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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

#191

Post by tehjoker »

This article features a study claiming 25% productivity gains form co-pilot. I wonder what a similar study would say about developers with and without access to internet search. In the study, it seems, as I expected, less experienced people found more value from it. My experience has been AI tools are more helpful when I don't know the domain, and then their benefit declines as I familiarize.

I also looked at the study and noticed a few aspects that were surprising:

(a) some of the 95% CIs crossed zero, meaning no benefit is a possible interpretation in figures 6 and 7

(b) did anyone account for what happens when two workers are in different experimental groups and sit next to each other? I imagine it was likely common people in the experimental group to use co-pilot queries for their friends.

(c) for experienced workers, the mean value is actually negative (lol) in the unweighted data in Figure 7

There are a lot of other subtleties in the interpretation of this paper.

"...developers who were less productive before the experiment are significantly more likely to accept any given suggestion...."

...curious lol

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566

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

#192

Post by neilv »

You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs

The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly.

So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you.

Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to launder it.

Google had too much class (and comfortable market position) to launch the sleazy "AI" gold rush.

But plenty of upstarts currently see an irresistible opportunity to get rich, by leveraging automated mass copyright violation, while handwaving "AI".

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

#193

Post by vkou »

_9ptr wrote: post #190
ath3nd wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here.

When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.

If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.

Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.

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

#194

Post by SoftTalker »

rynohack wrote: post #132
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…

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 means of production for a software engineer is a laptop. Many SEs own them. There are no raw materials or factories needed to produce software, at least not in the sense of traditional production.

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

#195

Post by tkzed49 »

neilv wrote: post #192

You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly. So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you. Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to…

I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".

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

#196

Post by closewith »

dang wrote: post #186
closewith wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Nothing in my comment was a personal attack, only a reflection of GP's own behaviour. Go ahead and ban the account if calling out these comments as written is unwelcome. But beware the behaviour you welcome by leading it unchallenged.

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

#197

Post by placardloop »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #143
placardloop wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your comment stated “nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools”, which is entirely false - I’m looking at an email in my inbox from my VP right now saying everyone must use AI every day.

You said “None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere” - this is also false. I’m looking at an installed by default (and uninstallable) AI browser addon on my work laptop right now.

It’s not hearsay, you’re either commenting in bad faith or you’re just clueless about what’s going on at your own company.

> There is absolutely no company-wide mandate

And now you’re just moving the goalposts.

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

#198

Post by SoftTalker »

closewith wrote: post #157
f33d5173 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This also includes doctors, lawyers, academics, managers and executives, none of whom are traditionally thought of as "working class"

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

#199

Post by larodi »

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…

well, in all honesty, a lot of code that actually works in production, and delivers... goods, services, etc. is an over patched mess of code snippets. that sad part is that cpus are so powerful that it works.

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

#200

Post by s5fs »

pbw wrote: post #180
pbw wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another datapoint is working earlier eras sound bad to me: punchcards, assembly, COBOL, FORTRAN. Yes I suspect those people had a blast.

Ex-cobol guy here, the work was a blast! I was working on the Lawson erp for a non-profit, mostly customizing the software for their specific use case. I loved it because the tools were crazy, the language limited, and the system itself was high value to the org. Debugging took forever but the fixes were often really small changes. I often had to go into the database (oracle) and clean up the data by hand. Such fun!

I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!

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