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GitHub's CEO on why it's important for companies to keep hiring junior engineers
GitHub's CEO on why it's important for companies to keep hiring junior engineers

Business Insider

time23-06-2025

  • Business
  • Business Insider

GitHub's CEO on why it's important for companies to keep hiring junior engineers

In the age of AI coding, GitHub's CEO says he's still a believer that junior engineers are of great value to tech companies. Just don't be surprised if you're asked to showcase your prompt-engineering skills in a job interview. Thomas Dohmke, who has been CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub since 2021, talked in a recent interview with " The Pragmatic Engineer" about what early-career software developers bring to the table. "It's lovely to see that those folks that bring fresh ideas, a great amount of energy, the latest learnings from college and university, and often a different, diverse background into the company," Dohmke said. The GitHub CEO has talked before about how the job of the software engineer is evolving as AI tools become more prolific in the workplace, as well as the limits of "vibe-coding." Dohmke said that GitHub intends to have "a nice balance" of early-career and senior engineers, thanks to the combination of fresh perspectives and tested experience that an age-diverse staff can afford. "The folks that are younger in career bring a new perspective to the team and say, here, 'Why don't we try this?' or, 'I want to incubate this idea,'" he said. "And so we are excited about having this kind of like both junior and senior population in the company." The CEO said that some of the skills the company is looking to cultivate now include a working knowledge of AI. "Of course, we take people to an interview loop, and I think increasingly we're thinking about how do we leverage AI within the interview loop," he said. "There's nothing wrong about that from my perspective. In fact, I would say if you want to get a job in a tech company very soon, you're going to be asked to show your prompting skills, your co-pilot skills, if you will." Younger programmers in particular, he added, more readily adopt the technology. "I think, actually, folks that go to high school now, or to college, or even kids earlier in their education, they get to use AI much faster, Dohmke said. "They get it because they are taking this with an open mind. They don't have the, 'This is how we've always done it.'" Dohmke said he expects AI to continue to be part of the larger engineering toolkit, as ultimately what matters is that the job gets done, instead of how it gets done. "Because the goal of the future engineer is no longer to run it all from scratch," he said. "And the goal is to combine their prompting skills and agent, open source libraries, into getting that problem solved much faster than they could have two or three years ago." Even in a world where AI agents do become more "autonomous," that doesn't mean engineering jobs will disappear in their entirety, the GitHub CEO said. The overarching skills that make up the occupation have more to do with modes of thinking, he added, rather than knowledge of specific languages. "You've got to have engineering skills. You've got to have developed craft," he said. "You need senior people that know how to build large-scale systems. You need people that take large complex problems, break them down into smaller problems." Engineers will continue to need to be familiar with coding, he said, though actually producing it may not always make up the brunt of the job. "That's what engineering is all about," Dohmke said. "The coding skill will be part of that engineering skill set, but ultimately engineering means — I can build a really large complex system and then evolve that into even larger system next week, in today's world."

A software engineer's success often depends on their relationship with their manager, says ex-Amazon technical director
A software engineer's success often depends on their relationship with their manager, says ex-Amazon technical director

Yahoo

time22-04-2025

  • Business
  • Yahoo

A software engineer's success often depends on their relationship with their manager, says ex-Amazon technical director

An engineer's success is often largely determined by their manager, Dave Anderson said. The former Amazon engineering director said relationships with teammates and supervisors are crucial. On the "Pragmatic Engineer" podcast, he said underestimating a supervisor's influence is a mistake. A large part of an engineer's success is often tied to how they navigate their relationship with their manager, a former Amazon engineering director, Dave Anderson, said. "I would actually say, as a manager, even, like 50% of that performance, frequently, is your relationship with your manager and your team. How will you fit in with the team, with your peers, with your manager?" he said on a recent episode of "The Pragmatic Engineer," a podcast. Underestimating your supervisor's influence can be particularly dangerous at a company like Amazon, he added. As can be the case at other companies, a manager's decisions can shape the future of their direct report, from determining how much they're compensated to how far up the career ladder they climb. The influence a manager can have over an engineer's trajectory isn't something to shrug off, Anderson said. "I think the mistake that people will sometimes make is like, 'My manager doesn't influence my job that much because I can work independently,' or, you know, 'I don't need to figure this out with my manager because I can, you know, work with my peers, or I have this great engineer on my team I can work with,'" Anderson said. But if your manager doesn't like you, he added, you're "never ever" going to be able to snag a promotion. It's also important to remember that managers are often asked to point out a number of team members "who are not doing great," Anderson said. If you are, when compared with other members of your team, the "least effective," he added, you could be on the chopping block. "If you look around the room and you're thinking, 'Yep, I'm the worst one here' — that's not a great situation to ever be in. It's just never safe," Anderson said. "And at Amazon, it's definitely not safe. Some other companies where they just might do layoffs once every four years, you might be safe for quite a while. But Amazon has this sort of regular cycle." In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, said Anderson's experiences were his alone. "These claims reflect the opinion of one individual who worked at Amazon years ago. They're not based in fact, and aren't indicative of what it was like to work here then or what it's like today," Callahan said. "We're proud to be one of the most sought-after employers in the world and to have ranked in the top three in LinkedIn's Top Companies for eight years running." Anderson said that if an engineer's relationship with their manager isn't good, there can be an escape hatch of sorts: moving teams before being managed out. "So many times I've had someone who was either doing amazing on one team, they moved to the next team, and they're, like, actually not doing well at all, or someone who was not doing well escapes to another team before they get fired — and they do well," he said. If you start to hear rumblings from further up the chain of command, Anderson thinks it could be in your best interest to make a change, and swiftly. "This is, like, my sneaky recommendation for anyone is like — if you start to hear performance feedback whatsoever from your management chain, if you have any opportunity at all, get off your team fast as possible," he said. In a follow-up email, Anderson told BI that in a "great number of situations," he'd seen success prove itself to be at least partially dependent on team fit. "I've seen poor performers turn into great performers, and great performers turn into poor performers — and the only factor was them switching teams," he said. "In particular, switching teams to a place where they didn't know their manager. I don't think people fundamentally changed — so the only reasonable conclusion is that team fit (in particular, their relationship with their manager) is the deciding factor." Anderson doesn't suggest disavowing any negative feedback you receive and bailing out into a different section of the company on a whim. It depends, he said, on the relationship you've formed with your supervisor and whether you have faith in their advice. "Now, if you trust your manager, they might be actually just giving you honest feedback, which you'd like to be able to receive," he said. "But for the most part, if you've been working for someone for three years and suddenly they start giving you performance feedback, that's a really bad sign." Anderson added: "If you run for the hills fast enough, it's possible you'll get away before they flag you in the system as non-transferable." Read the original article on Business Insider

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