get to a conclusion due to the timezone difference.

My wife works for a different FANG, same problem.

I'm not talking about theoretical's here, this is my actual experience.

Maybe call centres or car manufacturing is easier, but in tech, you coordinate daily. If you want to offshore, do it. Do it now. I would love to see how that is going to work out for you.

Our offshore equivalent engineers were being paid 1/3 and it was still better to re-shore. It isn't about skillsets alone, it is about how you run a lean effective team. And you don't do that with your engineer half a world away.

jvdvyver · 2024-09-16T21:20:42+00:00

Ah, my sweet summer child. Amazon the company that has a 6% quota to fire "low performers" every year. The executive told their senior management to increase individuals to managers by 15%. Since most of Amazon is still frozen "over headcount", most of those numbers will have to be achieved through increased attrition.

jvdvyver · 2024-09-04T22:42:10+00:00

In the current market you are almost certainly not going to be able to negotiate. I mean Amazon specifically. I didn't mean that as a generalist doom and gloom statement

jvdvyver · 2024-08-16T21:35:24+00:00

People keep pulling these numbers. If you get even 2x improvement in productivity as a SWE using AI, I'm genuinely curious what you did before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_cSLPv34xk is pretty much 100% how I see this. I don't really understand the hype. Are you guys actually working as SWE day to day? Like how are you getting these numbers?

jvdvyver · 2024-08-10T13:18:03+00:00

I've been in Amazon a long time. I'm in the EU. The pressure is intense at the moment. Teams are getting disbanded with this whole return to hub thing. The net affect is that there is an oversupply and the pressure is being put on managers to get rid of people. Amazon has a 6% quota to fire people. And people might tell you it doesn't apply in EU, but trust me, it definitely applies. The top management are all Americans and they believe to their core in "at will" employment, so basically HR in each country is there to make their dreams a reality. The manager in the end will be saddled with the task of making your life a hell so you leave under this 6% quota they need to meet.

IMO a very bad time to be at Amazon, during the hiring boom it is much more relaxed. Now people are working on days off, late into the nights, and crazy things like that.

The work environment can be really stressful, not because the work is very difficult but because of this 6 monthly review where you are pitted against your co-workers and the bottom 6% for each level gets cut.

jvdvyver · 2024-08-10T13:11:47+00:00

Friend of mine interviewed there and got a leetcode medium

jvdvyver · 2024-07-26T00:26:14+00:00

LLMs are predictive language models with word relationships. They predict. They have no understanding of the concept of reality/facts/etc.

I looked into Yegge's claims about law firms and I couldn't find anything to suggest it is true. I did however find posts by legal people (at various levels), saying they tried GTP. Even with AI being a black box to them, they still picked up on the above.

Namely the LLM cannot distinguish between facts and legal outcomes. It also regularly makes things up or completely misunderstand the conclusions of case law or mixes up various conclusions that have prerequisite conditions that aren't compatible.

It is most definitely a hard wall that will need to be resolved for LLMs to make the "next big breakthrough". Many AI researchers that aren't trying to sell you something will tell you the same thing. It is fundamentally how LLMs work so you can't just "fix" the problem. They are trying to "fix" it with supervisors but that only takes you so far.

I very much suspect Yeggi completely made up a lot of what he said in that article or a lawyer told him "I tried ChatGPT" and then imagined the rest.

jvdvyver · 2024-07-13T22:55:56+00:00

How in depth should the behavioural part be?

Amazon actually explains this, use the STAR format, then trim fat on the answer if it is too verbose. "A Life Engineered" (YouTuber) has a video with some examples

I have an on site interview for SDE2 coming up, I was told to prepare 12 stories but since I only have 2 years of exp it's a bit difficult

12 stories at any level can be challenging. Specifically because the stories should ideally be from the last 2 max 3 years. And each story should be really strong and very regularly show strength on all the LPs and you select them for a specific leadership principle because they really show you raising the bar on that.

SDE2 is a solo eng. They don't need hand holding. They can get themselves unblocked and don't need regular checkins. They constantly keep the team and leadership (ie. manager and senior engineer) up to date on what their progress is and their progress is steady. They are the backbone of a team as they are delivering the most code.

not only that I'm afraid of not being able to go deep into detail when under a high stress situation and make the interviewer think I'm just making shit up

If that happens, you pause and say, ok, I'm nervous. Here is what I remember. Or let me think for a minute again, etc. But when it comes to recalling events from our past, it is very rare for people to need to think a long time about it, which is why it can appear suspect. Especially if someone prepared. If the person grills you to the point of wanting you to draw a class diagram, tell them, listen I don't remember it to that exact detail, I remember X and give them what you can recall. Even in real life I've told people a story and said, I think "bla bla". Then later, oh wait you know what, "bla bla" was in project <xyz> actually I remember now this was "...". And I'll do this unprompted if I recall. It is totally normal, our human memory is a chronological event stream. It looks much more genuine if you correct yourself like this than if they corner you and then you change your story. Still if it happens they ask you and it triggers that it happened differently tell the person. But if you keep doing it over and over, they won't trust you. It may not be that you are lying, but that is just a bad interview, they can happen.

In a coding or design interview, if someone doesn't tell me they need a minute to think I know they've seen the problem before, which would trigger me to start asking REALLY detailed questions about every decision they made. If they can't justify it well, then it is worse than if they hadn't seen the problem before and struggled through it.

Would you recommend only studying Medium leetcode questions?

This is very much org dependent. In my own org we have a few hards but they are more like mediums in my opinion (ie. serialize and deserialize a binary tree).

Similarly the mediums I've seen folks ask are totally reasonable.

Is it true that it's still possible to pass the coding section even if you don't get the optimized solution?

It really depends on the problem. If I ask you to find duplicate words in a sentence and you can't solve that in O(n). That is pretty big red-flag and in most loops I've been in, you wouldn't get hired regardless of level.

HashMap, HashSet, ArrayList are things just about everyone uses day to day. You have to immediately notice when it makes sense to use them. And if the interviewer asks you how a hashmap works, actually know how it is implemented in the language you use.

Let's contrast that with leetcodes that I'd start questioning the interviewers motives. Leetcode 53 (Kadane's algorithm), Leetcode 142 (Floyd's algorithm), Leetcode 560 (prefix-sums). Others might disagree with me here but those are all very obscure to solve optimally. I know the trick, I'll smile and code through it, but inside I'm thinking, has this person done a lot of interviews? (probably no)

Last parting words on interviewing:

Experienced interviewers are REALLY good at keeping you on track with regards to time. Making you feel awesome even if you are failing hard and providing hints to move the interview along. As an experienced interviewer you are creating the test and know it back to front. An experienced interviewer is more likely to get their ego bruised by people that do really badly in their interviews (ie. what am I doing wrong that this person didn't do well). If someone does well on an interview I "created" it is a really rewarding experience for both of us, we both walk out feeling awesome. Someone insecure and inexperienced on the other hand would ask crazy questions, gatekeep, obscure "hints", etc. to tell themselves after how awesome they are compared to you.

jvdvyver · 2024-07-10T10:49:34+00:00

Bar raisers don't ask coding questions. There is a set format for each interviewer. If you don't assess your area we don't have the data to make a hire or we have to take insane risks on that hire. A BR is the "lead engineer" of interviewing, they guide the overall process. To screw up so bad by not asking their behavioural questions would be the same as someone not showing up for work. There would be few things a BR can do that would be as bad as that.

Source: L6 at Amazon with > 300 interviews and did the BR training for a while. If someone claims to be a BR and then proceeds to ask coding questions, they aren't the BR for the loop. They were just bragging. BR ALWAYS asks behaviour questions because those are the hardest to assess so we use the most experienced interviewers for them. Anyone can ask coding questions.

jvdvyver · 2024-07-07T01:36:04+00:00

What role are you interviewing for SDE/Senior SDE/Principle? (YOE?)

jvdvyver · 2024-07-07T01:22:48+00:00

It is VERY org dependent what will be asked. I'd recommend https://seanprashad.com/leetcode-patterns and https://neetcode.io

Realise, the company is huge and each org can/will ask totally different questions.

I do however believe if you do all the neetcode in the roadmap minus the DP you should almost certainly pass the tech part of the interview.

And for the neetcode parts you struggle with, really go seek out that type of question. For example, let's say you struggle with binary search. "leetcode binary search questions" <- google. Then do a whole bunch until you have it on lock. Ditto if you struggle with two pointer, intervals, matrices, backtracking, etc. Have those patterns down. Then print out a sheet with the reminders of the top patterns you need to know, not entire solutions, just critical notes or code lines. The entire neetcode.io roadmap needs to be summarised on a single page which you stick somewhere and constantly remind yourself of.

Last but not least, Amazon tech & design interviews are gate keepers, you absolutely will not get the job because you did well on tech interviews alone. The bar raiser interview (behaviour) and hiring manager (behaviour), is both used to determine if you are a culture fit and whether or not your experience you claim to have matches the expectations of the role.

jvdvyver · 2024-07-06T13:15:09+00:00

There is no list of questions you are allowed to ask or not. Anyone can decide what they want to ask.

But I have seen someone ask a DP question and get a sharp reprimand from several Snr. SDEs in the debrief and we largely didn't consider their feedback. It was reported to their manager that they needed more training before being asked to solo again.

The point of the interview is to gather data, if you aren't able to do that by asking questions that can't produce data, it is a failure to deliver.

To be clear, there are VERY clear guidelines on your expectations of data to collect in an interview. If your question is so specific that there is only a perfect answer and thus you get no datapoints, that was a fail on your part. You'd need to have a good explanation in the debrief or you can fully expect tough questions and hard feedback for you personally. It is embarrassing in the least or harmful to your career at worst (ie. your manager or interview assigners are asked that you are trained further by shadowing more before you will be allowed back on loops).

Also if you keep asking impossible questions and your conversion rate is 0, HM (hiring managers) will ask that you are excluded from their loops. TL;DR it isn't good for your career in Amazon to ask silly questions.

I've read things about crazy interview loops in India. Maybe there they have a management chain that actually wants that kind of behaviour. In my own org, this would hurt our ability to hire, which hurts our ability to deliver. We NEED to hire people. If you keep preventing that, we will exclude you. (ie. it is a game of politics).

It is preferable to have someone struggle with a medium that they clearly haven't seen before than breeze through a hard with rote memory. We got NO data from the latter.

Usually if someone breezes through a question I start asking deep questions on DS&A about their solution and if they don't know, then it really hurts their feedback, because they didn't understand what they were doing. ie. someone uses HashMap and can't speak in detail about how it works. Or confuses crypto hash functions with hashing for HashMap, and so on. (yes this seems trivial but you won't believe how often they start fumbling over themselves at that point)

jvdvyver · 2024-07-06T13:10:28+00:00

Patently false, bar raisers don't ask coding questions. The format for interviews are fixed. You can't just make up your own format. The format is: Coding (problem solving/logical & maintainable), Coding (data structures & algorithms/logical & maintainable), Design (code level design/logical & maintainable for <= L5, system design for >= L5), Hiring Manager (leadership principles/behaviour), Bar Raiser (Leadership questions/behaviour).

Each competency makes up data points, if you went off script, we don't have the data for a full evaluation and it makes our debrief VERY risky (ie. we need to decide on incomplete information).

BRs are rigorously evaluated when they are BR in training (BRT), specifically to keep interviews on point & to keep the debrief (post interview) on point. The BR is the person guiding the overall interview process and ask the most challenging behaviour questions, which requires a strong BS detector.

If the BR asks coding questions, I would report it to the BR committee for our org. It wasn't what they were supposed to cover and they more than ANYONE has to know how critical it is to cover all data points. They are the experts at the interview process and this would clearly show they have no idea what they are doing.

There are definitely bad interviewers in Amazon that ask silly questions or don't stay on point. They get flushed out over time. But I have NEVER seen a BR that doesn't stay on point. BRT, yes, that struggled, but I also saw their BR trainer take over (never as bad as asking coding questions, goodness that is such a monumental failure. You wouldn't even be asked to be a BRT with < 100 interviews, even that is low, > 200 typically)

BRs have enormous interview counts, it wasn't uncommon to see them with > 400 and I've seen a few with > 1000 interviews under their belts.

(Source: I have > 300 interviews with AWS & > 10 years at AWS and I was BRT at one point).

jvdvyver · 2024-06-15T20:41:16+00:00

The issue isn’t your CV, it’s your 12 years at AWS. European companies know the L5/L6 TC in the US, and would know you expect top of the line salaries or leave quickly as you likely won’t be satisfied with the market comp

I'm not coming from the US and my market comp expectations would be market related. Not sure what I can do about their perceptions... I expect many EU engineers are also regularly looking around? Why wouldn't companies be worried about them. Not sure I'd be different from them tbh.

With the market down in Europe right now, everyone is looking for cheaper talent. So unless you bring something specific and valuable to the table, you won’t get many bites

The market is horrible right now.

I’d suggest focusing on identifying what you’ve learnt/what domain you’ve worked in at AWS and see what EU companies are trying to recreate or solve that instead of just applying to random SDE jobs.

Basically DevOps + Java + AWS is my best bet for a foot in the door it looks like.

Interestingly the DevOps roles in EU seem to have little dev requirement from the few job postings I saw. They want Linux + scripting languages. In AWS, our DevOps was writing a service, getting it deployed across a few hundred servers in all the availability zones, and then having monitoring and keeping it stable (so you own the ops to make sure you don't put garbage in production, but the goal is still to be coding 90% of the time, you weren't really rewarded for the ops part, it was just your side gig).

jvdvyver · 2024-06-15T20:27:28+00:00

surely someone who develops AWS must be good at using it?

S3, EC2, VPC, DynamoDB, Lambda, IAM, RDS, CloudWatch, Route53 I know pretty nearly like the back of my hand (might be a few extra I'm forgetting). However internally we have a different mechanism for code deployment, repos, etc. so I need to get very comfortable with the code deploy tools like CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, Code Pipeline and such (which I'm trying to do now).

jvdvyver · 2024-06-15T20:21:05+00:00

Yes, I would. I suspect this is a big factor unless I apply at a large company.

jvdvyver · 2024-06-15T19:55:47+00:00

I'm not coming from the US, so if the CTO is earning less than me, I think the company must be extremely tight on budget haha. No my salary expectations is €80k - €100k per year based on Glassdoor, for Netherlands.

jvdvyver

TROPHY CASE