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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

#181

Post by jerpint »

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…

Part of the fun is also figuring out the “best” way to achieve a thing. LLMs don’t often propose the best way and will happily propose convoluted ways. Clean approaches are still hard to come up with, but LLMs certainly help implementing them once thought up

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

#182

Post by crabl »

softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embr…

As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".

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

#183

Post by hbartab »

osigurdson wrote: post #53

Why would any company want to pay a software engineer to do repetitive / factory like work? It would be better to automate that and not have any engineers from the company's perspective.

Because engineers train the AI that'll replace them.

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

#184

Post by torben-friis »

OptionOfT wrote: post #171

To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded. It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and ex…

Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern.

The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinking about long term architecture and craftsmanship. It’s a laziness enhancer.

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

#185

Post by ath3nd »

pbw wrote: post #159
ath3nd wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I'd argue we'll be better at our jobs if we took pride in our craft and were treated with dignity and respect rather than like replaceable cogs in a machine that have to compete with one another to stay "competitive".

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

#186

Post by dang »

closewith wrote: post #125
devnullbrain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person the headline refers to is a webdev. What job is that getting rid of?

[flagged]

Could you please stop crossing into personal attack? Your account has unfortunately been doing this a lot and we ban accounts that do that.

I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

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

#187

Post by dang »

devnullbrain wrote: post #150
closewith wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

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

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

#188

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

> (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.)

I am not a professional programmer, and I tend to bounce between lots of different languages depending on the problem I'm trying to solve.

If I had all of the syntax for a given language memorized, I can imagine how an LLM might not save me that much time. (It would still be helpful for e.g. tracking down bugs, because I can describe a problem and e.g. ask the AI to take a first pass through the codebase and give me an idea of where to look.)

However, I don't have the syntax memorized! Give me some Python code and I can probably read it, but ask me to write some code from scratch, and LLMs I would have needed to dive into the language documentation or search Stack Overflow. LLMs, and Claude Code in particular, have probably 10x'd what I am capable of, because I can describe the function I want and have the machine figure out the minutia of syntax. Afterwards, I can read what the produced and either (A) ask it to change something specific or (B) edit the code by hand.

I also do find writing code to be less enjoyable than reading/editing code, for the reason described above.

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

#189

Post by newAccount2025 »

overgard wrote: post #167

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…

I really like a lot about Amazon. Friendly and creative people, good projects with high ambiguity and autonomy. The bad parts are the penny-pinching, careless and unaccountable senior leaders who just wants to exploit everyone and everything. But really, aside from things like RTO, they aren’t too impactful on the day to day.

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

#190

Post by _9ptr »

ath3nd wrote: post #129
timkam wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.

Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.

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