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

nytimes.com

761–770 of 897 posts

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

#761
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> '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.

I could argue that a company that would do that could be in a long run out-competed by a company that would do layoffs and push their employees for higher productivity by utilizing AI.

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

#762
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see that in this article referencing Jassy's 4,500 years of effort. Which is said "sounds crazy but it's true!" It isn't true. The tool he's bragging about most went about changing JDK8 to JDK17 in a build config file, and if you're lucky tweaking log4j versions. 4,500 years my ass. It was more regex and AI

This was not even imaginable at all just a few years ago. It doesn't matter if it's not working perfect yet. It's only a few years got 3 came out. Having a reasonable chat with a computer was also not possible at all. AI right now already feels like another person. You bought gasoline for the first cars in a pharmacy.

Sed was released in 1973. Changing a number in a config file with regex has been easily possible for over fifty years

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

#763
post #577
post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I already heard comments about myself when I went and RTFM'd "You read manuals?!?" "... Yeah? (pause) Wait, you don't ?!?!?"

To be honest, I do find most manuals (man pages) horrible to quickly get information how to do something and here LLMs do shine for me (as long as they don't mix up version numbers).

For man pages, you have to already know what you wants to do and just want information on how exactly to do it. They're not for learning about the domain. You don't read the find manual to learn the basics of filesystems.

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

#764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx permeates economics like Newton permeates physics. If this seems like an absurd comparison, I would suggest reading both Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Das Kapital.

The obvious and actual analog to Newton is Adam Smith.

Marx builds on Adam Smith and Ricardo among others and contributes an understanding of where money comes from and where profits come from among other things.

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

#765

Why would any company want to pay a software engineer to do repetitive / factory like work? It would be better to automate that and not have any engineers from the company's perspective.

Because engineers train the AI that'll replace them.

Probably better just to replace them now if they are just doing simple / repetitive tasks.

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

#766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the process either works, or it doesn’t. Meaning it either brings in the expected value with acceptable level of defects or it doesn’t. From a higher up’s perspective what they do is not that different from vibe coding anyway. They pick a direction, provide a high level plan and then see as things take shape, or don’t. If they are unhappy with the progress they shake things up (reorg, firings, hirings, adjusti…

I agree with this completely. I get the impression that a lot of people here think of software development as a craft, which is great for your own learning and development but not relevant from the company's perspective. It just has to work good enough. Your point about management being vibe coding is spot on. I have hired people to build something and just had to hope that they built it the way I wanted. I honestly…

> I get the impression that a lot of people here think of software development as a craft, which is great for your own learning and development but not relevant from the company's perspective. It just has to work good enough.

Building the thing may be the primary objective, but you will eventually have to rework what you've built (dependency changes, requirement changes,...). All the craft is for that day, and whatever that goes against that is called technical debt.

You just need to make some tradeoffs between getting the thing out the faster possible and being able to alter it later. It's a spectrum, but instead of discussing it with the engineers, most executive suites (and their manager) wants to give out edicts from high.

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

#767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's deepseek's answer. To Deepseek I add: Market failure is addressed even more in Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" which addresses market and financial consolidation in the early 20th century (it's worse now). I would also add that Marx built off of and sometimes critiqued Adam Smith and Ricardo, it's not an entirely different branch of the intellectual tree.

    Elasticity of Demand – Marx does not explicitly discuss elasticity, but he analyzes demand fluctuations in terms of "the social need" (gesellschaftliche Bedürfnis) and "effective demand" under capitalism (Capital, Vol. III). He notes how capitalist production responds to demand shifts, though not in the formalized neoclassical sense.

    Market Equilibrium – Marx critiques the idea of equilibrium (a key concept in classical and neoclassical economics), instead emphasizing "anarchy of production" and "tendential laws" (e.g., the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). He sees markets as inherently unstable due to contradictions in capitalism (Capital, Vol. I & III).

    Externality – While Marx doesn’t use this term, he discusses "social costs of production" (e.g., environmental degradation, worker exploitation) as inherent to capitalism’s drive for profit (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "metabolic rift" (in Capital, Vol. III and his ecological writings) touches on unintended consequences akin to negative externalities.

    Market Failure – Marx’s entire critique of capitalism can be seen as an analysis of systemic "failures," such as "crises of overproduction", "underconsumption", and "disproportionality" between sectors (Capital, Vol. II & III). He attributes these to contradictions in the capitalist mode of production rather than isolated market inefficiencies.

    Network Effect – Marx does not discuss this directly, but his analysis of "general social labor" (the socially necessary labor time underpinning exchange) and the role of "commodity fetishism" (Capital, Vol. I) implies that value is socially determined in a way that could loosely parallel network effects (e.g., the more a commodity is exchanged, the more its value appears natural).

    Opportunity Cost – Marx does not use this term (rooted in marginalist economics), but his labor theory of value centers on "socially necessary labor time", implying that the cost of producing one good is the labor diverted from other uses (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "alternative employments of capital" in Capital, Vol. III also touches on trade-offs.

    Comparative Advantage – Marx critiques David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage (e.g., in Theories of Surplus Value), arguing that international trade under capitalism exploits unequal exchange and reinforces imperialism. He focuses on "uneven development" and "super-exploitation" rather than mutual gains from trade.

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

#768
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you this, do software engineers in unions enjoy more benefits and compensation than those not in Unions?

They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union. Most importantly more protections. Comparing those in unions who are more likely to be in the video game making or industry or government to faangs like Amazon where you work day and night for a 4 year vesting offer that pays out very little until the 4th year and where on average most worker work less than 2 years at Amazon.

>They enjoy more benefits and compensation than if they were not in a union.

Please tell me a union SWE shop that has better benefits and comp than I get?

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

#769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common) Idk I barely ever work with people who are like this, and if people become like this, it's usually obvious to everyone that it's happened and they get a talking to in the…

I assume you are in a country with fire-at-will policies. In Germany you have a job security, you can't just fire people without a reason. The difficulty is actually proving their incompetence or unwillingness to work. Thus in my experience (working a self-employed contractor in Germany) this group is far larger than 50%. Also one of my reasons why no good software comes out of germany (and this includes SAP, as long…

Yes I work in the US but my company has extreme time wasting practices designed to have engineers explain every thing they do and why it's worth it. I never found this helpful and find it causes more problems than it solves.

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

#770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are in a country with fire-at-will policies. In Germany you have a job security, you can't just fire people without a reason. The difficulty is actually proving their incompetence or unwillingness to work. Thus in my experience (working a self-employed contractor in Germany) this group is far larger than 50%. Also one of my reasons why no good software comes out of germany (and this includes SAP, as long…

Why is incapability to make progress at work tasks not a valid reason for job dismissal in Germany? Unless I am misunderstanding something

You have to prove it is the employees fault by intentionally not completing the task. Incompetence or incapability is not the employees fault, because well, you hired them and judged their ability - probably due to their education (it is a little more complex than that of course). As a concrete example, if you have a CS degree from the 80s and job as a COBOL programer and your employer decides to assign you to a new team doing react+js, the employee is still formally qualified. You couldn't fire him for incompetence, just because a 22 year old bootcamp graduate delivers 10x the results.
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