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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

#601

Post by lukan »

Avicebron wrote: post #597
fao_ wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I already heard comments about myself when I went and RTFM'd "You read manuals?!?" "... Yeah? (pause) Wait, you don't ?!?!?"

(Anecdote) Best job I ever had, I walked in and they were like "yeah, we don't have any training or anything like that", but we've got a fully setup lab and a rotating library of literature. "Yeah I'm not going to be around, but here are the office keys" don't blow up the company pretty much.

I don't really see the connection here, but it was a nice anecdote of a trusting environment.

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

#602

Post by close04 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #434
lolinder wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They took their time precisely specifying the robot movements so they're always repeatable. Almost like...some sort of carefully crafted code.

You misconstrue the analogy. The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy. It’s the thing that generates the code.

The robot operates deterministically, it has a fixed input and a fixed output. This is what makes it reliable.

Your “AI coder” is nothing like that. It’s non deterministic on its best day, and it gets everything thrown at it so even more of a coin toss. This seriously undermines any expectation of reliability.

The guy’s comparison shows a lack of understanding of either of the systems.

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

#603

Post by neom »

staunton wrote: post #508
neom wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be technical, and to borrow a bit. Proletariat[1] are the working class, they work for the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions. That's why I asked why you used demote. Lower, Middle and Upper are strata or ranks within classes. Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish: Petite bourgeoisie: small business owners, shopkeepers Haute bourgeoisie: industrialists, financiers Managerial class (i…

> the Bourgeoisie[2], the people who own the means of productions > Within the bourgeoisie, you can distinguish: [...] Managerial class [...] non owners who control labor Contradiction?

Class != Job Title

Managerial Class != Bourgeoisie

This was a loose usage of the term “bourgeoisie”, meant in the sociological rather than economic sense. Sorry.

In late capitalism, the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) occupies a weird liminal space:

Economically they're proletariat

Socially/culturally they're aligned with bourgeois values

Politically they often acts in defense of capital (because of career dependency)

Hence: managerial class != bourgeoisie, even if they act like them or aspire to be them.

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

#604

Post by Ray20 »

ath3nd wrote: post #262
_9ptr wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound. Everyone expect ~50 people would be working class, probably including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump. Also "working class" has a historical, social component, by which programmers are certainly not included.

> 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…

Weak argument.

The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.

So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.

You just choose to spend all your money on things you don't need to survive, that's the only reason you needed to work. But that doesn't make you a worker class any more than Elon Musk becomes a worker class by buying 10 companies like Twitter.

So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."

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

#605

Post by lambdasquirrel »

RossBencina wrote: post #574
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 whole auto factory thing sounds completely misinformed to me. Just because a machine made it does not mean the output isn't checked in a multitude of ways. Any manufacturing process is subject to quality controls. Machines are maintained. Machine parts are swapped out long before they lead to out-of-tolerance work. Process outputs are statistically characterised, measured and monitored. Measurement equipment is r…

It’s been said that every jetliner that is in the air right now has a 1in hairline fracture in it somewhere? But that the plane is designed for the failure of any one or two parts?

Software doesn’t exactly work the same way. You can make “AI” that operates more like [0,1] but at the end of the day the computer is still going to {0,1}.

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

#606

Post by bamboozled »

torben-friis wrote: post #184
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…

Counterpoint: AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Things like extracting some common structure that’s present in a slightly different way in 30 places, where cursor detects it, or suggesting potential for a certain pattern. The problem with vibe coding is more behavioral I think: the person more likely to jump in the bandwagon to avoid writing some code themselves is probably not the one thinkin…

I've found it can help one get the confidence to get started, but there are limits and there is a point where a lack of domain knowledge and a desired target (sane) architecture will bight you hard.

You can have AI almost generated anything, but even AI has limited to understanding requirements, if you cannot articulate what you want very precisely, it's difficult to get "AI" to help you with that.

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

#607

Post by bamboozled »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #60

With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. 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…

Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing.

The weird thing about this is, many developers wanted this. They wanted the theater of Agile, JIRA tickets, points etc.

I'm in the same boat yet still need to squeeze out another 10 years or so but personally working om multiple-side projects so I can get out of this boring, mundane shit.

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

#608

Post by jmyeet »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #488
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…

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.

You and I seem to be on the same page here but I want to take this opportunity to the role "middle class" plays in preventing class consciousness.

The "middle class" is propaganda we've been fed for decades by our governments, the media and the very wealthy. It's just another way to pit workers against one another, like how the flames of white supremacy were fanned after the slaves were freed so poor whites wouldn't socially align with freed slaves. It's why politics now tends to focus on socially divisive issues rather than economics, like abortion, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, Islamophobia, etc.

Doctors are workers. Lawyers are workers. Professional athletes are workers.

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

#610

Post by CuriouslyC »

talles wrote: post #584
CuriouslyC wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have meaningful metrics that are objective. KLOC is bad but at least it means something concrete, issues closed or PRs submitted is essentially meaningless. This is a software engineering problem not an AI problem.

KLOC is as objective as your other examples and as meaningless as well IMO.

With "standard" formatting, and considering only legitimate source files, it at least means the same thing from one company or project to another. Sure, it can be gamed by writing bad, verbose code, but in the context of AI generated code, the distribution is squashed quite a bit, so it ends up being more meaningful. Perhaps when we have AI generated issues that will become a better metric as well.
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