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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

#671

Post by InsideOutSanta »

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…

>It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct

Yeah, but there's still something checking the angles. When an LLM writes code, if it's not the human checking the angles, then nothing is, and you just hope that the angles are correct, and you'll get your answer when you're driving 200 km/h on the Autobahn.

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

#672

Post by guappa »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #554
makeitdouble wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Reading "couldn't" as, you would technically not be able to do it because of the complexity or intricacy of the problem, how did you guarantee that the change offered by the AI made proper sense and didn't leave out critical patterns that were too complex for you to detect ? Your comment makes it sound like you're now dependent on AI to refactor again if dir…

Before I started using advanced IDEs that could navigate project structures very quickly, it was normal to have a relatively poor visibility -- call it "fog of war/code". In a 500,000 line C++ project (I have seen a few in my career), as a junior dev, I might only understand a few thousand lines from a few files I have studied. And, I had very little idea of the overall architecture. I see LLMs here as a big opportun…

That's what documentation is for. If you don't have that, AI won't figure it out either.

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

#673

Post by thinkingtoilet »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #668
vijucat wrote: post #659

Not directly related, but an anecdote: well before AI, I was talking to a Portfolio Solutions Manager or something from JP Morgan. He was an MD at the firm and very full of himself. He told me, "You guys, your job is....you just Google search your problem and copy paste a solution, right?". What I found hilarious is that he also told me, "The quants, I hate that they keep their C++ code secret. I opened up the execut…

My own tangential gripe (a bit related to yours though): the factory work began when Agile crept into the workplace. Additionally, lint, unit tests, code reviews... all this crap just piled on making programming worse still. It stopped being fun to code around that point. Too many i's to dot to make management happy.

What's wrong with writing tests? I sleep well at night when we push to production because of our robust test suite.

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

#674

Post by guappa »

winrid wrote: post #226
torben-friis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have the same observation. I've been able to improve things I just didn't have the energy to do for a while. But if you're gonna be lazy, it will multiply the bad.

Yesterday I searched how to fix some windows issue, google AI told me to create a new registry key as a 32 bit value and write a certain string in there.

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

#675

Post by SonOfKyuss »

TexanFeller wrote: post #594
mji wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job This sucks for the 50% or so who are like you, but there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (…

Those people should not have been hired, or should have been let go at 6 months when that became obvious. The real solution to this problem doesn't fit with most management methodology though.

It only makes sense to fire someone who needs to be nudged into getting their job done if you can find a replacement at a similar cost who doesn’t.

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

#676

Post by guappa »

soraminazuki wrote: post #281
podviaznikov wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. I did this many times too. Often I wouldn’t bother with cleanup or refactor before, but now it’s way easier, faster and cheaper to do it. And it’s better in the long run.

Any actual evidence of it being better? Because publicly available evidence points to the contrary, where it repeatedly fails to complete the most basic of tasks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152

It's better than him.

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

#677

Post by SonOfKyuss »

notyourwork wrote: post #42
ape4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing bugs in my own code is fine. In other's code its less fun.

That’s the wrong mentality. You and your team own all the code. A bugs peer is your bug too.

Not OP but I’ll give my perspective. I have no problem fixing someone else’s bugs up to a point, but I also don’t want to be the one cleaning up someone else’s mess who didn’t take time to do proper testing but is getting rated higher than me for clearing more tasks last month because they cut corners

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

#678

Post by whatwhaaaaat »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #673
JKCalhoun wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own tangential gripe (a bit related to yours though): the factory work began when Agile crept into the workplace. Additionally, lint, unit tests, code reviews... all this crap just piled on making programming worse still. It stopped being fun to code around that point. Too many i's to dot to make management happy.

What's wrong with writing tests? I sleep well at night when we push to production because of our robust test suite.

Becuase builds are gated by test coverage people write tests for coverage and not for functionality. I’d say a good portion of the inherited tests I’ve ran in to wouldn’t catch anything meaningfully breaking in the function being tested.

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

#679

Post by javcasas »

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…

> It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct

That cannot be any furthest from the truth.

Take a decent enterprise CNC machine (look in youtube, lots of videos) that is based on servos, not the stepper motor amateur machines. That servo-based machine is measuring distances and angles hundreds of times per second, because that is how it works. Your average factory has a bunch of those.

Whoever said that should try getting their head out of their ass at least every other year.

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

#680

Post by rvnx »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #673
JKCalhoun wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own tangential gripe (a bit related to yours though): the factory work began when Agile crept into the workplace. Additionally, lint, unit tests, code reviews... all this crap just piled on making programming worse still. It stopped being fun to code around that point. Too many i's to dot to make management happy.

What's wrong with writing tests? I sleep well at night when we push to production because of our robust test suite.

Testing in production happens. This is for example the best practice at SpaceX or at Tesla (FSD, Robotaxi, Unboxed designs, etc), and I think these people sleep very well.

Yes, of course, some rockets may explode (almost 10 soon), or some people may have accident, but that's ok from their perspective.

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