Andrew Ng isn’t shy about the kind of engineer he refuses to hire, and he says the AI era is exposing exactly who’s falling behind.
The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist broke down what he sees as a hierarchy of engineering talent on an episode of the “20VC” podcast published Monday.
The top performers are seasoned engineers who have adopted AI early and know how to leverage it effectively.
“The most productive engineers I know, they’re not fresh college grads,” said Ng, who now leads several AI-focused ventures, including AI Fund. “They are people of 10, 20 years of experience or whatever, and really on top of AI,” he added.
These engineers “move faster than anything the world has seen even one or two years ago,” Ng said.
Just below them are fresh college graduates who learned AI tools through “the social network community,” and Ng said he has hired a few of them.
“We can’t find enough of them,” Ng said, referring to these college graduates who really know AI. “So many businesses love to hire those fresh college grads.”
Beneath that group are experienced developers who had a “comfortable job” and are still “coding like it’s 2022,” before AI rewired how software is built.
“I just don’t hire people like that anymore,” Ng said. “Those people may get into trouble at some point.”
At the bottom of the hierarchy are new computer science graduates who never learned AI at all, “which is the tier that is in trouble.”
University curricula haven’t kept pace with industry needs, and schools should be training computer science majors on the core AI building blocks that software engineers are expected to know, Ng said.
“Imagine graduating a CS undergrad that has never heard of cloud computing,” Ng said. “That’s a cohort of students entering the job market that’s really struggling.”
AI and the workforce
Ng’s remarks come amid a growing debate in Silicon Valley over who will thrive — and who will struggle — as AI reshapes the workforce.
Some industry leaders say younger workers may actually be better positioned for the transition than their older counterparts. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he’s far more concerned about how workers later in their careers will cope with the rapid adoption of AI.
“I’m more worried about what it means not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn’t want to go retrain or rescale or whatever the politicians call it that no one actually wants,” Altman said in August on Cleo Abram’s “Huge Conversations” YouTube show.
New graduates are poised to adapt to the changes AI brings. “If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history,” Altman said.
Some tech leaders are also making it mandatory for employees to adopt AI tools.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in August that he fired employees who didn’t use AI tools at work and couldn’t justify why.
Google executives have delivered similar expectations. Employees told Business Insider in an August report that CEO Sundar Pichai urged staff in an all-hands meeting to use more AI across their workflows, including engineers adopting AI-assisted coding to stay competitive.
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