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

251–260 of 897 posts

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

#251

Post by kranke155 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #194
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 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.

That’s not true. The actual means of production are the data centers. It’s true they didn’t use to be hugely expensive either, but now with AI being the backbone of everything we now have really expensive data centers again.

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

#252

Post by neilv »

AstroBen wrote: post #227
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…

Google had too much class? They've been scraping sites content for years before all this LLM stuff - using it to answer questions directly in search results and sending no clicks No, I think Google was just slow this time

I think Google has ethics in their self-image. Albeit more flexibility in practice.

But decisions might've come down to what keeps the ad revenue machine fed. Or it might not have made it to decisions.

If they were slow, wasn't it only in being prepared for when the boat got rocked? Until the boat got rocked, they had a monopoly, so why rock it themselves?

I wouldn't write in my promotion packet, "Disrupted our golden cash cow, and put our dominance and entire company at risk, before someone else did, because it would happen eventually, you'll thank me later, pls promo kthx."

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

#253

Post by tkzed49 »

neilv wrote: post #247
tkzed49 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code. But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor). For one reason, code is important, and valuable... There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money h…

Thanks, it's an interesting perspective. I may have underappreciated the code volume/time requirements to execute especially in a startup setting.

I think I see where you're coming from. I'd imagine in some applications, there is very niche/specific implementation on Github that is both expensive to reimplement and not permissively licensed. I can see the "AI laundering" angle there.

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

#254

Post by raxxorraxor »

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…

There are probably some spots with interesting engineering problems or projects. But overall I agree, I don't want to work for big tech.

As for developing becoming more factory-like. Not sure about that, you have the same leverage as a developer and you can just work for the other guy.

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

#255

Post by closewith »

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 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)

A true committed exclusionary socialist.

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

#256

Post by const_cast »

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"

It doesn't, because a lot of those people do not sell their labor. Doctors sell a practice, or can anyway. As time goes on fewer and fewer do - they're being pushed out of the capitalist class to the working class. Most now work a salary for a large employer, like you or me.

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

#257

Post by closewith »

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"

All professions are traditionally working class.

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

#258

Post by const_cast »

pessimizer wrote: post #228
almostgotcaught wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.

> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are…

> "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual.

Right, but the observation here is that many, maybe most, individuals in a particular field are having this same problem of labor autonomy and exploitation. So... unions are pretty good for that.

SWE is somewhat unique in that, despite us being the lowest level assembly-line type worker in our field, we get paid somewhat well. Yes, we're code monkeys, but well-paid code monkeys. With a hint of delusions of grandeur.

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

#259

Post by Flemlo »

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…

A hype is over promising and under delivering.

AI is extremely new, impressive and is already changing things.

How can that be in any way be similar to crypto and VR?

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

#260

Post by const_cast »

lazystar wrote: post #230
nagisa wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon pays really well. Amazon also has a number of interesting projects (e.g. a number of contributors to the rust compiler are employed by Amazon to work on rustc.) It also looks nice enough on a resume to give people a nice stepping stone towards even better opportunities.

> Amazon pays really well maybe 10 years ago. HR is like a rabid dog, fighting for every dollar.

They, the HR and bean counters of the world, don't see the big picture. It's optimize optimize optimize, but then they don't consider what they're actually trying to achieve.

Typically if you squeeze every penny, you end up with shit. You can do it, but those costs don't just - poof - disappear. They might, and often do, become more difficult to measure. So if you're the measuring guy, it might look great to you.

Post reply on HN