Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 897 posts

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

#161

Post by HPsquared »

overgard wrote: post #158

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…

I personally find debugging and fixing code to be the most rewarding.

That way you know you're (usually) strictly making an improvement.

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

#162

Post by lloeki »

bgwalter wrote: post #115
lloeki wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Larousse dictionary disagrees:

https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/informatique/...

This cites the same person (Philippe Dreyfus) but with "automatic":

https://www.caminteresse.fr/societe/quelle-est-lorigine-du-m...

> Il faut attendre 1962 pour réentendre parler d’informatique dans les médias. « Informatique » est en effet le terme utilisé pour la première fois par un scientifique français pour désigner le traitement automatique des données. Il s’agit de Philippe Dreyfus, fondateur de la société SIA, acronyme pour « Société d’Informatique Appliquée ».

And then enters the dictionary in 1966.

In 1957 in Germany, Karl Steinbuch describes Informatik as Automatische Informationsverarbeitung.

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

#163

Post by Vinnl »

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…

I think for me, the fun comes from preventing bugs; being able to draw on my experience to foresee common classes of bugs, and being able to prevent them through smart code architecture, making it easier for future contributors/readers to avoid walking into those traps. I'm hoping I'll keep being able to do that.

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

#164

Post by overgard »

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…

I spend all day fixing bugs and that's why they pay me -- because for most people it's not an enjoyable task. I'm not denying your experience but I will tell you I think you're an outlier. For most people, fixing bugs they didn't create is the worst part of the job.

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

#165

Post by cj »

overgard wrote: post #158

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…

> I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code.

IME there's an inverse relationship between how excited the person is about AI coding and their seniority as an engineer.

Juniors (and non-coders) love it because now they can suddenly do things they didn't know how to do before.

Seniors don't love it because it gets in their way, causes coworkers to put up low-quality AI-generated code for peer review, and struggles with any level of complexity or nuance.

My fear is that AI code assistants will inadvertently stop people from progressing from Junior --> Senior since it's easier to put out work without really understanding what you're doing. Although I guess I could have said the same thing about Stack Overflow 10 years ago.

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

#166

Post by overgard »

HPsquared wrote: post #161
overgard wrote: post #158

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…

I personally find debugging and fixing code to be the most rewarding. That way you know you're (usually) strictly making an improvement.

I know I'm making an improvement by features I've shipped to customers. Bugs prevent me from shipping more features until they're fixed. I do not enjoy bugs.

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

#167

Post by overgard »

This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees well.

(That said I'm all for more dystopian stories so we can get past this AI-replacing-coders fad)

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

#169

Post by philipwhiuk »

neom wrote: post #95
julkali wrote: post #87

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 softwar…

I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do th…

You're paying $1000 a month to build a web app for fun?

This seems like a crazy solution to a situation.

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

#170

Post by pbw »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #60

With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are…

I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular.

But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff.

At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.

Post reply on HN