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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

#121

Post by closewith »

wkat4242 wrote: post #116
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

Too unreasonable and yet now the issues warned against by labour movements for decades are coming to pass.

You have fallen for capitalist propaganda. Time to re-evaluate.

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

#122

Post by closewith »

neom wrote: post #79
aatd86 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not necessarily. the economies of scale might be increasing as dev productivity increases. the goal of many businesses being to do more with less.

The goal of all American business is exactly the same: maximize the return of profits to the shareholders at large. It is in fact, the law. Do more with less is a natural consequence of this.

> is in fact, the law

It is not in fact law in the US.

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

#123

Post by closewith »

casenmgreen wrote: post #75
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 may be wrong, but I think every job creates wealth overall (or it would not exist), and that software engineering has been making some jobs more efficient and others not necessary, and then the wealth which formerly had to be employed where those jobs were inefficient, or had to exist at all, is then employed elsewhere. If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside. Overall, over the whole of t…

> Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.

This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.

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

#124

Post by seanmcdirmid »

timr wrote: post #11
jt2190 wrote: post #4

This is interesting: > “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.” > This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bys…

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…

Bugs are awesome. I picked my current job at Google because it involved lots of bug fixing and crash investigation.

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

#125

Post by closewith »

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?

[flagged]

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

#127

Post by neom »

closewith wrote: post #122
neom wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of all American business is exactly the same: maximize the return of profits to the shareholders at large. It is in fact, the law. Do more with less is a natural consequence of this.

> is in fact, the law It is not in fact law in the US.

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what...

If directors consistently chose "do less with more" - they'd certainly lose under virtually any legal standard?

Edit: I guess it's technically Michigan law, but as far as I'm aware is de facto? Even Aronson v. Lewis wouldn't allow that. (IANAL)

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

#128

Post by timkam »

closewith wrote: post #114
timkam wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at least temporarily it was, and partially still is, true.

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

#129

Post by ath3nd »

timkam wrote: post #128
closewith wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at leas…

Is the wealth of the average software developer ($122 000/y) in the US closer to the wealth of:

A) a coal miner with $60 000/y salary

B) Elon Musk: $381 000 000 000

Sources: - https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries

- https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO...

- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rich-6-8-170106956....

Is the average amount of properties (1-2) owned by a software developer closer to those of:

A) a worker at Walmart

B) Mark Zuckerberg?

> Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class.

That's what they have been telling SEs to prevent us from unionizing :) All so they can put you where you stand now, when they (wrongly) think they don't need you. SE jobs are working class jobs, and have always been.

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

#130

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.
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