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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

#281

Post by soraminazuki »

podviaznikov wrote: post #213
torben-friis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any actual evidence of it being better? Because publicly available evidence points to the contrary, where it repeatedly fails to complete the most basic of tasks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152

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

#282

Post by wkat4242 »

closewith wrote: post #277
wkat4242 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No really, we had such a room built and it is literally never used. Because there is nobody who brings their baby to work (which would be exceptionally impractical anyway - who'd want to be sitting on a phone call beside a crying baby??). The bad thing is they converted the welfare room for this which was used all the time :(

Breastfeeding rooms are used for expression and I wonder how you'd know if they're used or not.

I was told by building services when I complained about the removal of the wellness/meditation room. They have presence sensors. They also told me that nobody actually asked for it besides the union idiots who are not even in our city. They're just ticking boxes.

I really needed that place because of the move to hotdesking so I'm constantly sitting besides blabby sales people. Formerly we had an IT floor where people knew concentration is sometimes needed. So I'd go there to sit in silence and de-stress for a while.

But I have to say the company is good otherwise, I told them about my difficulty and the H&S people let me work from home much more than others.

I hate the way companies are going back from full remote to hybrid hotdesking though because that is the worst of both worlds.

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

#283

Post by tehjoker »

timkam wrote: post #100
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.

The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the ski…

s/post-pandemic/after ignoring the pandemic/

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

#284

Post by dymk »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #60

With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are…

It’s less automating the job of the engineer away, and replacing management with a panopticon AI

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

#285

Post by tehjoker »

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.

data, infrastructure, IP, etc You typically don't serve business from your laptop. Without that stuff your code is worthless.

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

#286

Post by tehjoker »

hollerith wrote: post #279
OKRainbowKid wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you ignoring the rest of the comment?

Most professional economists IMHO would not agree that Marxism's vocabulary permeates their field. Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.

I think if you had read Capital, you'd find many of these concepts amply addressed, usually with different terminology.

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

#287

Post by cyanydeez »

gavinward wrote: post #275
Flemlo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Agreed. I can't think of another area where AI could amplify the effect of my existing level of knowledge as it does with coding. It's far exceeding my expectations.

So, the internet was great until Facebook showed up.

Facebook of AI is coming and it's going to be much, much worse. and it'll still contain as you describe.

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

#288

Post by jvanderbot »

geodel wrote: post #240
pjmlp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been a factory job for decades. Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department. Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job. And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.

Of course it is true. The thing was 90% of Amazon engineers made far more money at their job while essentially doing typical enterprise software work. This money led them believe it is some creative work. And now those task management and time monitoring tools are catching up to Amazon IT workers so they are realizing it is similar to another low end IT job/ factory work.

The pay and benefits at Amazon always seemed to offset the shit work/life balance and on-call rotation. What a gauntlet that was. The only engineers that got recognition were those that fixed high profile bugs, preferably after hours. Shipping a feature was always just "business as usual"

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

#289

Post by rxtexit »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #5

Welcome to the club. Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions? I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.

Yes, this is the nature of being spoiled rotten.

I am not a software engineer and have never felt stable in my 30 year career.

It always feels like the rug could get pulled out from under me at any time.

So what? It is still better than working in coal mine. It is still more interesting than working at a gas station.

Hard to feel sorry for people basically complaining the work ping pong table doesn't have quite the quality ping pong balls they were expecting.

It is an interesting mix of being both super elitist and completely infantile at the same time.

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

#290

Post by cyanydeez »

kranke155 wrote: post #251
SoftTalker wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if we're just going to loop this properly, the modern means of production is the stock market's inflated capital. Most of AI floats on cash that does not exist for any purpose except market speculation.
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