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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

#111

Post by wkat4242 »

bgwalter wrote: post #96
wkat4242 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm on the other hand, there isn't much resistance against genAI in software development (unlike other creative industries) because ours is founded in collaboration and continuing others' work. It's where open source came from, and the use of libraries. Using stackoverflow was never frowned on. AI is just the same but more efficient. Nobody invents the wheel from scratch. It will change the job yes but it also can me…

There isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete. This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).

These things are waves. First they will fire a bunch of people, but no company can grow through constant downsizing. Then they'll start to imagine to do new things they can do with the new skills and invest in that.

It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now.

And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people.

But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped)

I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much.

In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.

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

#112

Post by neom »

From the business side of the house, I only ever look at it as what can do the right job for the right money to very quickly deliver continuous value to customers. In an employee base: Experience around is always good for growing and improving my people, but it isn't necessarily tied directly to the work to be done. The shift I feel is happening is how I place the value here. Where I can imagine I would land if I was actively running a startup right now is making sure I have amazing production teams (whatever that looks like, age, location, LLM powered or otherwise) book ended by great people growers as all cogs start to squeak if they're not oiled, and experience is the best lubricant on teams, you need both.

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

#113

Post by closewith »

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]

But you of course with your superior skills are above that risk?

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

#114

Post by closewith »

timkam wrote: post #100
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.

The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the ski…

The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.

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

#115

Post by bgwalter »

lloeki wrote: post #43
A1kmm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Contraction of "information" and "electronics" according to this site:

https://grodiko.fr/informatique?lang=en

German site claims that "Informatik", which is practically the same, is a contraction of "Information" and "Mathematik":

https://www.pctipp.ch/praxis/gewusst/kam-begriff-informatik-...

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

#116

Post by wkat4242 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #89
wkat4242 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't really believe in unions either. But I do believe in a good balance between capitalism and socialism (and welfare systems, employee rights etc). I don't believe in the market solving everything.

The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we wouldn't have to fight for our rights because we'd already have them anyway.

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

#117

Post by oulipo »

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.

Agreed, although it's slightly beside the point. The goal of building tools and robots has always been to alleviate work. And this is fine. There's still plenty of stuff to do if machines work for us to give us basic housing and food.

Now what needs to be done is to give back the profits to everyone, inclusively, as a kind of "universal basic income", so that we all enjoy it together, and not just the billionaires

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

#119

Post by bgwalter »

bookofjoe wrote: post #118

I note less hostility to AI/LLM etc in the comments on this post than in previous months. Is the needle shifting?

There were many more throwaway accounts before (I think) the new moderation efforts. Many people cannot speak freely on this topic.

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

#120

Post by closewith »

happytoexplain wrote: post #68
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.

Savoring suffering is uniquely hideous, and one of the grand hallmarks of almost every facet of the decline of the US. It's a clear, bright sign of the death of one's humanity, and the foundation of all evil. Is that dramatic? No. More specifically: Things can be inevitable and also horrible . It is not some kind of cognitive dissonance to care about people losing their livelihoods and also agree that it had to happe…

If in the process of automating away people's livelihoods, you do not simultaneously advocate for the destruction of the capitalist system that ties the well-being of people and their families intrinsically to those jobs, then you do in fact deserve what's coming to you. History shows that retribution against class traitors is not limited to financial hardship, either.
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