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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

#211

Post by codr7 »

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.

I don't mind reading and debugging my own code, or any other code written with a plan by someone with a clue.

Reading and debugging slop code is not the same thing, not even close.

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

#212

Post by dragonwriter »

wkat4242 wrote: post #207
closewith wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> 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.

Having strong and independent unions is how you keep a good socialist government. Almost anytime you hear “With a good government, you don’t need ”, you are hearing a recipe for guaranteeing that good government is an exceptional, transitory state. If your society isn't prepared for bad government, it will have one sooner than you’d like, and it will be difficult to dislodge it.

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

#213

Post by podviaznikov »

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…

100% this. I did this many times too. Often I wouldn’t bother with cleanup or refactor before, but now it’s way easier, faster and cheaper to do it.

And it’s better in the long run.

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

#214

Post by mystified5016 »

larodi wrote: post #199
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.

Yeah, this isn't new, but it certainly seems worse now

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

#215

Post by SoftTalker »

crabl wrote: post #182
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".

CS degree programs have never been about learning to code. They are learning about computers, data structures, machine structures, algorithms. The code was always done on your own time at least that's how my school did it. I never had a class in "Java" or "Python" or "C" or any other languge, that was always incidental to the particular course. I could have used ChatGPT (had it existed) or hired a friend to write the code but that wouldn't help me on the exams (written on paper, at that time). Dev bootcamps? Yeah they should probably be leaning hard into AI as that's just what junior devs are going to be asked to do from here on out.

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

#216

Post by Daishiman »

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.

Marxism is the most impactful ideology of the history of the 20th century and its vocabulary permeates all of political and economic analysis. Marxist analysis is not the same as communism.

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

#218

Post by stock_toaster »

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…

I wonder about codebase maintainability over time.

I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality.

So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.

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

#219

Post by pessimizer »

The Amazon site search and at least some product pages seem to be down right now, although I'm hesitant to say that because I don't remember Amazon ever breaking.

I'm getting 503s ("Sorry! Something went wrong on our end") on searches and "We're sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again" on product pages.

The AIs should probably fix that.

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

#220

Post by Daishiman »

_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.

On the contrary, the definition of "working class" has basically included everyone of up (and potentially including) the petit bourgeois.
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