--- title: AI mandate backlash grows, DoorDash scraps LeetCode for... description: A roundup of major developments at the intersection of AI and software engineering careers. Amazon mandated senior engineer sign-off on all junior code amid... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-mandate-backlash-grows-doordash-scraps-leetcode-for-live-coding-sessions-gedqxymwa twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI mandate backlash grows, DoorDash scraps LeetCode for live coding sessions | daily.dev og:description: A roundup of major developments at the intersection of AI and software engineering careers. Amazon mandated senior engineer sign-off on all junior code amid... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-mandate-backlash-grows-doordash-scraps-leetcode-for-live-coding-sessions-gedqxymwa og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/GEDqXymwA.png og:image:alt: AI mandate backlash grows, DoorDash scraps LeetCode for live coding sessions og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI mandate backlash grows, DoorDash scraps LeetCode for live coding sessions **[Career Digest](https://daily.dev/sources/career_digest)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A roundup of major developments at the intersection of AI and software engineering careers. Amazon mandated senior engineer sign-off on all junior code amid 30,000 layoffs and an internal push for AI tool adoption, creating a review bottleneck critics call 'cognitive debt.' DoorDash replaced algorithmic interviews with 60-minute AI-assisted working sessions evaluating real engineering skills. Sam Altman's thank-you post to coders backfired spectacularly as developers connected OpenAI's tools to mass layoffs. Software engineering job postings hit a six-month high but remain well below pre-pandemic levels. Additional data points: AI is shifting engineering time toward debugging and review rather than coding, PwC warned AI skeptics have no future at the firm, and Jensen Huang's AI token compensation proposal drew criticism for lacking the financial properties of real equity. ## Content **TLDR:** Amazon's senior engineer review mandate and Sam Altman's thank-you post to coders both landed badly this week, crystallizing frustration around AI-driven workforce changes. DoorDash quietly replaced algorithmic interviews with 60-minute AI-assisted working sessions, signaling a real shift in how companies evaluate engineers. Software engineering job postings hit a six-month high on Indeed, though the market remains well below pre-pandemic levels. The debate over whether AI tools actually improve productivity got more complicated, with new data suggesting debugging time is up 50% for some teams. --- ## Amazon mandates senior sign-off on all junior code Amazon has required L5+ engineers to approve every code change made by junior and mid-level engineers, against a backdrop of 30,000 layoffs and an internal push for 80% of developers to use its AI coding tool Kira. The irony is hard to miss: AI tools are supposed to accelerate output, but the mandatory senior review bottleneck will slow everything down. Multiple high-profile outages attributed to AI-generated code appear to be driving the policy, which critics are calling a "cognitive debt" problem — the infrastructure around AI coding hasn't kept pace with how fast the tools generate changes. ## DoorDash replaces algorithmic interviews with AI-assisted working sessions DoorDash has swapped traditional coding interviews for 60-minute sessions where candidates use their own machine, preferred IDE, and AI tools like Cursor or Claude Code on tasks that resemble actual DoorDash engineering work. The format evaluates navigating unfamiliar codebases, handling ambiguity, and validating AI outputs critically rather than solving contrived puzzles under pressure. Lessons from pilots: keep project scope tight enough for meaningful work in the time limit, and train interviewers to assess workflow rather than just whether the output compiles. ## Sam Altman's thank-you to coders backfires Altman posted a message thanking developers who wrote complex software by hand, calling it a craft that now feels like a distant memory. The response was immediate and brutal — thousands of sarcastic replies pointing out that OpenAI's tools are being cited as justification for mass layoffs at Amazon, Block, Atlassian, and Meta. The meme cycle was predictable, but the underlying anger is real. Being thanked for your craft by the person whose company is being used to eliminate your job is a specific kind of tone-deafness that developers noticed. ## Software engineering job postings hit a six-month high The FRED index for software engineering job postings has ticked back up toward 70% of pre-pandemic baseline levels after bottoming out around 60%. Andrej Karpathy argued this week that cheaper engineering creates more demand rather than less, and OpenAI's announcement of nearly doubling headcount from 4,500 to 8,000 was cited as supporting evidence. The recovery is real but modest — remote roles are scarcer, layoffs in game development continue, and nobody is predicting a rapid return to 2021 levels. --- ## Also notable - **AI productivity numbers are messier than advertised.** Coding represents roughly 16% of engineering work, and while AI speeds up code generation, it's creating downstream bottlenecks in review and validation. One data point circulating: debugging time reportedly jumped from 12% to 18% of total work time for some teams. - **PwC told staff that AI skeptics have no future at the firm.** US CEO Paul Griggs said senior staff who aren't "AI-first" will be replaced, and the firm is exploring shifting from hourly billing to subscription-based AI-driven services — notable given PwC's own January research showed more than half of businesses using AI saw little or no benefit. - **Jensen Huang's AI token compensation idea is drawing scrutiny.** His suggestion at GTC that engineers should receive AI tokens worth roughly half their base salary has critics pointing out that token budgets don't vest, don't appreciate, and don't carry forward in salary negotiations — and come with implicit pressure to produce at superhuman rates. - **Musinsa redesigned junior hiring around ambiguity, not algorithms.** The Korean fashion platform built a 3-tier automated evaluation pipeline for a deliberately vague concurrency problem, then analyzed candidates' prompt history and git commits to distinguish engineers who understood what they built from those who just delegated to AI. - **Amazon's AI tool Kira tracks weekly usage and feeds results into performance reviews.** Gallup data shows only 26% of US workers use AI weekly, and nearly half report minimal or no training — the gap between compliance mandates and actual enablement is widening. - **WhatsApp built a billion-user product with 30 engineers and almost no process.** Engineer #19 Jean Lee shared that WhatsApp had no Scrum, no TDD, and minimal code reviews — CEO Jan Koum rejected 99% of feature requests to protect reliability. Worth reading alongside every "we need more process" conversation happening in your org right now. - **The "slow phase" of software development is getting more valuable, not less.** When AI makes execution cheap, mistakes in upstream decisions propagate faster. Writing down the problem before prompting, running pre-mortems, and building throwaway prototypes to validate direction are becoming higher-leverage activities. - **iOCO eliminated remote work for all 4,300 employees.** The South African tech services firm reports higher productivity and fewer errors, though a Stanford study published in Nature found hybrid work delivers comparable productivity with significantly lower turnover. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Trends \#10: Amazon now requires senior approval for AI-assisted code from junior and mid-level engineers](https://daily.dev/posts/the-trends-10-amazon-now-requires-senior-approval-for-ai-assisted-code-from-junior-and-mid-level-e-odyocrxqm) · Tech World With Milan · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI productivity debate](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-productivity-debate-yygr5tr1m) · Software Engineering Research · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-mandate-backlash-grows-doordash-scraps-leetcode-for-live-coding-sessions-gedqxymwa) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-mandate-backlash-grows-doordash-scraps-leetcode-for-live-coding-sessions-gedqxymwa","headline":"AI mandate backlash grows, DoorDash scraps LeetCode for live coding sessions","text":"A roundup of major developments at the intersection of AI and software engineering careers. 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