GitHub CEO Thomas Domke says it's important for companies to continue hiring younger programmers. This creates a balance between the experience of older specialists and the fresh ideas of younger ones. Domke also explains how he believes AI will transform the work of engineers.
GitHub CEO Thomas Domke says it's important for companies to continue hiring younger programmers. This creates a balance between the experience of older specialists and the fresh ideas of younger ones. Domke also explains how he believes AI will transform the work of engineers.
Domke says GitHub aims to have a "good balance" of early-career engineers and senior professionals, with a mix of fresh perspectives and proven experience, Business Insider writes .
In his opinion, young IT specialists bring fresh ideas to the company, as well as a lot of energy, the latest knowledge from colleges and universities, and often have a completely different background.
“Younger people bring a fresh perspective to the team and say, ‘Why don’t we try this?’ or ‘I want to make this idea happen,’” he says. “That’s why we’re happy to have both younger and older people in the company.”
In addition, the CEO of GitHub notes that the company is currently striving to develop practical knowledge in the field of AI, and young specialists are the first users of this technology.
He says the company is already thinking about how to use AI in interviews. Domke notes that if you want to get a job at a tech company in the near future, you'll likely be asked to demonstrate your skills in prompting and using AI agents.
Younger programmers, in particular, he added, are more willing to adopt this technology.
“I think actually people who are in high school now, or in college, or even kids who are in early school, are much more likely to use AI,” Domke said. “They understand it because they’re open-minded about it.” They don’t have this, ‘This is how we’ve always done it.’”
Domke expects AI to continue to be part of the broader engineering toolkit, because ultimately what matters is that the work is done, not how it is done.
“Because the goal of the future engineer is no longer to start everything from scratch,” he says. “The goal is to combine their prompting skills and agents, open source libraries, to solve this problem much faster than they could two or three years ago.”
Even in a world where AI agents become more “autonomous,” that doesn’t mean engineering jobs will disappear entirely, says GitHub’s CEO. The general skills that make up the profession are more about ways of thinking, he added, than about knowing specific languages.
"You have to have engineering skills. You have to have a developed craft. You need senior people who know how to build large-scale systems. You need people who take big complex problems and break them down into smaller ones."
Engineers will still need to be familiar with coding, he said, although actually creating it may not always be the bulk of the job.
"That's what engineering is all about," Domke said. "Coding skills will be part of that engineering skill set, but ultimately engineering means — I can build a really big complex system and then turn it into an even bigger system next week, in today's world."
