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

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

#721
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…

> Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns Perhaps this is industry dependent? In my country’s automotive industry, quality control standards have risen a lot in the past few decades. These days consumers expect the doors and sunroof not to leak, no rust even after 15 years being kept outdoors, and the engine to start firs…

That's great! What country are you in?

For context, I am in the US and in a position to see what goes on behind the scenes in most of the major auto-maker factories and some aerospace, but that's about as far as I can talk about it, since some of them are DoD contracters.

Quality Control is a valuable tool when deployed correctly and, itself, monitored for consistency and areas where improvement can happen. There is what I consider a limp-wristed effort to improve QC in the US, but in the end, it's really about checking some bureaucratic box as opposed to actually making better product, although sometimes we get lucky and the two align.

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

#722
post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Code review is another sacred process that seems too good not to have, but many teams use it as a "we care about quality" stamp when in fact they do not. Used for just nitpicking code style (important but not the whole reason to have CR, and there are tools for this), issue comments like "LGTM" and approve whatever arrives at the pull request anyway.

I've not yet seen code review implemented in a good way in places I have worked. It's not really considered "real work" (may result in zero lines of code change) and it takes time to properly read through code and figuring out where the weaknesses might be. I just end up being forced to skim read for anything obvious and merging, because there is not enough time to review the code properly.

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

#723

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.

If you give up on unit tests and code review then the code is "yours" instead of "ours" and your coworkers will not want to collaborate on it with you.

However, this has to be substantive code review by technical peers who actually care.

Unit tests also need the be valued as integral to the implementation task. The author writes the unit tests. It helps to guide the thought process. You should not offload unit tests to an intern as "scutwork".

If your code is sloppy, a stylistic mess, and unreviewed, then I am going to put it behind an interface as best I can, refer to it as "legacy", rely on you for bugfixes (I'm not touching that stinking pile), and will probably try to rally people behind a replacement.

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

#724
post #715
post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defi…

I had to scroll back to see if the same poster calling OP adversarial was GP. And it was. Your > * Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns* set the adversarial bar, and OP was just countering in kind.

Just a reader of this thread, but that wasn't my take on it. The text you quoted was, I think, an overgeneralisation (there are certainly manufacturers who perform above the baseline standards), but I don't think it was worded adversarially? It then provided some more information (some of which I have heard from others in the industry, especially around QA being pressured to pass defective items).

The post they are complaining about was a driveby dismissive statement that didn't add anything to the discussion whatsoever.

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

#725
post #715
post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defi…

I had to scroll back to see if the same poster calling OP adversarial was GP. And it was. Your > * Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns* set the adversarial bar, and OP was just countering in kind.

Huge difference between me saying manufacturers will cut corners in any way they can (maybe you're taking this as consumer vs manufacterer?) and the person who replied to me saying I don't work a job that encounters "real" (read intentionally vague and diminutive) QC standars. One is a blanket statement that is backed by easily accessed and very public evidence, the other is personal attack.

Please do not conflate the two.

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

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the process an LLM uses to generate code based on an input is definitely not entirely deterministic Technically correct is the least useful kind of correct when it's wrong in practice. And in practice the process AI coding tools use to generate code is not deterministic which is what matters. To make matters worse in the comparison with a manufacturing robot, even the input is never the same. While a robot get the…

I don't really understand your point. An LLM is loaded with a seed value, which is a number. The number may be chosen through some pseudo- or random process, or specified manually. For any given seed value, say 80085, the LLM will always and exactly generate the same tokens. It is not like stamped sheet metal, because it is digital information not matter. Say you load up R1, and give it a seed value of 80085, then say "hi" to the model. The model will output the exact same response, to the bit, same letters, same words, same punctuation, same order. Deterministic. There is no way you can say that an LLM is non-deterministic, because that would be WRONG.

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

#727
post #513

> Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.” Like what exactly is Amazon giving us here? I don't…

Jassy is one of the most anti-employee CEOs I've ever seen. Which is remarkable, considering who he is the successor of.

Why is this surprising? Isn't being anti-employee and being a psycho the most basic requirement for being a CEO of huge companies these days?

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

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1+1 is often less than 1.

The mediocre unmotivated person is dragging down the other, killing their motivation. You'd be better off without them even if you couldn't replace them.

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

#729

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…

If you couldnt do the task youself (a very loaded statement which I honestly dont't believe), how could you even validate what llm did was correct, didnt miss anything, didnt introduce a nasty corner case bug etc?

In any case a very rare and specific corner case you mention, a dev can go on a decade or two (or lifetime or two) without ever experiencing similar requirement. If it should be a convincing argument for almighty llm it certainly isnt.

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

#730

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…

I think what you are describing is the difference between being among the people to engineer the first car to being in the factory trying to make the 100 millionth car as cheaply as possible. Forty years ago people mostly learned to program because they were interested in it. People starting software / tech companies were taking a chance on something most didn't understand. That self selected for a type. Now its the most common major in school. I am sure its possible to recreate what you felt in the '90s but probably in a different field or a subset of this one.
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