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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

#301

Post by closewith »

wkat4242 wrote: post #282
closewith wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can imagine why the breastfeeding rooms were empty if your comments are indicative of your attitude in work.

Nothing about your example is an overreach of unions. In fact, it is a perfect example of the value of organised labour.

In honour of recent comments by dang, I won't be as direct as I'd historically be and instead invite you to think about - in the grand scheme of things - how accessibility, including expressing mothers, may be a societal and absolute good.

As a secondary exercise, maybe it's worth thinking about the ethics of presence sensors.

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

#302

Post by overgard »

jevndev wrote: post #173
overgard wrote: post #158

You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.) The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that…

I think the key to understanding why people want this is that those people care about results more than the act of coding. The easy example for this is a corporation. If the software does what was said on the product pitch, it doesn’t matter if the developer had fun writing it. All that matters is that it was done in an efficient enough (either by money or time) manner. A slightly less bleak example is data analysis.…

If you care about the results you have to care about the craft, full stop.

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

#303

Post by Jensson »

biosboiii wrote: post #85
bgwalter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the EU, use this search engine: https://geizhals.eu/ Amazon is not nearly the cheapest or most reliable one for hardware.

I am sorry but this is insane cope, Amazon is still on-top everywhere, also in Europe.

Depends on how local you go, there are local alternatives that are bigger in their domain for almost every domain in most parts of Europe. Amazon is much much smaller outside of USA and there are plenty of alternatives with better and cheaper service.

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

#304

Post by closewith »

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.

Marx permeates economics like Newton permeates physics.

If this seems like an absurd comparison, I would suggest reading both Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Das Kapital.

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

#305

Post by skydhash »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #231
skydhash wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one have the language syntax memorized, unless you're working with the language daily. Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot (checkout the formal grammar for any programming language). For any C like language, they overlap a lot, the difference are mostly in syntax minutia (which we can refresh in an afternoon with a reference) and the higher abstractions (which you learn once, like OOP, pattern matchin…

> Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot That's kind of what I mean by "syntax". For example, "how do I find a value that matches X in this specific type of data structure?" AI is very good at this and it's a huge time saver for me. But I can imagine how it might be less helpful if I did this full time.

That's a good workflow. But in this case I just have a somewhat complete book about the language, a book and some web search open. Because I often seek for more complete information without the need for prompting and checking if the information is correct.

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

#306

Post by closewith »

SoftTalker wrote: post #269
closewith wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All professions are traditionally working class.

I guess it depends on whose tradition is under discussion. In the contemporary American usage, "working class" means the trades, or factory and service work. Few people would call a physician or lawyer "working class" even though they are paid for their time (and knowledge).

I wonder about your contemporaries. I imagine that most of them have a completely different definition to you, because you and doctors and lawyers are - to a rounding error - working class and everyone but you is aware of it.

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

#307

Post by lvturner »

billy99k wrote: post #299
dabockster wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way? Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But h…

I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software. The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that…

>> The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you.

But isn't that exactly what we have now with the existing patents and copyrights implementation?

Maybe some people are getting some money, but I know if Amazon (random example company name) violate copyright or a patent of mine, I don't have the resources to take them to court over it much less win.

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

#308

Post by lawgimenez »

dabockster wrote: post #293
codr7 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation. It's effective on things that would take months/years to learn, if someone could reasonably learn it on their own at all. I tried vibe coding a Java program as if I was pair programming with an AI, and I encountered some very "Java" issues that I would not have even had the opportunity to get experience in unless I was lucky enough to work on a Fortu…

I just came out from a cave, what is this vibe coding?

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

#309

Post by Supermancho »

pbw wrote: post #153
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.

“I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.” Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed?

> Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed?

Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.

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

#310

Post by hackernoops »

ath3nd wrote: post #129
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…

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…

And for all of Mark Zuckerberg's wealth and property holdings, it wasn't enough and didn't stop him from trying to take sacred land from native Hawaiians on the island of Kauai.
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