Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 897 posts

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

#561

Post by fireflash38 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #527
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…

Seems like the more distanced we get from actual engineering methods, the more fucked up our software and systems become. Not really surprising to be honest. Just look at the web as an example. Almost everyone is just throwing massive frameworks and a hundred libraries as dependencies together and calls it a day. No wait, must apply the uglyfier! OK now call it a day.

I'd love to blame shitty web apps on outsourcing of computing power to your users... But you'll hear countless stories of devs blowing up their AWS or GCP accounts with bad code or architecture decisions (who cares if this takes a lot of CPU to run, throw another instance at it!) , so maybe it's just a lazy/bad dev thing.

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

#562

Post by fzeroracer »

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…

You should try interviewing a few people fresh out of college. That'll change your opinion incredibly quickly.

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

#563

Post by chaosbolt »

This is good, it means they'll optimize for this kind of coding to have less coders to save pennies here and there and please the shareholders short term, and get left behind in the long term once an old school startup that tries to do everything better comes up.

Of course I'm fantasizing and we sadly don't live in this kind of world (Amazon or Google would stomp you if you come for their users) but hey a man can dream.

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

#564

Post by anonzzzies »

alternatex wrote: post #473
mrheosuper wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you mean "contractor" ?

A lot of those deals between western companies and companies in developing countries are not fixed-time contracts but ongoing collaborations.

And that is not outsourcing? Definitely called that here...

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

#565

Post by fzeroracer »

overgard wrote: post #302
jevndev wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key to understanding why people want this is that those people care about results more than the act of coding. The easy example for this is a corporation. If the software does what was said on the product pitch, it doesn’t matter if the developer had fun writing it. All that matters is that it was done in an efficient enough (either by money or time) manner. A slightly less bleak example is data analysis.…

If you care about the results you have to care about the craft, full stop.

Probably the most unfortunate thing is that the whole AI garbage trend exposes how little people care about the craft leading to garbage results.

As a comparison point I've gone through over 12,000 games on Steam. I've seen endless games where large portions of it are LLM generated. Images, code, models, banner artwork, writing. None of it is worth engaging with because every single one has a bunch of disjointed pieces shoved together combined.

Codebases are going to be exactly the same. A bunch of different components and services put together with zero design principal or cohesion in mind.

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

#566

Post by b112 »

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?

This also seems, to me, like composer/npm issues.

An entire generation of devs, who grew up using unaudited, unverified, unknown license code. And which at a moments notice, can be sold to a threat actor.

And I've seen devs try to add packages to the project without even considering the source. Using forks of forks of forks, without considering the root project. Or examing if it's just a private fork, or what is most active and updated.

If you don't care about that code, why care about AI code? Or even your own?

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

#567

Post by vbezhenar »

fao_ wrote: post #539
zelphirkalt wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?!?!?"

Imagine reading in 2025, when you can just watch tiktok about it!

/s

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

#568

Post by Ray20 »

sham1 wrote: post #392
jmyeet wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There have always been segments of the working class, which have deluded themselves into believing that by co-operating with the capitalists, they could shield themselves from the adverse effects of what is happening to the rest of the working class. And it's an understandable impulse, but at some point you'd think people would learn instead of being mesmerized by the promise of slightly better treatment by the highe…

>but at some point you'd think people would learn instead of being mesmerized by the promise of slightly better treatment

They have already learned, fortunately the entire 20th century was devoted to this. That is why any worker with even a little bit of brain and ability to learn perceives socialists as the main threat to his well-being.

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

#569

Post by Elinvynia »

School-Cotton wrote: post #363
timkam wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the ski…

The pandemic is ongoing.

For anyone downvoting this: look into how many people are currently infected. Compare that to early 2020.

Yes, the people who were prone to dying already did so years ago. But the rate of long term disability in every single country is skyrocketing.

The average person has had 4.7 covid infections by now. Now look into the literal thousands of studies of long term effects of that.

Future generations will never forgive us for throwing them under the bus.

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

#570

Post by markus_zhang »

maeln wrote: post #487
bdangubic wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least LLM write a huge amount of comments /s
Post reply on HN