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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

#141

Post by spacemadness »

layer8 wrote: post #71
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 problem I see is less that of losing jobs, but the fact that the jobs get less enjoyable, less deep work, more mindlessness and less reflection, and possibly also the quality of the produced software decreasing. Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for de…

To be fair, all of corporate has grated against deep work and well written software way before the dawn of LLMs. Tech debt is one of the things that modern software engineering produces in spades.

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

#142

Post by dttze »

f33d5173 wrote: post #133
rynohack wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working class is not defined by income level. The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears. That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.

The way a word is defined by communists and the way it is defined by the rest of the world are seldom the same.

Yeah, one is right and the other is bs pushed to divide people

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

#143

Post by iLoveOncall »

placardloop wrote: post #57
iLoveOncall wrote: post #32

I'm a software engineer at Amazon and I'm directly and indirectly involved a lot in programs related to GenAI tooling. I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or ena…

If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening. Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many team…

Somehow you're dismissing my post saying it's based on my own anecdotical experience while providing your own anecdotical experience and just hearsay.

There is absolutely no company-wide mandate to use GenAI. If some SDM is pushing it on his SDEs, that's an outlier and on that person alone.

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

#145

Post by sidibe »

telesilla wrote: post #54

Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?

> won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?

No why would there be? Unless you are spiritual, there isn't any reason any of the physical processes that make up human thought can't be done artificially, probably much more efficiently. Society needs to confront the myth that automation is going to always open up more jobs that need human labor. It's comforting for people who hate the idea of UBI or other safety nets that people can keep "retraining". Eventually there's going to be nothing to retrain to (at least of nothing of economic value)

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

#147

Post by dang »

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]

> shitty code monkeys

Please don't put others down like that on HN. It's mean and degrades the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#148

Post by exe34 »

sokoloff wrote: post #92
exe34 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind of automation I write is stuff that wouldn't get done if person had to do it. But with automation, it becomes possible and profitable.

I think a lot of genAI coding efficiency will have the same property: costs will go down to the point where things that couldn’t be done affordably in software in 2020 will be affordable in 2030. That could well result in a net increase in tech employment.

I'm surprised people aren't using it to churn out javascript framework after framework - is that not the done thing anymore?
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