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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

#81

Post by garretraziel »

devnullbrain wrote: post #50
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?

Cashiers, some officials, a lot of the “personal contact with a customer” gets transferred to web. I am not complaining, just answering the question.

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

#82

Post by NBJack »

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).

Joke's on us; this is going to rapidly drain what little creativity there is in places like Amazon as they rely increasingly more on a tool that at best intelligently regurgitates what it learned/gleaned/stole from the internet. As the AI models are further trained on their own slop, the signal to noise ratio will only get worse; this has already been noted in studies.

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

garretraziel wrote: post #81
devnullbrain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cashiers, some officials, a lot of the “personal contact with a customer” gets transferred to web. I am not complaining, just answering the question.

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by SonOfKyuss »

talles wrote: post #72

It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job. AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.

Agreed. I spend maybe 20% of my time writing code. The rest is gathering requirements, design, testing, scheduling. Maybe if that 20% now takes half as long, I might have time to actually write some tests and documentation

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

#85

Post by biosboiii »

bgwalter wrote: post #73
mananaysiempre wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now ... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)

For the EU, use this search engine: https://geizhals.eu/ Amazon is not nearly the cheapest or most reliable one for hardware.

I am sorry but this is insane cope, Amazon is still on-top everywhere, also in Europe.

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

#86

Post by NBJack »

biorach wrote: post #29
eitally wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for about ten years, at least, the majority of Google swe rules have been talked about as "just moving protobufs", which is effectively the same. If your job is just plumbing other people's designs for existing products, how fun can it be?

I think you do not understand what A Google SWE actually does

It's a running joke internally. But not always far from the truth. Translating business level protobufs into solution level protobufs is indeed the job of entire teams sometimes.

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

#87

Post by julkali »

I think there is a fundamental misconception of the benefit / performance-improvement of LLM-aided programming:

Without sacrificing code quality, it only makes coding more productive _if you already know_ what you're doing.

This means that while it has a big potential for experienced programmers (making them push out more good code), you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good software.

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

#88

Post by sokoloff »

devnullbrain wrote: post #50
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?

Web dev doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Web dev for e-commmerce displaced brick and mortar retail. Web dev for streaming displaced video rentals and audio sales.

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

#89

Post by amanaplanacanal »

wkat4242 wrote: post #63
jampekka wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it. https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...

Certainly back when I worked in IT, the people I worked with were mostly very much anti-union. I didn't hear much anti immigrant talk back then but I've been retired for a while.

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

#90

Post by Pet_Ant »

devnullbrain wrote: post #59
Pet_Ant wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email made the corporate mailroom obsolete and the letter carrier.

So would it be poetic justice when an electrician gets laid off?

More like if the motor maker gets replaced by a motorised machine. And yeah, that’s poetic.

The electrician is more like the person laying fibre optic cable.

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