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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

#731

Post by georgeecollins »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #312
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…

> 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 doing Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" w…

>> Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" where you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back

In my experience it is human nature to think you are doing something that people around you can't or don't understand. The graveyard is full of irreplaceable people is an old saying. Sometimes the people you report to are morons, but if you consistently report to a moron its time for introspection. There's more that you can do than just suffer that. One place to start is to have some charity for the people you work with.

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

#732

Post by nojito »

danparsonson wrote: post #643
nojito wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the code it creates is deterministic.

LLMs almost always operate at least partly stochastically.

Of course but the code they generate only operates in one way.

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

#733

Post by sealeck »

akudha wrote: post #727
wavemode wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Think about who his predecessor was.

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

#734

Post by solaire_oa »

strogonoff wrote: post #476
pshc wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes a problem is a weird combination of hairy/obscure/tedious where I simply don’t have the activation energy to get started. Like, I could do it with a gun to my head. But if someone else were to do it for me I would gratefully review the merge request.

Reviewing a merge request should require at least the same activation energy as writing the solution yourself, as in order to adequately evaluate a solution you first need to acquire a reference point in mind as to what the right solution should be in the first place. For me personally, the activation energy is higher when reviewing: it’s fun to come up with the solution that ends up being used, not so fun to come up…

The submitter should also have thoroughly reviewed their own MR/PR. Even before LLMs, coders not having reviewed their own code would be completely discourteous and disrespectful to the reviewer. It's an embarrassing faux pas that makes the submitter and the team all look and feel bad when there are obvious problems that need to be called out and fixed.

Submitting LLM barf for review and not reviewing it should be grounds for termination. The only way I can envision LLM barf being sustainable, or plausible, is if you removed code review altogether.

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

#735

Post by nojito »

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…

It's simple. You run the code generated by the llm you will get a deterministic result of said code.

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

#736

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

georgeecollins wrote: post #731
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doing Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" w…

>> Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" where you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back In my experience it is human nature to think you are doing something that people around you can't or don't understand. The graveyard is full of irreplaceable people is an old saying. Sometimes the people you report to are morons, but if you consis…

> graveyard is full of irreplaceable people

I am not special and make no claims of it; I am entirely replaceable and I'd make no claims to the contrary.

This has nothing to do with me or anyone like me, and everything to do with the "adult daycare" style of project managers.

I'm tired of re-iterating to non-technical project managers that status of tickets, why things are "blocked" or why the ask isn't feasible given constraints, over and over again. Time is a flat-circle.

If they understood the problem scope better, such questions would not arise. I know this from experience.

The majority of them are completely stateless and I'll repeat things daily for weeks on end, explaining the same things over and over again, while they make 0 effort to "unblock" issues.

I've had one good project manager in my career that advocated for his technical staff and understood the both the project and business deeply; he was invaluable and a pleasure to work with.

I've had many many others that served no tangible purpose whatsoever.

My frustration is ostensibly there is a purpose for these jobs beyond employing people with the role of "attending meetings"; I've rarely seen it.

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

#737

Post by hollerith »

tehjoker wrote: post #286
hollerith wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most professional economists IMHO would not agree that Marxism's vocabulary permeates their field. Core economic concepts are things like elasticity of demand, market equilibrium, externality, market failure, network effect, opportunity cost and comparative advantage, and AFAIK Marx and his follower had essentially no role in explaining or introducing any of those.

I think if you had read Capital, you'd find many of these concepts amply addressed, usually with different terminology.

Please list terms in this different terminology that are equivalents or analogs of the terms I listed, so that I can use Ctrl+F to find them in my PDF of volume one of the book.

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

#738

Post by garylkz »

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…

Curious, do you supervise the code itself or at least understand what the code is trying to do?

By "I didn't edit a single line", do you still prompt the agent to fix any issues you found? If so, is that consided an edit?

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

#739

Post by sanderjd »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #516
brundolf wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've been thinking about is that most claims of AI productivity apply just as well (and more concretely and reliably) to just... better tooling and abstractions Code already lets us automate work away! I can stamp out ten instances of a component or call a function ten times and cut my manual labor by 90% I'm not saying AI has nothing to add, but the "assembly line" analogies - where we precisely factor out…

Exactly that. Software development isn't about writing code, never was, it's about what code to write. Doesn't matter if I type in the code or tell an AI what code it should type. I'll admit that assuming it's correct, an AI can type faster than me. But time spent typing represents only a fraction of the software development cycle. But, it'll take another year or two on the hype cycle for the gullible managers being…

I've been telling friends and family - and kids interested in going entering this field - this for years (decades actually, at this point), that I don't spend much of my time typing out code.

I've found that it's very hard for people to conceptualize what else it would be that we're spending our time doing.

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

#740

Post by lolinder »

rco8786 wrote: post #666
close04 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy. It’s the thing that generates the code. I think this inversion is what a lot of people are missing, or just don't understand (because they don't understand what code is or how it works).

I totally understand that inversion but I think it's a bad analogy.

Industrial automation works by taking a rigorously specified designs developed by engineers and combining it with rigorous quality control processes to ensure the inputs and outputs remains within tolerances. You first have to have a rigorous spec, then you can design a process for manufacturing a lot of widgets while checking 1 out of every 100 of them for their tolerances.

You can only get away with not measuring a given angle on widget #13525 because you're producing many copies of exactly the same thing and you measured that angle on widget #13500 and widget #13400 and so on and the variance in your sampled widgets is within the tolerances specified by the engineer who designed the widget.

There's no equivalent to the design stage or to the QC stage in the vibe-coding process advocated for by the person quoted above.

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