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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

#431

Post by rocqua »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #362
firecall wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

To makeitdouble's point, how is this any different with an LLM provided solution? What confidence do you have that isn't also beginning an unlimited game of bug testing whack-a-mole? My confidence in LLMs is not that high and I use Claude a lot. The limitations are very apparent very quickly. They're great for simple refactors and doing some busy work, but if you're refactoring something you're too afraid to do by ha…

Especially with refactoring, it tends to be tedious and repetitive work that is slightly too complicated for a (regex) search replace.

A lot of repetitive slight variations on the same easy to describe change sounds pretty good to ask an LLM to do quickly.

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

#432

Post by lodovic »

redtaperat wrote: post #345
protocolture wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is one of several shortcomings I’ve encountered in all major LLMs. The llm has consumed multiple versions of SDKs from the same manufacturer and cannot tell them apart. Mixing up apis, methods, macros, etc. Worse is that for more esoteric code with fewer samples, or more wrong than right answers in the corpus means always getting broken code. I had this issue working on some NXP embedded code.

We have MCP servers to solve that (and Context7)

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

#433

Post by anonzzzies »

decimalenough wrote: post #419
anonzzzies wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outsourcing for software fizzled out Any data on that? I see everyone trying to outsource as much as they can. Sure, now it is moving toward AI, but every company I walk into have 10-1000s of FTEs in outsource countries. I see most fortune 1000 companies here doing some type of agile/planningexecution which is in fact more waterfall. The people here in the west are more management and client facing, the rest is 'th…

If they're FTEs, that's not outsourcing, it's moving your employees to a cheaper location. Outsourcing means laying off your FTEs and shoving the entire project over to a WITCH consulting shop.

FTE for lack of a better word: they are not employees of the company, they are full-time working for the company; they are employed by some outsourcing place. FTE I guess means employee of the western country and that they are not, but what would be the term? Full time remote worker?

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

#434

Post by alpaca128 »

lolinder wrote: post #360
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…

Also, you know who did measure every angle to make sure it was correct? The engineers who put together the initial design. They sure as hell took their time getting every detail of the design right before it ever made it to the assembly line. Who's filling that role in this brave new world?

They took their time precisely specifying the robot movements so they're always repeatable. Almost like...some sort of carefully crafted code.

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

#435

Post by strken »

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…

This feels like the wrong question to ask. Someone with a net worth of a "mere" $2 million is also closer to the coal miner, but at a 3% per year withdrawal rate, has a passive income equal to the coal miner's full time work week without lifting a finger.

I don't think it makes sense to group the "don't have to go to work anymore" people with the "can buy anything" people, but they don't have a lot in common with the working class, either.

To what extent are SWEs working class? I guess that depends on how many of them still have to go to work. A salary of $350k certainly puts you on the road to never having to work again.

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

#436

Post by anonzzzies »

ccppurcell wrote: post #414
anonzzzies wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outsourcing for software fizzled out Any data on that? I see everyone trying to outsource as much as they can. Sure, now it is moving toward AI, but every company I walk into have 10-1000s of FTEs in outsource countries. I see most fortune 1000 companies here doing some type of agile/planningexecution which is in fact more waterfall. The people here in the west are more management and client facing, the rest is 'th…

The point being made here is that the biggest software companies still employ lots of programmers but the biggest manufacturing companies don't employ lots of factory workers. I don't think you need data just think about Microsoft vs General Motors etc etc

Sure, but my claim is that these things are still outsourced en masse and nothing fizzled out from that perspective.

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

#437

Post by b800h »

anonzzzies wrote: post #389
majormajor wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons outsourcing for software fizzled out some compared to manufacturing is because in a factory you don't have "measuring to make sure every angle is correct" because (a) the manufacturing tools are tested and repeatable already and (b) the heavy lifting of figuring out all the angles was done ahead of time. So it was easy to mechanize and send to wherever the labor was cheapest since the value was in…

> outsourcing for software fizzled out Any data on that? I see everyone trying to outsource as much as they can. Sure, now it is moving toward AI, but every company I walk into have 10-1000s of FTEs in outsource countries. I see most fortune 1000 companies here doing some type of agile/planningexecution which is in fact more waterfall. The people here in the west are more management and client facing, the rest is 'th…

It did fizzle out the first time round. It won't on this occasion.

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

#438

Post by brundolf »

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…

Something I've been thinking about is that most claims of AI productivity apply just as well (and more concretely and reliably) to just... better tooling and abstractions

Code already lets us automate work away! I can stamp out ten instances of a component or call a function ten times and cut my manual labor by 90%

I'm not saying AI has nothing to add, but the "assembly line" analogies - where we precisely factor out mundane parts of the process to be automated - is what we've been doing this whole time

AI demands a whole other analogy. The intuitions from automating factories really don't apply, imo.

Here's one candidate: AI is like gaining access to a huge pool of cheap labor, doing tasks that don't lend themselves to normal automation. Something like when manufacturing got offshored to China in the late 20th century

If you're chronically doing something mundane in software development, you're doing something wrong. That was true even before AI.

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

#439

Post by brundolf »

andyferris wrote: post #421
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…

The correct analogy is that software engineers design and build the _factory_. The software performs the repeatable process as defined by code, and no person sits and watches if each machine instruction is executed correctly. Do you really want your auto tool makers to not ensure the angle of the tools are correct _before_ you go and build 10,000 (misshaped) cars? I’m not saying we don’t embrace tooling and automatio…

Yes and this is just garden-variety abstraction and toolmaking, which is what programmers have done since the very beginning

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

#440

Post by therein »

mji wrote: post #364
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doing Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" w…

> you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job This sucks for the 50% or so who are like you, but there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (…

Just if there were a way to filter people at hiring and perhaps some way to choose to not employ them after doing so...
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