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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

#681

Post by varjag »

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…

It doesn't help that most "tech visionaries" or people considered tech bros these days more often come from accounting or legal background than anything technical. They are widely perceived as authorities but come without the expertise. This is why it's so perplexing for the techies when the industry gets caught up in some ridiculous hype cycle apparently neglecting the physical realities.

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

#682

Post by 0xEF »

idiotsecant wrote: post #669
0xEF wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any manufacturing process is subject to quality controls. A few things on this illusion: * Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns * QA workers are often pressured to let small things fly and cave easily because they simply do not get paid enough to care and know they won't win that fight unless their employer's product…

You don't work in a job with real QC. Do some pharma work and then get back to me.

Your comment is adversarial for no reason. "Real" QC? I work for people who make vehicles on the ground and in the air that hold passengers expecting to be delivered safely. Some of them even make parts for very large structures that are expected to remain standing when the wind blows too hard or the ground shakes too much. Let's talk about "real" QC and these other imagined types that must exist to you.

Can you define the differences between "real" QC and other versions? Does this imply a "fake" QC? Does that mean that our auto and aerospace manufacturers can't hold themselves to the same quality standards as Big Pharma, since both are ultimately trying to achieve the same goal in avoiding the litigation that comes with putting your customers at risk?

Let's not pretend that pharma co's have never side-stepped regulation or made decisions that put swaths of the population in a position to harm themselves.

My argument was dispelling the general idea that just because rules are in place, they are being followed. Believe me, I'd love to live in that world, but have seen little evidence that we do.

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

#683

Post by 33hsiidhkl »

close04 wrote: post #660
nojito wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the code it creates is deterministic.

I don't know what you mean with "the code it creates is deterministic" but the process an LLM uses to generate code based on an input is definitely not entirely deterministic. To put it simply, the chances that an LLM will output the same result every time given the same input is low. The LLM does not operate deterministically, unlike the manufacturing robot who will output the same door panel every single time. Or a…

For any given seed value, the output of an LLM will be identical- it is deterministic. You can try this at home with Llama.cpp by specifying a seed value when you load a LLM, and then seeing that for a given input the output will always be the same. Of course there may be some exceptions (cosmic ray bit flips). Also, if you are only using online models, you can't set the seed value, plus there are multiple models, so multiple seeds. In summary, LLMs are deterministic.

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

#684

Post by rwmj »

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.

Agile yes, it's micromanagement at scale. But writing tests and doing code reviews is good practice.

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

#685

Post by alasarmas »

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.

Tests that you write in order to contribute to a robust test suite are good.

Tests that are written to comply with a policy that requires that all components must have a unit test, and that test must be green, could be good. Often, they are just more bullshit from the bullshit factory that is piling up and drowning the product, the workers, the management, and anyone else who comes too close.

I feel that it’s still correct to call both of these things tests, because in isolation, they do the same thing. It’s the structure they’re embedded in that is different.

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

#686

Post by dlgeek »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #143
placardloop wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening. Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many team…

Somehow you're dismissing my post saying it's based on my own anecdotical experience while providing your own anecdotical experience and just hearsay. There is absolutely no company-wide mandate to use GenAI. If some SDM is pushing it on his SDEs, that's an outlier and on that person alone.

> There is absolutely no company-wide mandate to use GenAI.

There is an STeam goal for adoption and usage. There is a QS dashboard for SDMs to see statistics on their org's adoption and abandonment rates. There is BT guidance being propagated out to VPs and directors on how to roll out programs. As placardloop said, there was a mandatory OP1 FAQ question on GenAI usage.

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

#687

Post by foobarchu »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #678
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your issue is with targeting a metric then (coverage), not the unit tests. Good unit tests can be so useful. I've got a project currently that can't be run locally because of some dependencies, and coding against unit tests means I get to iterate at a reasonable speed without needing to run all code remotely.

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

#688

Post by myvoiceismypass »

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.

I never found linting or writing unit tests to be particularly un-fun, but I generally really really value correctness in my code, and both of those things tend to help on that front.

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

#689

Post by __s »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #678
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I spent 3 years getting a Ruby codebase to 100% branch coverage running locally in a few minutes (I wasn't just looking at coverage, I was also profiling for slow tests). Found a few bugs ofc having to read through code so carefully. The value was having a layer of defence while refactoring, if some unrelated test failed it implied you missed impact of your change. It also helped people avoid the issue of making changes to an area of code with no testing, where existing tests act as docs (which execute, so won't go stale as easily) & make it easier for new code to write new tests building on existing tests

This codebase was quick to deploy at Microsoft. We'd rollout every week. Compared to other projects that took months to rollout with a tangling release pipeline

Anyways I left for a startup & most of this fast moving team dissolved, so the Ruby codebase has been cast aside in favor of projects with tangling release pipelines

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/how...

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

#690

Post by gofreddygo »

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.

Writing good tests is an art. Its hard. It takes a deep understanding of _how_ the system is implemented, what should be tested and what should be left alone.

Coverage results don't mean much. Takes some experience to know how easy it is to introduce a major bug with 100% test coverage.

Tests are supposed to tell you if a piece of code works as it should. But I have found no good way of judging how well a test suite actually works. You somehow need tests for tests and to version the test suite.

A overemphasis on testing also makes the code very brittle and a pain to work with. Simple refactorings and text changes need dozens of tests to be fixed. library changes break things in weird ways.

Unless I know the system being tested, I take no interest in tests.

There's clever hacky ways to test systems that will never pass the "100% coverage" requirement and are a joy to work with. But they're the exception.

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