‘If organizations focus only on short-term efficiency… they risk hollowing out the next generation of technical leaders’: Microsoft execs say senior workers must mentor juniors to fix AI mistakes
- Companies risk experiencing a skills shortage in the future if they stop hiring junior developers today, Microsoft executives say.
- AI promises productivity gains, but we need humans to manage agents
- Human-AI collaboration is more important than code volume
Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, and Scott Hanselman, vice president of developer community, argued that senior engineers need to actively mentor younger workers to avoid future skills shortages, suggesting that AI coding agents disproportionately affect younger, newer workers.
In a research paper, the two executives explain how AI coding assistants can increase the productivity of senior engineers.
However, for early-career workers, AI slows them down, requiring them to carefully guide, verify, and integrate AI-generated code into their own work.
AI helps code now, but it could wipe out future skills
In the article, the two authors outline some common problems with AI coding assistants, including introducing bugs, duplicating code, or writing code that passes some tests but fails more generally.
While these are completely legitimate concerns that are reflected in many studies and in practice, it’s the effects on human workers (and especially younger generations) that concern Microsoft executives the most.
Currently, companies are hiring fewer developers in response to the growing use of AI. But that means future generations won’t be as well-equipped with coding and AI management skills.
“If organizations focus only on short-term efficiency – hiring those who can already lead AI – they risk crowding out the next generation of technical leaders,” he concludes.
Although smaller companies with limited resources may struggle to avoid falling into the traps of AI’s short-term promises, the two researchers and Microsoft executives urge large organizations to continue hiring early-career developers.
“The future of software engineering will not be defined by the volume of code that AI can generate, but by how effectively humans learn, reason, and mature alongside these systems,” they add, indicating that even if AI isn’t going anywhere, neither are human workers.
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