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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

#611

Post by ignoramous »

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…

> Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification of "if it compiles, ship it!"

Not really. More like, if the fopen works fine, don't bother looking how it does so.

SWE is going to look more like QA. I mean, as a SWE if I use the webrtc library to implement chat and it works almost always but just this once it didn't, it is likely my manager is going to ask me to file a bug and move on.

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

#612

Post by generj »

intended wrote: post #413
lightedman wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The fact that they used the auto industry as an example is funny, because the Toyota way and six sigma came out of that industry." It's even funnier when you consider that Toyota has learned how bad of an idea lean manufacturing/6-Sig/5S can be thanks to the pandemic - they're moving away from it in some degrees, now.

Technically, Toyota doesn’t use 6sig, and when you say they are moving away from it, what do you mean? Because I would be deeply amused (and shocked) if the Muda, Muri people would be giving up on quality control.

Idk about Toyota moving away from Kaizen, but they certainly have moved away from JIT. Toyota pioneered Just In Time (JIT) part inventory which dramatically lowers inventory costs and makes balance sheets look far more attractive.

What Toyota realized in 2011 due to the Fukushima disaster however is that this completely fails for computer chips because the pipeline is too long. So they kept JIT for steel, plastic parts etc but for microcontrollers, power supply chips, etc they stockpile large quantities.

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

#613

Post by xeonmc »

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?

Cory Doctorow described this cart-before-the-horse arrangement as Reverse Centaurs[0][1]

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/

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

#614

Post by bckr »

HenryBemis wrote: post #518
pchristensen wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harper talks a lot about using defensive coding (tests, linters, formal verification, etc) so that its not strictly required to craft and understand everything. This article (and several that follow) explain his ideas better than this out of context quote. https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/

The issue is that, (the way I see it happening more and more in the real world): - tests are ran by machines - linters are (being) replaced by machines/SaaS services (so.. machines) - formal verification: yes - SHure, 5 people will review the thousands lines of code written every day, in a variety of languages/systems/stacks/scripts/RPAs/etc. or they will simply check that the machines return "green-a-OK" and ask the…

> Devs are cost center, not a profit center. They are "value enablers" not "value adders".

I don’t understand this and I think it would require breaking my brain in order to.

A person pays the company to provide a service.

The developers create and maintain (part of) that service.

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

#616

Post by sham1 »

Ray20 wrote: post #568
sham1 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well given that you're the first in this subthread to even mention socialism, that lesson of the 20th century would probably ring true, yes. Although I must admit that talking about classes like that probably did help conjure that idea.

Of course, it's not like one needs to be a Marxist or even any other sort of a socialist to see the whole "employers are screwing their employees", since I do doubt that many employees working in Amazon's tech like AWS and whatnot would be in the ideology. In fact, that has become a fairly popular position even outside of traditionally leftist politics.

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

#617

Post by bigfatkitten »

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 once showed a reasonably experienced infrastructure engineer how to use strace to diagnose some random hangs in an application, and it was like he had seen the face of God.

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

#618

Post by owebmaster »

timr wrote: post #11
jt2190 wrote: post #4

This is interesting: > “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.” > This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bys…

I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs. Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly bori…

I hate fixing bugs but I enjoy big refactoring, AI-assisted or not - sometimes you just gotta do it all

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

#619

Post by goeiedaggoeie »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #600
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.

Are least for a few more generations of model. I just finished creating a multiplayer online party game using only Claude Code. I didn't edit a single line. However, there is no way someone who doesn't know how to code could get where I am with it. You have to have an intuition on the sources of a problem. You need to be able to at least glance at the correct and understand when and where the AI is flailing, so you k…

Surely there is a scale limit to how big the application can be using this approach.

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

#620

Post by te_chris »

jmyeet wrote: post #608
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’re missing a pretty key part of class discourse: the bourgeoisie (idea and practice).
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