He heard whispers: “he is getting old, who will replace him?” People ask him with a straight face, “When are you going to retire? After nearly 25 years at Amazon, where every year has been different and amazing, he feels as young as the day he decided to leave academia and join Amazon.”
The thing about getting older as a developer is that you’ve seen a lot and encountered a lot of the problems that younger developers face (even if they look a little different at first glance). If you’ve been around the block as many times as some of us, you’ve earned your battle scars along the way. There are days in the war rooms that you will never forget. You’ve been through a lot and failed more times than you care to remember. You have half a head full of what is practical and works. And a quarter of that space has been trained to look for red flags and look for things that you know are going to go wrong.
What is left in your head is used for creativity. Receiving all kinds of signals, creating mental models and coming up with new unique solutions. It’s the best part of our job. As developers, we create something new every day. Let that sink in for a second. Who else can do that? And that’s why I never take it for granted.
As a senior developer, you’ve also seen patterns repeat themselves… all the time. Companies promising the moon but only delivering a package of Swiss cheese.
And here comes AI. It’s not the AI you’ve been using for the last 15-20 years: NLP, voice-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, image recognition, recommendations, fraud detection, all the things that Amazon.com was built on. No, we’re talking about generative AI, which, even as a senior developer, is really exciting. The speed of experimentation has increased dramatically. In the hands of a seasoned builder with a healthy dose of skepticism, it’s powerful. But it was also challenging because it wasn’t released like other technologies. No one educated users before release. Magic had just been released from the bottle, and because it was so unexpected, the hype absolutely exploded. And that seems strange to us because we’re used to seeing our software evolve with smaller releases that take a year or more to release. It took 2 years for Windows 3 to reach Windows 3.1. And Mac OS X made minor bump releases from 2001 to 2019 before starting to make major releases every year. But it seems like every week the models switch places in the rankings with each new release they release.
AWS has always been a B2B company. We’ve always provided the building blocks that allow other companies to innovate for their customers (S3, EC2, DynamoDB, Lambda, DSQL). In the midst of all the hype, we were suddenly being compared to B2C companies. It was frustrating. But experience has taught us what to do. We went back to our roots, democratizing access to technology (in this case models), giving customers choice, keeping privacy and security our top priorities, providing the guardrails companies need for security and compliance, and leveraging automated reasoning to reduce potential model errors. That’s the value of having seen patterns repeat themselves for decades – you know which ones work.
A senior developer doesn’t worry about the barrage of announcements about new models and new features coming out every week. He’s seen it before. New technology, same designs.
After all, over the past decade, a senior developer has probably learned more than 10 programming languages, tons of OSS libraries, and more platforms than they can remember. He was always following technology trends, reading articles, studying new directions because that was the fun part of the job (you know, learning things). The senior developer made sure he was fully prepared when his company was ready to start attacking the problems where generative AI is uniquely suited. Also read Marc Brooker’s fantastic article on LLM driven development and will probably follow his advice.
Almost every customer I talk to asks, “What should we do with gen AI?” The best answer I’ve seen so far is from Byron Cook, one of our great scientists: “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your question right away, but why did you ask me this question?”
You’ll find that 90% of the responses you get back aren’t because they think generative AI will solve a specific problem their business is facing, but because they’re worried. That they have very strong feelings of FOMO (fear of missing out).
And a senior developer knows that this is exactly the moment to hit the pause button. Wait a minute. He motivates juniors to educate themselves on the pros and cons and that the board & C-Suite read books like Jeff Lawson’s “Ask Your developer”.
Then you do exactly what you’ve always done. Talk to your customer in depth, listen to them, dive deep into their challenges, design architectures, migrations and tools for them. And sometimes generative AI will be the solution.
But as a senior developer, you already knew that.
Now get building!