Beginner programmers at Amazon lose opportunities for career growth

Artificial intelligence did not replace programmers at Amazon, but radically transformed the nature of their work. And this causes many of them anxiety, bad thoughts and apathy towards work in the company. According to company engineers, software development has begun to resemble warehouse work. Only instead of moving boxes they now “drag features”. This reflects deep changes in the profession that Amazon employees report.

Development teams have shrunk, but the volume of tasks remained the same. Functionality that previously took weeks to create now needs to be implemented in a matter of days. Although using artificial intelligence is formally not mandatory, in fact it is impossible to meet the new compressed deadlines without it.

The current situation creates a particularly acute problem for beginner programmers at Amazon. Artificial intelligence takes away routine tasks – writing tests, debugging, iterative code improvement. Exactly those aspects of work through which professional development traditionally occurred. As a result, beginner programmers find it harder to grow and advance up the career ladder. And it turns out, similar to how the industrial revolution turned craft workshops into assembly lines, artificial intelligence turns programming from a creative process into a set of uniform operations. For checking and refining generated code.