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AWS BugBust

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Re: AWS BugBust

#81

Post by jedberg »

pyjug wrote: post #76
jedberg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where the exploitation is. The developers are already getting paid to fix bugs. Now they have some structure and added incentives.

The structure already exists. It’s called your bug tracker. By building tools to gamify this process, it’s clearly incentivizing devs to put in more hours. I have no doubt that the global leaderboard will consist of devs that would’ve clocked 100s of hours above their regular hours. For very little benefit to the employee. Let me put it you this way - would an engineer at Netflix ever “play this game” to win ? Would…

> would an engineer at Netflix ever “play this game” to win ?

I think you're missing the point. The leaderboard is an extra bonus. The main thing is squashing bugs you were already squashing. But yes, there are definitely engineers at Netflix who would play this to "win", just for the love of the game.

But let me relate another similar story -- when Amazon released the Deepracer, they added a leaderboard. All around the world, people got paid by their employers to compete. I think the first winner worked for Samsung and was paid her full time salary just to compete on Deepracer. They saw it as a point of pride that one of their employees was on the leaderboard, with enough value to pay her to work on it full time. I'm pretty sure that is what they are going for here with the global leaderboard. Everyone wins in that situation. The company gets to brag about having the best bug squasher, the employee gets to get paid for squashing bugs, and Amazon gets publicity.

Re: AWS BugBust

#82

Post by jedberg »

bogwog wrote: post #80
jedberg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I already get plenty of recruiting inbound without having to donate my time to fix bugs for Internet Points. You're not the target audience. And also, you wouldn't be donating your time. The whole point is that a company puts up a contest for their own employees, who are presumably getting paid to participate.

So by participating in this, a company is making their own employees more attractive to recruiters?

No the company is getting some extra structure to their bug bash with some prizes provided by Amazon, as well as being able to recruit other people by pointing out how good their current people are (because they are on the leaderboard).

Re: AWS BugBust

#83

Post by anchpop »

rattray wrote: post #34
rplnt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be that work worth the equivalent of $769 is required to get a point?

Right - they're saying that if the work of a point is worth $769 to a company, then that's the amount they should get paid as a developer. Even if Amazon took a $269 cut from each point, I'd expect to get paid $50k for doing 100 points. But instead you yet a $12 t-shirt.

do you not fix bugs in the course of your job anyway? it’s your employer who should be paying you, amazon is just giving you a t shirt for using their software

Re: AWS BugBust

#84

Post by jedberg »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #77
jedberg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The companies that put up the contest benefits. For a lot of people at a lot of companies, a trip to re:invent is a huge prize. If your job is to fix bugs anyway, now your company just incentivized you to do it more and in your off time to win that prize. Also, the bug buster benefits if they get up high on the leaderboard, because job recruiters will most likely use the leaderboard for lead gen. If you're looking to…

> Also, the bug buster benefits if they get up high on the leaderboard There is literally another story on the front page [1] about such "leaderboards" and what happens when people game them to move up. I would not advise anyone to participate in such a contest, it sounds more like a race to the bottom while providing valuable training data to AWS for free. ------------------------------------------------- [1] https:…

That has nothing to do with this though. The global leaderboard is for fixing bugs in your own company.

Re: AWS BugBust

#85

Post by dvtrn »

WYepQ4dNnG wrote: post #69
dvtrn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask candidates to write and review real production code. Presumably you pay candidates for this, right, if we're talking about "real production code" and valuing developers?

it does not take much, I usually ask candidates on-site, to review real production PR. I would also keep around pieces of real production code and ask the candidate to either fill in additional/missing functionalities, or ask them what changes/tests if any they would implement and why. Basically testing real day-to-day job. If you were to work in this company and you were given this task, how would you approach it? Y…

I would also keep around pieces of real production code and ask the candidate to either fill in additional/missing functionalities

So as opposed to a boilerplate test or asking developers to solve a challenge with a few lines of code and discuss their thoughts on it, they're asked to look at real production code that is in use, opine on it, and add/change functionality to it?

Can I re-ask my question if I've read you properly and understood: presumably you pay people for this right?

I ask because in my mind, solving a coding challenge or talking about something hypothetical/conceptual probably isn't too much different than solving a problem on actual code the company uses from a technical standpoint in as much as they both require effort on my part to think about the problem and bang out a solution...

... but in terms of time spent interviewing and evaluating employers, I'd feel less comfortable contributing anything to production code without the guarantee that the company wont just take the work and implement it, and then later say they hired someone else/went another direction or just decided not to hire at all.

Which has happened.

Re: AWS BugBust

#86

Post by cjaybo »

theden wrote: post #21
Sheepzez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have a pricing page so it's not even free BugBust itself is free. You pay for usage as per normal for CodeGuru Reviewer and CodeGuru Profiler (after the 30 day free trial of BugBust and 90 day free trial of Profiler).

Not sure if you have to use CodeGuru with BugBust, they don't clarify. >(after the 30 day free trial of BugBust and 90 day free trial of Profiler). So it's not free, dev time is expensive and has a lot more value than their proprietary service usage time—so they're coming out on top whilst charging people for it.

They say this service "utilizes" CodeGuru, so I'm betting it cannot be used without CodeGuru.

Re: AWS BugBust

#87

Post by WYepQ4dNnG »

dvtrn wrote: post #85
WYepQ4dNnG wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it does not take much, I usually ask candidates on-site, to review real production PR. I would also keep around pieces of real production code and ask the candidate to either fill in additional/missing functionalities, or ask them what changes/tests if any they would implement and why. Basically testing real day-to-day job. If you were to work in this company and you were given this task, how would you approach it? Y…

I would also keep around pieces of real production code and ask the candidate to either fill in additional/missing functionalities So as opposed to a boilerplate test or asking developers to solve a challenge with a few lines of code and discuss their thoughts on it, they're asked to look at real production code that is in use, opine on it, and add/change functionality to it? Can I re-ask my question if I've read you…

it is trivial code, but in the context of a real code base. I would never ask a candidate to solve a "hard" problem that no one in the company wasn't able to solve. Just an example: in the context of a spring application, I would ask to add a new api, from the controller all the way down to the database. And of course, I'd gauge the interview according to the experience of the candidate and knowledge of a specific framework etc. They are free to lookup the documentation. Really simulating what would happen if the candidate were to get hired.

I mean either that, or you are back at the : implement a linked list, invert binary tree, check palindrome string and similar bs.

Re: AWS BugBust

#88

Post by mdaniel »

jedberg wrote: post #70
ARandumGuy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding how this works, this isn't "give you some perks for doing your job." It's getting perks for doing your job, for someone who isn't paying you. And that's what the problem is. If you want me to fix your bugs, pay me for it. Don't do this gamification nonsense. Edit: apparently I did misunderstand how this works. It seems like the "Bugbusters" are just a company's normal developers…

They're marketing page isn't super clear, but it's adding structure for a company's existing bug bashes. You set up a bug hung for your own developers on your own code.

Then why in the world make Internet Widgets, Pty users create yet another login on some random .aws property that (as very best I can tell) does not support any kind of SSO auth that an outside organization would use: GitHub/GitLab, IAM/Cognito nor OIDC/SAML

Re: AWS BugBust

#89

Post by pyjug »

jedberg wrote: post #81
pyjug wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The structure already exists. It’s called your bug tracker. By building tools to gamify this process, it’s clearly incentivizing devs to put in more hours. I have no doubt that the global leaderboard will consist of devs that would’ve clocked 100s of hours above their regular hours. For very little benefit to the employee. Let me put it you this way - would an engineer at Netflix ever “play this game” to win ? Would…

> would an engineer at Netflix ever “play this game” to win ? I think you're missing the point. The leaderboard is an extra bonus. The main thing is squashing bugs you were already squashing. But yes, there are definitely engineers at Netflix who would play this to "win", just for the love of the game. But let me relate another similar story -- when Amazon released the Deepracer, they added a leaderboard. All around…

You didn’t address whether engineers at Netflix would put up with this.

> I'm pretty sure that is what they are going for here with the global leaderboard

Sorry, I’m confused. This seems like a change in your position? Earlier you argued the intent is for employees to be able to showcase their skill to recruiters… you also responded to someone else who said they already have recruiter attention with “you are not their intended audience”

> paid her full time salary just to compete on Deepracer

Wait, are you seriously comparing a global competition in cutting edge tech to squashing bugs … in your own codebase? Come on.. there’s no comparison. If anything, a company would be semi embarrassed that they have so many bugs in their pre existing codebase.

I’m asking you in good faith. Why the contortions to defend such a product? I see from your profile that you are an investor and advisor. I would seriously try pushing this product to your companies and see how they react. If they do adopt it, run an anonymous survey of the devs .. then I would love to see you argue with a straight face that it “benefits developers”

Re: AWS BugBust

#90

Post by mdaniel »

ehsankia wrote: post #72
mdaniel wrote: post #13

When I read the announcement, I thought they were donating the use of CodeGuru to projects (which I presumed would be limited to open source ones) to (1) improve the code hygiene of the world (2) gather more data for their machine learning models (3) publicity for CodeGuru But as best I can tell, this is the worst of all worlds: I have to already have an AWS account to both create the competition and also to point Co…

One part I'm still not 100% clear about after looking at the site and even your comment. Would people be running CodeGuru against their own internal AWS code, or against existing public open source Github projects, and sending PRs separately from AWS?

I didn't set it up beyond creating a skeleton "Event", cause I have zero interest in paying real money to kick the tires on this, but as I understand it one would add existing repos to their AWS Code* tooling, at which point machine learning awesomeness takes place and it surfaces findings (inside those AWS CodeWhatever APIs, having nothing to do with BugBust)

If those findings are imported into a BugBust Event [which is defined by the tuple of (start date, end date, scoring, and repos in scope)], then one can (invite|publish) a link to the BugBust Event and at the end date the participant who fixed the in-scope issues with the highest point values claims the cited prizes. Further (again, AIUI), at the end of the *AWS* event, the BugBust account who has the most *overall* points wins a re:Invent trip

I don't believe AWS gets into the business of monitoring the PRs, only observing the CodeWhatever outcomes -- if CodeWhatever found an issue, time elapses, and the CodeWhatever sees the issue is fixed, then BugBust will look up the category of said issue, multiply it by the assigned score in any Events it is associated to, and award the Internet points to any Event participant it knows about

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