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

You're Learning the Wrong Gen AI Tools ⚙

There are countless 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?

Let’s take an example: you’ve learned and mastered a no-code AI automation tool like n8n. It's great for personal productivity - automate file uploads to Google Drive, send notifications, etc. But here’s the catch, this isn’t what enterprises are hiring for.

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.

That means they’ll hire someone who knows:

• AWS Strands
• OpenAI SDK
• Google’s ADK (Agent Developer Kit)
• Someone who can design flows using MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent to Agent)
• Perhaps LangChain or LangGraph

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 Bedrock, APIs to invoke LLMs, RAGs using Bedrock Knowledge Base (if it's an AWS shop), MCP, 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.
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 AWS core infrastructure! If you can talk about how ChatGPT can generate Ghibli images but can't answer questions on compute, or security, someone else will beat you in the interview.
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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.

Hence, it's fine to learn Gen AI, but please don't ignore the components that are more important in interviews and jobs.

Question to readers - what shiny Gen AI tool have you got distracted with, later only to realize it's not contributing to your work or career? I'll go first - Google Veo3! Though it's fun to generate videos from a prompt, it contributes zero to my work and career! Here is a sample video that I created with it, just for fun.​​

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Keep learning and keep rocking 🚀,

Raj