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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

#481

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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?

> A hype is over promising and under delivering.

Indeed, which is exactly what's happening with AI.

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

#482

Post by [deleted] »

misja111 wrote: post #451

My experience with AI so far is exactly the opposite. It can help me with finding configurations to set up software packages, with syntax of programming languages that I use only occasionally so am not too familiar with, or it can give suggestions for improvement for code that I have written. It's like having a personal assistant. But the interesting work: thinking about software architecture, about implementation st…

[deleted]

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

#483

Post by entropi »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #239
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…

This can only go three ways. The first is that the entire global codebase starts to become an unstable shitpile, and eventually critical infrastructure starts collapsing in a kind of self-inflicted Y2k event. Experienced developers will be rehired at astronomical rates to put everything back together, and then everyone will proceed more cautiously. (Perhaps.) The second is that AI is just about good enough and things…

I agree with you three scenarios. But I would assign different probabilities. I think the second option is the most likely. Things will get shittier and cheaper. Third option might not ever come to pass.

Just like clothing and textile work. They are getting cheaper and cheaper, true, but even with centuries of automation, they are still getting shittier in the process.

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

#484

Post by xarope »

NBJack wrote: post #86
biorach wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you do not understand what A Google SWE actually does

It's a running joke internally. But not always far from the truth. Translating business level protobufs into solution level protobufs is indeed the job of entire teams sometimes.

to a certain extent, this is correct:

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.” — Linus Torvalds

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

#485

Post by bubblyworld »

tho234j234234 wrote: post #428
ozim wrote: post #411

As a software dev I always felt like working warehouse - sprints, strony points being held on productivity metrics. people think all devs work FAANG like companies when there is loads of companies where devs are treated like dirt only now one FAANG company catches up with reality. Where business people seem to never be measured in any way. If requirements were shitty - well dev team did a bad job - not that business…

I thought devs were always treated like dirt at Amazon ? I've tried interviewing at that place, and have't felt that kind of hostility ever - one guy even wanted me to prove that K-means in 2d is in P. This I later found was a was the topic of a key paper in this niche of ML theory.

That can't be right - planar k-means is well known to be NP-complete.

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

#486

Post by [deleted] »

rafaelmn wrote: post #459
whatever1 wrote: post #456

An example from today: I have some scientific calculations that run in a Django app. One specific endpoint has a function that takes 2-3 minutes to execute. When I was hitting the endpoint I was getting a timeout error. I asked Claude to fix it, and it came up with a huge change in the front end (polling) and backend (celery) to support asynchronous operations. I instead increased the nginx timeout from 1 minute to 5…

You didn't specify how you asked Claude to fix it here so hard to evaluate if it's giving you what you asked for or just choosing the wrong approach. It's one of the things these models will do - they will narrow down on what you asked them to do - so for example if you just gave it your code without the deployment and said fix it on code level that would bias it to go in that direction, etc. Disclaimer: not one of t…

[deleted]

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

#487

Post by maeln »

bdangubic wrote: post #342
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…

It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. this matches the description of every codebase (except one) I came across in my 30-year career

While I have a similar experience with, hurm, "legacy" codebase, I gotta say, LLM (in my experience) made the "legacification" of the codebase way, way faster.

One thing especially, is the loss of knowledge about the codebase. While there was always some stackoverflow-coding, when seeing a weird / complicated piece of code, I used to be able to ask the author why it was like that. Now, I sometimes get the answer "idk, its what chatgpt gave me".

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

#488

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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…

I think engineers are more like doctors / lawyers, who are also both contracted labor, whose wages can be (and have been) suppressed as automations and tactics to suppress wages arrived.

But these groups also don't have strong unions and generally don't have the class consciousness you are talking about, especially as the pay increases.

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

#489

Post by GrumpyNl »

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…

In the beginning there was a saying, "nobody cares what your code looks like, as long as it works". We went full circle.

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

#490

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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 (…

> 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 (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common)

Idk I barely ever work with people who are like this, and if people become like this, it's usually obvious to everyone that it's happened and they get a talking to in the office then get shown the door

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