Hello Reader,

We all heard it - Gen AI is taking away your job. The reality is, it is for sure impacting your job functionalities. However, there is a bigger reason why many folks are failing interviews and not growing in their career, due to Gen AI, but NOT for the reasons you think! Let's dive deep.

Moltbot/Clawdbot/OpenClaw is all over the internet. Everyone and their mother is installing it. It can delete spam emails, schedule meetings, monitor your flight confirmation, check you in, and what not!

There are countless other Gen AI tools and services out there. But here’s the key question you should be asking: Which tools are actually being used by the companies that are hiring?

Moltbot is great for personal productivity. But here’s the catch, this isn’t what enterprises are hiring for. And this is not the only example - there is n8n, video generation tools, profile pic creator app and more. It's fine to try them out, but don't spend countless hours on it. It's okay to play with it, but be cognizant of the time you are spending.

When a company wants to build Gen AI workflows, they don’t use off-the-shelf tools. They build custom agentic workflows using infrastructure they can control for scale, security, flexibility, and profitability. They often choose the building block on the cloud they are using.

Another example - even if you’re great at using ChatGPT for daily tasks, that won’t help if the job requires building scalable Gen AI systems. Companies want people who can go beyond using tools - they want those who can build the tools by combining an LLM, perhaps hosted on cloud infrastructure, APIs to invoke LLMs using API Gateway/Load Balancers, implement security using Cloud Services etc.

A Non-AI Analogy

Think of it like this: knowing how to save files to Google Drive won’t get you a high-paying cloud job, or even a storage job!
But knowing how to store data in Amazon S3, using API Gateway, and run logic through Lambda to create similar functionalities will get you hired.

Start learning what companies are building with - not just what’s easy to use.

Gen AI is still a tiny portion of the interviews 💰

Gen AI is all fun and games, but remember - the majority of the interview questions are still on core infrastructure and fundamentals! Especially for AWS Solutions Architects, and Cloud Engineers. If you can talk about how Moltbot can check you in your flight but can't answer questions on compute, or security, someone else will beat you in the interview. To prove my point, here is a sample Solutions Architect open role at AWS:

Similarly, if you explore other Solutions Architect and DevOps roles, often there is no mention of Gen AI, and sometimes it's just one of the points. Let me tell you straight - you need to know the Gen AI fundamentals (see below), but not everything to the extent your FOMO is making you do. If you mess up the core Cloud DevOps topics, you'd get rejected. I know this, because I have data from all the bootcampers who recently got top jobs, including at Amazon, JPMC, ServiceNow etc. Guess the secret - 90% Core Concepts, 10% Gen AI!
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You might ask - why is core cloud infrastructure more important? Because that's what brings money to the companies. Your fav banking app - a mix of microservices and front-end app running on cloud infrastructure. Your cellphone bill processing - batch process with checkpointing and business logic running on cloud infrastructure (unless it hasn't been migrated from the mainframe!).

Even the Gen AI features are running on the infrastructure. The ChatBot you are interacting with is a cloud service interacting with LLMs hosted on the cloud.

Everything is built on top of core services like VPC, EC2, EKS, ECS, Lambda, Databases, Load Balancer, IAM etc.

Gen AI fundamentals you need to learn 🤖

Being said that, in tech rounds you will get Gen AI fundamental questions. Study the below areas:

• RAG
• MCP, Tools
• Agents - what, why, and one implementation ideally on Cloud
• Agent Memory
• Gen AI use cases (no need to implement - general knowledge)
  • Extra points if you know Gen AI use cases related to your business domain
• Gen AI Security (it's a big deal right now)

I will keep you all posted as the landscape change - remember an year back Prompt was all the rage, and it's faded now. Hope this edition put some perspective and put you at ease. Keep preparing, and keep hustling - you got this!

Keep learning and keep rocking 🚀,

Raj

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