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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.”
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