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At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

nytimes.com

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Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#41

Post by Pet_Ant »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #17
usrnm wrote: post #12

I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.

How is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation?

Email made the corporate mailroom obsolete and the letter carrier.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#42

Post by notyourwork »

ape4 wrote: post #26
timr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs. Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly bori…

Fixing bugs in my own code is fine. In other's code its less fun.

That’s the wrong mentality. You and your team own all the code. A bugs peer is your bug too.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#43

Post by lloeki »

A1kmm wrote: post #33
usrnm wrote: post #12

I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.

Software development is the most automated career in the history of all time. Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development. LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used…

In french the two fields that are Computer Science and Information Technology are under the same moniker: "informatique", a portmanteau of information and automatic.

The whole field is about automating yourself out of a job, and it's right in the name.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#44

Post by Pet_Ant »

codr7 wrote: post #18
timkam wrote: post #15

Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely…

[flagged]

I see it more as replacing shitty code monkeys because it leaves the hard parts behind.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#46

Post by leoedin »

pbiggar wrote: post #10

About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say. I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity an…

I've had plenty of colleagues who expect the job to be that. Just working on a small ticket and moving it to "to test" when done.

It's incredibly frustrating to try and get anything done in a team like that. The reality of most software jobs I've had is that problem discovery is part of it. The only people who know the code well enough to know the problens it has are the developers.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#47

Post by jampekka »

usrnm wrote: post #12

I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.

Gloating about hardships was and is a great way to ensure things will get worse for workers as efficiency and automation increases.

Another option would be to join forces to collectively demand more equitable distribution of the fruits of technological development. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#48

Post by smokel »

usrnm wrote: post #12

I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.

I have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less.

It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#49

Post by bix6 »

danielbln wrote: post #27
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #5

Welcome to the club. Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions? I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.

This begins the golden age of creative generalists (until that's also in the chopping block).

Is it? We’re more specialized than ever imo.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#50

Post by devnullbrain »

usrnm wrote: post #12

I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.

The person the headline refers to is a webdev. What job is that getting rid of?
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