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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

#531

Post by this15testingg »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #77
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…

Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.

right; the "ancap" mentality in computing could only last for so long. Eventually, and especially with the refusal of incorporating any ethics or humanity into it, it's now an established industry affecting all walks of life just like every other that has preceded it, and the belief that its technological superiority/uniqueness was a good reason to essentially exempt it from regulation (TV broadcasts for children are required to have "bumper" sections that would clearly define the show vs the advertisement; Why was computing/the internet treated differently? A high-horse mentality that stemmed from "complexity olympics"? no child could ever use or comprehend a sophisticated machine like this!!) has really fucked us. The labor is decentralized at such a scale that I also have a hard time believing anything could be rectified; open source software is mostly just corporate welfare, putting anything at all on the internet has become corporate welfare, and there is no real purpose or goal for building all of this. The computer was supposed to allow us to do less work, right?

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

#532

Post by discreteevent »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #515
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's a weird / wrong analogy. Software engineers design and program the robots, they don't build the cars.

That analogy wouldn't give a person much confidence in the rest of his ability/judgement.

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

#533

Post by rybosworld »

Hard to feel bad for any dev that agrees to work at Amazon.

They’ve opted into shitty working conditions for years and played a pretty big part in spreading those conditions to other places.

I have found that former Amazon employees can get jobs at other FAANG companies. But smaller/medium companies that compete on culture rather than pay, don’t tend to want to hire those folks.

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

#534

Post by zkry »

locococo wrote: post #24
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…

A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.

Even before AI I've always had the perception that writing software felt more intellectually on the level of plumbing. AI just feels like a having one of those fancy new tools that tradespersons may use.

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

#535

Post by mrweasel »

softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embr…

I'm optimistic long long long term, but long term our industry is screwed.

The current LLM based "AI" isn't good enough and we're already seeing way to many unable to code without the assistance of an AI agent. Sure, many of these people couldn't code at all before, or only very poorly, but at least their output was limited. We're producing way to much code (and to much content in general). The heavy leaning into AI at this point is going to set us back 10 - 15 years, for a short term profit. It's the dotcom bubble all over again in that respect. Way to many unskilled people are producing garbage code, and there aren't enough skilled people around to fix it, because the output volume is to high.

> Google recently told employees it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating A.I. tools that could “enhance their overall daily productivity,” according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000.

If it's really that great, why the competition? Shouldn't this happen pretty organically? Companies are pushing "AI" hard, why to hard, it's not yet there where it can realistically deliver what is expected on the business side. I think even Google developers know this, but hey, $10,000 is $10,000.

I'm very concerned that we eroding trust, safety and quality long term, for a short term profit. It's not that LLMs can't be helpful, save money or improve quality, but you have to be a fairly skilled developer to get those advantages safely.

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

#536

Post by iLoveOncall »

saratogacx wrote: post #420
iLoveOncall wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you join a FAANG you simply cannot imagine the complexity of the systems and how much has not been automated and how much there is to build. I've been in Amazon for close to a decade, and I constantly think "I can't believe X hasn't been automated in the 30 years that Amazon has existed and is still done on Excel". Most engineers will work on new features for at least half of the year, and I personally work on…

Doing work that helps another team will rarely result in getting any credit and is a great way to get stuck in the bottom of the stack rank (top grading or whatever they call it now). So automating anything that integrates across the org chart won't happen because the incentive structure is against it.

That's not true. In fact OP1 and OP2 [1] in Amazon are in majority an intake process for projects requested by other teams. I'd say only half of them come from the team itself.

[1] https://docbarraiser.com/annual-business-planning-what-the-o...

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

#537

Post by throwaway2037 »

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

    > except one
Please share more!

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

#538

Post by ath3nd »

wiseowise wrote: post #441
ath3nd wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As a member of society, a lot of things in your life should be about society. And none of those things is shareholder value.

In fact, most people would have a version of this pyramid in order of importance:

1. Personal mental and physical well-being and the same for your loved ones

2. Healthy and functioning society and robust social safety nets, e.g retirement, paid leave, social housing, public transport etc

...

1337. The composition of sand on Mars

...

...

...

...

4206919111337. Shareholder value

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

#539

Post by fao_ »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #530
lukan wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world of vibe coders, those who can still debug on their own, will have quite a valuable skill.

I already imagine future devs wide-eyed saying things like: "He/She can _debug_!!"

I mean I already heard comments about myself when I went and RTFM'd

"You read manuals?!?"

"... Yeah? (pause) Wait, you don't?!?!?"

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

#540

Post by nicetryguy »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #388
nicetryguy wrote: post #384

> Andy Jassy ... said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.” Bruh, no competitor is going to set up an army of datacenters and warehouses on the gargantuan scale of amazon anytime soon... What do customers want? How about fixing your search function…

AWS has competition in Azure and Google Cloud, and AWS is the money maker for Amazon, everything else is incidental.

> AWS is the money maker ... everything else is incidental.

Considering Amazon kills and steals all kinds of small businesses and ideas that would be a godsend for Americans.

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