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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

#741

Post by strogonoff »

solaire_oa wrote: post #734
strogonoff wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gr…

> The submitter should also have thoroughly reviewed their own MR/PR

What does it mean to have to review your own code as a separate activity? Do many people contribute code that they wrote but… never read?

> Submitting LLM barf

Oh right…

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

#742

Post by HEmanZ »

rwmj wrote: post #684
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.

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

Everywhere I’ve worked I’ve found that the entire organization pays lip service to unit tests and code reviews, but then sets timelines so short and workloads so high that make real tests and reviews genuinely impossible.

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

#743

Post by Flemlo »

ModernMech wrote: post #695
Flemlo wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strawberry thing is solved. Nonetheless it's different things. Just because they struggle with that makes all the other things wrong? Underwhelming? I don't think so.

It's not solved, I had tried it across the latest versions of several different AIs before I posted, because I anticipated a reply like yours. > Just because they struggle with that makes all the other things wrong? No, it makes their grandiose claims very tenuous. But for me, yes I'm very underwhelmed by what AI is capable of. I think it's a useful tool, like a search box, but that's it at this point. That they are…

I tried it too and I know this test for a while.

Not only did Claude respond correctly, I also wrote it in German.

And I often switch between English and German for single words just because ai is already that good.

This wasn't even imaginable a few years back. We had 0 technology for that.

I created single page html Javascript pages for small prototypes withhin 10 minutes with very little repromting.

I can literally generate an image of whatever I want with just text or voice.

I can have a discussion with my smartphone with voice.

Jules detected my programming language, how to build and running it by me writing 'generaten GitHub action for my project and add a basic test to it's

I don't get how people can't be amazed by these results.

What are you normally do when you try it out?

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

#744

Post by rightbyte »

dbolgheroni wrote: post #709
rwmj wrote: 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.

Code review where I worked seem to either in practice be rubber stamping or back scratching. Never once have I felt the need for it. If people are unsure about a change they ask usually.

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

#745

Post by v3xro »

HEmanZ wrote: post #742
rwmj wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Everywhere I’ve worked I’ve found that the entire organization pays lip service to unit tests and code reviews, but then sets timelines so short and workloads so high that make real tests and reviews genuinely impossible.

Can echo that - it's pure lip service - the deadlines are arbitrary and change often, and nobody cares about quality beyond "can it appear to work plausibly at a demo". There are notable exceptions - nobody wants to be the next Knight Capital but a lot of work is not seen to be that critical so off to the next ticket it is.

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

#746

Post by bwfan123 »

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

This is just not being reported yet in mainstream media. ie, that the emperor is only wearing undergarments (he is not fully naked).

Part of the reason is that the reporters are themselves not in the trenches coding to be skeptical of the claims they hear.

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

#747

Post by Altern4tiveAcc »

mji wrote: post #371
talles wrote: post #72

It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job. AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.

> 'generating new code' is a small part of the job I think this attitude has been taken too far to the point that people (especially senior+ engineers) end up spending massive amounts of time debating and aligning things that can just be done in far less time (especially with AI, but even without it). And these big companies need to change that if they want to get their productivity back. From the article: > One engi…

How is the shorter deadline better for the worker? Ultimately, that devolves to a race to the bottom with people choosing between overworking or being laid off. Surely AWS is profitable enough by now, that all those employees could get their work hours reduced, receive a raise, and have both the organization and the product keep existing just fine.

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

#748

Post by rightbyte »

red_admiral wrote: post #589
RossBencina wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole auto factory thing sounds completely misinformed to me. Just because a machine made it does not mean the output isn't checked in a multitude of ways. Any manufacturing process is subject to quality controls. Machines are maintained. Machine parts are swapped out long before they lead to out-of-tolerance work. Process outputs are statistically characterised, measured and monitored. Measurement equipment is r…

On the auto factory side, the Toyota stuck gas pedal comes to mind, even if it can happen only under worst-case circumstances. But that's the (1 - 0.[lots of nines]) case. On the software side, the THERAC story is absolutely terrifying - you replace a physical interlock with a software-based one that _can't possibly go wrong_ and you get a killing machine that would probably count as unethical for executions of convi…

THERAC was terrible. And intermittent to for extra horror.

I am a strong proponent of hardware level interlocks for way more mundane things than that. It helps a lot in debugging to narrow down the possible states of things.

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

#749

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #527
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…

Seems like the more distanced we get from actual engineering methods, the more fucked up our software and systems become. Not really surprising to be honest. Just look at the web as an example. Almost everyone is just throwing massive frameworks and a hundred libraries as dependencies together and calls it a day. No wait, must apply the uglyfier! OK now call it a day.

There's no incentive for engineering methods because there's no liability for software defects. "The software is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability." It's long overdue but most people in the software industry don't want liability because it would derail their gravy train.

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

#750

Post by bwfan123 »

ModernMech wrote: post #298
OptionOfT wrote: post #171

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…

> English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do Exactly. And this is why I feel like we are going to go full circle on this. We've seen this cycle in our industry a couple times now: "Formal languages are hard, wouldn't it be great if we could just talk in English and the computer would understand what we mean?" -> "Natural languages are ambiguous and not pre…

> The eternal hope is that someday, somehow, we will be able to invent a natural language way of communicating something precise like a program, and it's just not going to happen

My take is more nuanced.

First, there is some evidence [1] that human language is neither necessary nor sufficient to enable what we experience as "thinking".

Second, our intuition, thinking etc are communicated via natural languages and imagery which form the basis for topics in the humanities.

Third, from communication via natural language - slowly emerges symbolism, and formalism which codifies intuitions in a manner which is operational, and useful.

As an example, socratic dialog was a precursor to euclidean geometry which operationally codifies our intuitions of space around us in a manner which becomes useful.

However, formalism is stale as there are always new worlds we experience which cannot be captured by any formalism. The genius of the human brain which is not yet captured in LLMs is to be able create symbolisms of these worlds almost on demand.

ie, if we were to order in terms of expressive power, it would be something like:

1) perception, cognition, thinking, imagination 2) human language 3) formal languages and computers codifying worlds experienced via 1) and 2)

Meanwhile, there is a provocative hypothesis [2] which argues that our "thinking" process lies outside computation as we know it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w [2] https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computer... [3] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

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