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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

#201

Post by catigula »

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…

Yep.

ChatGPT was hugely irresponsible in many ways and rests solely on the shoulders of Sam Altman, someone allegedly implicated in various schemes.

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

#202

Post by larodi »

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'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.

indeed. people generally hate foreign/alien code, or rather - love their style too much. it is not hard to recognize this pattern - ive seen it with colleagues, with my students, with some topnotch 10x-coders back in the day. so proofing is a skill one perhaps develops by teaching others do things right, but is not something most people entertain about.

on the other hand, people who lack time and patience to implement complex stuff may benefit from this process. particularly if they are good code-readers, and some seasoned devs become such people. i can see little chance they wont be using llms to spit code out.

but the two groups largely don't overlap and are different as astronomers and astronauts.

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

#203

Post by catigula »

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.

What you're describing doesn't sound like something that requires a lot of foreign laborers.

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

#204

Post by codr7 »

torben-friis wrote: post #184
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 thinkin…

And once AI is not there anymore, you're back on square one.

It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation.

It's the wrong tool for the job, that's what it is.

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

#205

Post by greesil »

torben-friis wrote: post #184
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 thinkin…

What do you think is going to happen when management is pushing on deadlines?

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

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

SoftTalker wrote: post #198
closewith wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

That group is, in fact, traditionally considered largely working class (proletarian, more specifically the proletarian intelligentsia, though some in that group might be middle class, again, in the traditional class analysis, petit bourgeois sense.)

American popular usage defers from traditional economic role-based class analysis to be instead do income-based “class” terminology which instead of defining the middle class as the petit bourgeois who apply their own labor to their own capital in production (or otherwise have a relation to the economy which depends on both applying labor and ownership of the non-financial means of production) defines middle class as the segment around the median income, almost entirely within the traditional working class.

This is a product of a deliberate effort to redefine terminology to impair working class solidarity, not some kind of accident.

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

#207

Post by wkat4242 »

closewith wrote: post #121
wkat4242 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really believe in unions either. But I do believe in a good balance between capitalism and socialism (and welfare systems, employee rights etc). I don't believe in the market solving everything. The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we would…

Too unreasonable and yet now the issues warned against by labour movements for decades are coming to pass. You have fallen for capitalist propaganda. Time to re-evaluate.

I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights. I find it a bit 'off' that each class of labour has to fight for their own rights separately. That shouldn't be needed (and really isn't, where I live). It also causes a lot of uproar, see France for example where a strike is just tuesday. Employee rights are strong, but the public is heavily impacted all the time. Better to just handle this on the government side. This is why I was a member of the socialist party but not of the union in my workplace (I'm no longer a member because I moved countries and can't vote where I live).

Note: I'm not living in the US obviously :)

I do say a balance because of course we're not living in a communist state. So even with a socialist government there is still capitalism. Just not unrestrictedly so as it is in the US.

I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave). All our basic rights are already sorted. We can't work too many hours, we have unlimited sick leave (though of course validated by a doctor for long absences), we're entitled to a lot of money when fired etc. But this is all national law level stuff. Not industry level.

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

#209

Post by casenmgreen »

closewith wrote: post #123
casenmgreen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be wrong, but I think every job creates wealth overall (or it would not exist), and that software engineering has been making some jobs more efficient and others not necessary, and then the wealth which formerly had to be employed where those jobs were inefficient, or had to exist at all, is then employed elsewhere. If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside. Overall, over the whole of t…

> Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth. This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.

> This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.

If everyone is becoming better off, but at different rates such that there is increase in inequality, then everyone experiences economic growth.

Thought experiment.

We have two people, one with 1000 wealth one with 100.

We have 10% growth per year.

So we see;

1000 -> 1100 -> 1210 -> 1331 100 -> 110 -> 121 -> 133.1

Difference in wealth;

900 -> 990 -> 1089 -> 1198

The ratio of wealth remains 10:1, but the absolute difference becomes larger and larger.

I do not know, and I would like to know, how numbers for wealth inequality are being computed.

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

#210

Post by wkat4242 »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #131
wkat4242 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really believe in unions either. But I do believe in a good balance between capitalism and socialism (and welfare systems, employee rights etc). I don't believe in the market solving everything. The problem I have with unions is that they can be too unreasonable. They're too much on the other side, they're too hardline just like the ultracapitalists/neoliberals but on the other side. In a good system we would…

This comment reeks of liberalism and illustrates why liberalism doesn’t work. You claim you’re trying to balance individualism and collectivism but don’t actually support things that make collectivism work so you end up de facto supporting individualism. Its a way to support individualism while allowing people to feel extra good about themselves for supporting collectivist ideas, on paper.

I'm very socialist, and anti-liberal (at least, in the economic sense of liberalism).

But where I live we just have strong labour rights from the government so individual unions fighting for each type of labour's rights are not needed as much. Sometimes they are, when there are specific risks like chemicals that they work with. But for overall "not get taken advantage of" stuff, it's just not needed so much.

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