- Amazon hires 11,000 new employees, mostly new grads and interns
- Garman says they are more impressionable and willing to adopt AI
- Willingness to learn might be more important than existing skills
Amazon CEO Matt Garman confirmed the company’s plans to hire 11,000 interns and new graduates this year, despite continued internal push for AI tools.
The news comes about six months after the company warned that 16,000 workers would lose their jobs, with Garman’s cloud business hit hard.
The latest news is that the company appears to be refocusing its human resources instead of getting rid of human workers altogether, as business priorities change and new opportunities open up.
Amazon will hire 11,000 workers in the same year it laid off 16,000
Chatting with Casey Newton about Platform In a YouTube interview, Garman explained that white-collar jobs are evolving thanks to AI, but they are not being eliminated. He compared AI to Excel spreadsheets, which significantly increased the productivity of accounting and finance work.
“If you look at what your job was two years ago and what your job will be two years from now, it will be very different,” he said.
Garman also noted a shift in where humans provide the most value: Writing code itself is becoming less valuable, but engineers still play an important role in reviewing AI-generated code, understanding business requirements, and designing systems with AI-generated code.
As for why the company is specifically hiring younger workers, Garman acknowledged that they are some of the cheapest workers to hire, but they also learn the company culture more quickly and may embrace AI more positively than older generations.
The CEO previously said that replacing junior employees with AI was “one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.”
Without hiring graduates today, companies risk creating a long-term skills gap in the future because they have no one to train senior, experienced engineers, he added.
He suggested that recruiting depends more on willingness to learn and not on skills already mastered, but the interview ultimately confirmed the continued value of human workers.
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