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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

#321

Post by protocolture »

winrid wrote: post #226
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…

I have the same observation. I've been able to improve things I just didn't have the energy to do for a while. But if you're gonna be lazy, it will multiply the bad.

Recent example.

Trying to get some third party hardware working with raspi

The hardware provider provides 2 separate code bases with separate documentation but only supports the latest one.

I literally had to force feed the newer code base into ChatGPT, and then feed in working example code to get it going, else it constantly reference the wrong methods.

If I just kept going Code / output / repeat it would maybe have stumbled on the answer but it was way off.

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

#322

Post by protocolture »

timr wrote: post #11
jt2190 wrote: post #4

This is interesting: > “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.” > This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bys…

I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs. Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly bori…

100% agreed.

I solve a problem, let the AI mull on the next bit, solve another problem etc.

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

#323

Post by xkjyeah »

Nasrudith wrote: post #130
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…

Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.

The number of organizations that continue to use tedious languages like Java 8 and Golang...

Like, they hadn't realized they were turning humans into compilers for abstract concepts, yet now they are telling humans to get tf out of the way of AI

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

#324

Post by almostgotcaught »

Supermancho wrote: post #309
pbw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

> It's not clear what they meant

I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.

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

#325

Post by analog31 »

rynohack wrote: post #132
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…

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.

Something I've always puzzled over is whether the means of production are our laptops, or our knowledge and expertise. I still work for a wage, but expect to be paid above subsistence. I don't own the laptop that I use at work, but also don't own the carpeting on the floor. Both are commodities.

Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?

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

#326

Post by schmidtleonard »

timkam wrote: post #138
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.

This is an interesting perspective, and I assume your definition is the technically correct one. Still, many SEs receive substantial compensation in RSUs, direct stocks, shares in startups, et cetera. So also from this perspective, there are many non-working class SEs. Another aspect is that culturally, the perception has been that SEs don't necessarily sell their work by the hour, but instead sell knowledge that sca…

It's not technically correct, it's correct.

The distinction here is "do you get your money from owning assets or do you get your money from working" because where you get your money is where you get your incentives and the incentives of owning are opposite the incentives of working in many important regards.

The economy is inhabited by people who work for a living but it is controlled by people who own things for a living. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's the definition of capitalism. If you do not own things for a living and do not know people who do, spend some time pondering "the control plane." It should seem like an alien world at first, but it's an alien world with a wildly outsize impact on your life and it behooves you to understand it in broad strokes even if you aren't trying to climb into it.

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

#327

Post by firecall »

makeitdouble wrote: post #319
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…

> AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Reading "couldn't" as, you would technically not be able to do it because of the complexity or intricacy of the problem, how did you guarantee that the change offered by the AI made proper sense and didn't leave out critical patterns that were too complex for you to detect ? Your comment makes it sound like you're now dependent on AI to refactor again if dir…

That's an important distinction!

There's a difference between not intellectually understanding something and not being able to refactor something because if you start pulling on a thread, you are not sure what will unravel!

And often there just isn't time allocated in a budget to begin an unlimited game of bug testing whack-a-mole!

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

#328

Post by timr »

jerpint wrote: post #181
timr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs. Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly bori…

Part of the fun is also figuring out the “best” way to achieve a thing. LLMs don’t often propose the best way and will happily propose convoluted ways. Clean approaches are still hard to come up with, but LLMs certainly help implementing them once thought up

Yeah, I agree with that. I still enjoy doing the conceptual and design work that once upon a time would have been the role of an "architect", and that's still required with LLMs.

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

#329

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

> lucky enough to work on a Fortune 500 Java codebase

Are you being ironic?

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