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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

#441

Post by wiseowise »

ath3nd wrote: post #134
pbw wrote: post #30

Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work f…

> But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer Or, you know, being a member of society, you can find other members of society who feel like you, and organize together to place demands on employers that...you know...stops them from exploiting you. - That's how you got the weekend: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-m…

Not everything is about society.

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

#442

Post by wiseowise »

mji wrote: post #371
talles wrote: post #72

It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job. AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.

> 'generating new code' is a small part of the job I think this attitude has been taken too far to the point that people (especially senior+ engineers) end up spending massive amounts of time debating and aligning things that can just be done in far less time (especially with AI, but even without it). And these big companies need to change that if they want to get their productivity back. From the article: > One engi…

> and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas.

At least something good comes out of this.

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

#444

Post by dmoy »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #398
dmoy wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The caveat is stated above: in a large expensive US city where a lot of these high paying tech jobs are.

Over 50% of that $160k floor is eaten up by just housing and private or ACA insurance.

So your housing costs for like a 1k-2k sqft spot, all in (rent, or if owning then insurance, upkeep, etc) costs you something like $50k+, your health insurance for two people on ACA costs you like $40k yr assuming kids are out of the picture (more if not), and you have a decent chunk leftover to spend on living a decent life, but not like egregiously large amounts. You're not flying first class, probably not taking more than 2 big vacations a year, driving nice but not crazy expensive car, etc.

If you elect to leave the big expensive US city, then of course you can do it with substantially lower amounts (especially so long as you can swing ACA subsidies and are willing to risk your "not-working-class" existence on the whims of the govt continuing that program).

Obviously if you live in some place (read: everywhere except the US?) where the floor for medical costs of two people not working but still having income from capital isn't around $40k/yr, then the amount can go wayyyy down.

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

#445

Post by wiseowise »

petesergeant wrote: post #400
nlitened wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Perl programmer

Perl programmers are as always ahead of the curve. Writing code that looks like LLM slop before LLMs!

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

#446

Post by anon-3988 »

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.

Where do people that works in Wall Street fall in this spectrum? They don't own the factories

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

#447

Post by djtango »

Aeolun wrote: post #380
makeitdouble wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think, if it’s similar to how I feel about it, that it’s more about always being able to do it, but not wanting to expend the mental effort to correctly adjust all those 30 places. Your boss is not going to care, so while it’s a bit better going forward, justifying the time to do it manually doesn’t make sense even to yourself. If you can do it using an LLM in a few hours however, suddenly making your life, and the…

So everyone is talking across each other...

AI is a sharp tool, use it well and it cuts. Use it poorly and it'll cut you.

Helping you overcome the activation barrier to make that redactor is great if that truly is what it is. That is probably still worth billions in the aggregate given git is considered billion dollar software.

But slop piled on top of slop piled on top of slop is only going to compound all the bad things we already knew about bad software. I have always enjoyed the anecdote that in China, Tencent had over 6k mediocre engineers servicing QQ then hired fewer than 30 great ones to build the core of WeChat...

AI isn't exactly free and software maintenance doesn't scale linearly

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

#448

Post by wiseowise »

pbiggar wrote: post #10

About 8 or 9 years ago, I talked to a friend who started their first software engineering job. They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back. They were expected to complete 2-3 tickets per day. They didn't enjoy the job, needless to say. I found this ultra-depressing, and far from what coding was for me - a creative role with great creativity an…

> They talked about their job as taking tickets from the JIRA board, completing the change, and putting the tickets back.

Where do I sign up?

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

#450

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>That just strikes me as an odd thing to say.

This is along the same lines as why I don't doubt the syntactical features to break. I assume they work. You have to accept some abstraction work, and build on top of it.

We will reach some point where we will have to assume AI is generating the correct code.

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