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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

#391

Post by malfist »

Flemlo wrote: post #259
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?

You can see that in this article referencing Jassy's 4,500 years of effort. Which is said "sounds crazy but it's true!"

It isn't true.

The tool he's bragging about most went about changing JDK8 to JDK17 in a build config file, and if you're lucky tweaking log4j versions. 4,500 years my ass. It was more regex and AI

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

#392

Post by sham1 »

jmyeet wrote: post #343
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…

You're not wrong that AI is hyped just like crypto and VR were. But it's also true that automation will increasingly impact your job, even for jobs that we have considered to be highly technical like software engineering. I've noticed this over the last decade where tech people (of which I am one) have considered themselves above the problems of ordinary workers such as just affording to live. I really started to not…

There have always been segments of the working class, which have deluded themselves into believing that by co-operating with the capitalists, they could shield themselves from the adverse effects of what is happening to the rest of the working class.

And it's an understandable impulse, but at some point you'd think people would learn instead of being mesmerized by the promise of slightly better treatment by the higher classes in exchange for pushing down the rest of the working class.

Now it's our turn as software engineers to swallow that bitter pill.

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

#393

Post by bartread »

agarren wrote: post #351

> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works. That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification…

And except that the factory analogy of software delivery has always been utterly terrible.

If you want to draw parallels between software delivery and automotive delivery then most of what software engineers do would fall into the design and development phases. The bit that doesn’t: the manufacturing phase - I.e., creating lots of copies of the car - is most closely modelled by deployment, or distribution of deliverables (e.g., downloading a piece of software - like an app on your phone - creates a copy of it).

The “manufacturing phase” of software is super thin, even for most basic crud apps, because every application is different, and creating copies is practically free.

The idea that because software goes through a standardised workflow and pipeline over and over and over again as it’s built it’s somehow like a factory is also bullshit. You don’t think engineers and designers follow a standardised process when they develop a new car?

It would be crazy for auto factory workers to check every angle. It is absolutely not crazy for designers and engineers to have a deep understanding of the new car they’re developing.

The difference between auto engineering and software engineering is that in one your final prototype forms the basis for building out manufacturing to create copies of it, whereas in the other your final prototype is the only copy you need and becomes the thing you ship.

(Shipping cadence is irrelevant: it still doesn’t make software delivery a factory.)

This entire line of reasoning is… not really reasoning. It’s utterly vacuous.

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

#394

Post by Ericson2314 »

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…

Illiterates. Reading code was always very important. Hell may be mandatory vibe coding, but I'm glad this guy is now forced to read.

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

#395

Post by zeroonetwothree »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #326
timkam wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

I wouldn’t say the economy is “controlled” by those people. The economy is just an emergent phenomenon. It’s a natural result of unrestricted freedom of exchange.

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

#396

Post by zeroonetwothree »

closewith wrote: post #304
hollerith wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The obvious and actual analog to Newton is Adam Smith.

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

#397

Post by fsloth »

bartread wrote: post #393
agarren wrote: post #351

> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works. That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification…

And except that the factory analogy of software delivery has always been utterly terrible. If you want to draw parallels between software delivery and automotive delivery then most of what software engineers do would fall into the design and development phases. The bit that doesn’t: the manufacturing phase - I.e., creating lots of copies of the car - is most closely modelled by deployment, or distribution of delivera…

It’s not only vacuous. It’s incompentent by failing to recognize the main value add mechanisms. In software delivery, manufacturing, or both. I’m not sure if Dunning-Krueger model is scientifically valid or not but this would be a very Dunning-Krueger thing to say (high confidence, total incompentence).

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

#398

Post by zeroonetwothree »

dmoy wrote: post #359
vkou wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here. When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid…

Yea for concrete numbers: If you have somewhere between $5M and $10M in a HCoL American city, you are probably no longer working class insofar as you could quit, get on ACA healthcare, and rent a decent house or buy / mortgage a decent house and live a pretty comfortable life indefinitely. But you're on the very low end of not-working-class and are living a modest life (if you quit and stop drawing a salary). If you…

I don’t see how something like 160-320k income without working is a “modest life”. By any absolute standard you have it better than almost every human that has ever lived.

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

#399

Post by tsimionescu »

gerdesj wrote: post #341
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.

"usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career." What does that mean?

It means that the company is more likely to fire that person on the logic that they "failed" to be promoted to management, that they're "treading water" as a developer.

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

#400

Post by petesergeant »

nlitened wrote: post #80
ManBeardPc wrote: post #70

I feel my job in the future will be more secure than ever. Tons and tons of AI generated garbage code (trained on more and more existing garbage code) that the „developer“ will at a certain point no longer be able to maintain or fix. Not even speaking about trusting the output. Feels similar to all the outsourced development to cheap suppliers that inevitably collapse or create horrible maintenance overhead.

Do you feel you would be able to “maintain and fix” LLM-generated 100-megabyte source code blobs? And if you could, do you think it would be a job you’d want to do?

I spent 2000-2015ish as a Perl programmer, which meant I spent most of that time working for a small number of e-commerce and SaaS companies who had large codebases that had mostly been written around 2005 with some hair-raising tech practices. Nursing a nasty codebase to health bit by bit can be very rewarding.
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