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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

#151

Post by mr_toad »

cmiles74 wrote: post #110
locococo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.

When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements. Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good d…

I worry a bit about people who like writing code but don’t like reading and debugging it. There are enough “throw it over the wall” coders.

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

#152

Post by kjkjadksj »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #56
bgwalter wrote: post #34

Amazon is going down. 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now they are violating EU laws and cheat the gmp developers out of a CPU replacement: https://gmplib.org/ Granlund's gcc optimizations probably save Amazon millions in electricity each year. But evidently they don't care about real programmers.

> 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.)

They aren’t cheaper anymore. The “real” branded stuff is usually more expensive on amazon than straight from the manufacturers website. The “cheap” fake aliexpress stuff is just that charged at a premium. You can find the same exact product images even on the same products on ebay from probably the same merchants listing on both marketplaces.

It has changed dramatically over the past 5 or so years into this.

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

#153

Post by pbw »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #77
pbw wrote: post #30

Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work f…

Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.

“I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.” Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed?

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

#154

Post by kjkjadksj »

chongli wrote: post #6

What even are most programmers at Amazon doing? It seems like all the interesting bits (the MVP of Amazon's major products) was developed long ago. All the low-hanging fruit is gone so the task is now focused on squeezing the few remaining drops of efficiency out of the stone.

Last few drops of efficiency out of the aws stone scales to millions of dollars of savings potentially.

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

#155

Post by pjmlp »

locococo wrote: post #24
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…

A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.

It has been a factory job for decades.

Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department.

Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job.

And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.

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

#156

Post by pjmlp »

mr_toad wrote: post #151
cmiles74 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements. Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good d…

I worry a bit about people who like writing code but don’t like reading and debugging it. There are enough “throw it over the wall” coders.

Yeah, AI will kill all mundane brick layering jobs.

The real software engineering role, with architecture, customer management, discovery phase, risk analysis and all the other kind of stuff, not yet.

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

#157

Post by closewith »

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.

The working class is globally the class of people who must sell their labour. That includes - to a rounding error - all software developers and that is completely uncontroversial.

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

#158

Post by overgard »

You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.)

The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that's written code knows that writing code is a lot more fun than reading code, but for some reason we're delegating to the AI the actual enjoyable task and turning ourselves into glorified code reviewers. Except we don't actually review the code, it seems, we just go on with bug ridden monstrosities.

I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code. I don't want my job to be reviewing LLM slop to find hallucinations and security vulnerabilities, only to try to tweak the 20,000 word salad prompt.

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

#159

Post by pbw »

ath3nd wrote: post #134
pbw wrote: post #30

Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work f…

> But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you. - That's how you got the weekend: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-m…

By all means “organize together to place demands on your employers”. I didn’t say don’t do that. But there are 24 hours in a day — maybe strive to be good at your job AND organize instead of doing just one or the other?
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