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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

#541

Post by nicetryguy »

echelon wrote: post #386
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…

> Bruh, firstly, no competitor is going to set up an army of datacenters and warehouses on the gargantuan scale of amazon anytime soon. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI covet what AWS has. They are absolutely coming for AWS.

AWS? Possibly. They have a huge head start and haven't lost much ground yet. The warehouses and physical delivery? No way in hell. Any competing physical infrastructure would take a decade from the first shovel hitting the ground today.

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

#542

Post by zkry »

specialist wrote: post #242
Nasrudith wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organizations have long had a preference for 'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures, regardless of the side effects or even if it results in it costs more due to needing three people where one talented could do it before. Because it is more dependable, even if it is dependably mediocre. Even though this technique may lead to their long-term doom and irrelevance.

Yes and (adjacently): Seeing Like a State by James Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State Explains a lot of the confusing stuff I've experienced, in that eureka sort of way.

I feel like managers are having a heyday over tools like cursor having a user-by-user breakdown on AI code generation stats. I feel this is only the beginning and a whole new world of in-editor workplace monitoring will pop up.

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

#544

Post by saagarjha »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #346
ath3nd wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound Oh, really? Is that why both "white-collar worker" and "blue-collar worker" contain the word "worker"? Working class is everyone who has to work for their money. Can most programmers, on a whim, afford to never work again? An average programmer's salary is 2x the average coal miner's. A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker htt…

"One medical debt away from being destitute" is socialists trying to make common cause between the upper and lower class. We have great insurance and big piles of savings, there's nothing in common with people who can barely afford their deductible and lose their job for missing too much work. The boundary between working class and not working class is not at the 99th percentile where you would have it. The diminishi…

Great insurance coming from where exactly?

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

#545

Post by wiether »

doug_durham wrote: post #468
stock_toaster wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about codebase maintainability over time. I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality. So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased dra…

Up until now large software systems required thousands of hours of work and efforts of bright engineers. We take established code as something to be preserved because it embeds so my knowledge and took so long to develop. If it rots then it takes too long to repair or never gets repaired. Imagine a future where the prompts become the precious artifact. That we regularly `rm -rf *` the entire code base and regenerate…

I can imagine that, but... given your prompt(s?) will need to contain all your business rules, someone will have to write prompt(s?) in a way that make it possible for the AI to produce something that works with all the requirements.

Because if you let every stakeholder add their requirements to the prompts, without checking that it doesn't contradict others, you'll end up with a disaster.

So you need someone able to gather all the requirements and translate it in a way that the machine (the AI) can interpret to produce the expected result (a ephemeral codebase).

Which means you now have to carefully maintain your prompts to be certain about the outcome.

But if you still need someone to fix the codebase later in the process, you need people with two sets of skills (prompts and coding) when, with the old model, you only needed coding skills.

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

#546

Post by wesselbindt »

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…

One simile I've heard describing the situation where fancy autocomplete can no longer keep track of its patches is that you'll be sloshing back and forth between bugs. I thought it was quite poetic.

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

#547

Post by lolbert6 »

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…

works for tesla

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

#548

Post by mrheosuper »

stock_toaster wrote: post #218
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…

I wonder about codebase maintainability over time. I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality. So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased dra…

I wonder whether we have the same talk when the C compiler first came out.

People may worry that the "ASM" codebase will be bit-rot and no one can understand the compiler output or add new feature to the ASM codebase.

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

#549

Post by ath3nd »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #408
almostgotcaught wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about labor theory of value vis-a-vis this comment > Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique Ie "capitalists" are not rewarded for deploying capital and mitigating risk but for extracting as much from the labor as possible. And yes Marx is absolutely the "originator" of these ideas and yes absolutely you ask any orthodox economist (and many random armchair…

Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power. Whether that’s the employee or the employer is going to depend on the exact circumstances (realistically it will be some mix). Hence why factory workers today get paid more than in the 1800s (and factory owners as well!)

> Gains from productivity will accrue to those with the most bargaining power.

That's true. And employers have been consistently the one with more bargaining power, and that's why our wages haven't kept up with the productivity gains. This is also known as productivity-pay-gap.

We, the working class, are supposed to be paid roughly 50% more than we are paid now, if the gains from productivity were properly distributed. But they are not, concentrated to a large extent in the owning class, which is what's unfair and why we, the workers, should unite to get what's rightfully ours.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

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

#550

Post by jbs789 »

> “It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct,” he said, since machines now do the work.

Am I accountable for the angles or not? Don’t think so! My job is just to bolt it on.

Is a developer not accountable for the code, regardless of how it was created?

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