{"id":38853,"date":"2025-11-18T07:12:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T07:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/andrew-ng-lays-out-a-hierarchy-of-engineering-talent-including-whos-in-trouble-and-who-he-refuses-to-hire\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T07:12:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T07:12:23","slug":"andrew-ng-lays-out-a-hierarchy-of-engineering-talent-including-whos-in-trouble-and-who-he-refuses-to-hire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/andrew-ng-lays-out-a-hierarchy-of-engineering-talent-including-whos-in-trouble-and-who-he-refuses-to-hire\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Ng lays out a hierarchy of engineering talent &mdash; including who&#8217;s in trouble and who he refuses to hire"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/691bee29abd5e944effaea8e?format=jpeg\" alt=\"andrew ng\"\/><figcaption>Andrew Ng outlines a hierarchy of engineering talent in the AI era \u2014 and warns which developers are falling behind and who he won&#039;t hire.<\/p>\n<p>Jemal Countess\/Getty Images for TIME<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Andrew Ng says the AI era is revealing a hierarchy in engineering talent.<\/li>\n<li>The Google Brain founder is blunt about the type of engineers he refuses to hire.<\/li>\n<li>Computer science graduates who don&#039;t know AI are &quot;in trouble,&quot; Ng said.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Andrew Ng isn&#039;t shy about the kind of engineer he refuses to hire, and he says the AI era is exposing exactly who&#039;s falling behind.<\/p>\n<p>The Stanford professor and Google Brain founder broke down what he sees as a hierarchy of engineering talent on an episode of the &quot;20VC&quot; podcast published Monday.<\/p>\n<p>The top performers are seasoned engineers who have adopted AI early and know how to leverage it effectively.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The most productive engineers I know, they&#039;re not fresh college grads,&quot; said Ng, who now leads several AI-focused ventures, including AI Fund. &quot;They are people of 10, 20 years of experience or whatever, and really on top of AI,&quot; he added.<\/p>\n<p>These engineers &quot;move faster than anything the world has seen even one or two years ago,&quot; Ng said.<\/p>\n<p>Just below them are fresh college graduates who learned AI tools through &quot;the social network community,&quot; and Ng said he has hired a few of them.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We can&#039;t find enough of them,&quot; Ng said, referring to these college graduates who really know AI. &quot;So many businesses love to hire those fresh college grads.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Beneath thatgroup are experienced developers who had a &quot;comfortable job&quot; and are still &quot;coding like it&#039;s 2022,&quot; before AI rewired how software is built.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I just don&#039;t hire people like that anymore,&quot; Ng said. &quot;Those people may get into trouble at some point.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>At the bottom of the hierarchy are new computer science graduates who never learned AI at all, &quot;which is the tier that is in trouble.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>University curricula haven&#039;t kept pace with industry needs, and schools should be training computer sciencemajors on the core AI building blocks that software engineers are expected to know, Ng said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Imagine graduating a CS undergrad that has never heard of cloud computing,&quot; Ng said. &quot;That&#039;s a cohort of students entering the job market that&#039;s really struggling.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>AI and the workforce<\/h2>\n<p>Ng&#039;s remarks come amid a growing debate in Silicon Valley over who will thrive \u2014 and who will struggle \u2014 as AI reshapes the workforce.<\/p>\n<p>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&#039;s far more concerned about how workers later in their careers will cope with the rapid adoption of AI.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I&#039;m more worried about what it means not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn&#039;t want to go retrain or rescale or whatever the politicians call it that no one actually wants,&quot; Altman said in August on Cleo Abram&#039;s &quot;Huge Conversations&quot; YouTube show.<\/p>\n<p>New graduates are poised to adapt to the changes AI brings. &quot;If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history,&quot; Altman said.<\/p>\n<p>Some tech leaders are also making it mandatory for employees to adopt AI tools.<\/p>\n<p>Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in August that he fired employees who didn&#039;t use AI tools at work and couldn&#039;t justify why.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Andrew Ng outlines a hierarchy of engineering talent in the AI era \u2014 and warns which developers are falling behind and who he won&#039;t hire. Jemal Countess\/Getty Images for TIME Andrew Ng says the AI era is revealing a hierarchy in engineering talent. The Google Brain founder is blunt about the type of engineers he [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38854,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38853","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}