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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

#801

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #704
d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an underrated comment. Who's job is it to do the thinking? I suppose it's still the software engineer, which means the job comes down to "code prompt engineer" and "test prompt engineer".

Wild times where a task that used to be described as "good at using google" now gets the title of "Engineer". It was bonkers enough when software devs co-opted the title.

I mean, building applications that are maintainable, will fail gracefully, and keeps costs low, has all the same needs as any classic engineering discipline. You could spend just as much time designing a well thought out CLI as it could take to design a bridge or a sewer system.

Whether people do, or not, is a different question.

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

#802

Post by gofreddygo »

dcherman wrote: post #775
gofreddygo wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point about coverage results is an important one to understand. Something that I like to say when discussing this with other folks is that while high code coverage does not tell you that you have a good test suite, low code coverage does tell you that you have a poor one. It's one metric amongst many that should be used to measure your code quality, it's not the end-all-be-all.

code coverage is a bad metric either way. soon as it gets mentioned anywhere, an mba manager wants it as close to 100 as possible and goodhart's law kicks in.

it's synonymous with LOC. don't bring it up anywhere.

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

#803

Post by elzbardico »

jmyeet wrote: post #608
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think engineers are more like doctors / lawyers, who are also both contracted labor, whose wages can be (and have been) suppressed as automations and tactics to suppress wages arrived. But these groups also don't have strong unions and generally don't have the class consciousness you are talking about, especially as the pay increases.

You and I seem to be on the same page here but I want to take this opportunity to the role "middle class" plays in preventing class consciousness. The "middle class" is propaganda we've been fed for decades by our governments, the media and the very wealthy. It's just another way to pit workers against one another, like how the flames of white supremacy were fanned after the slaves were freed so poor whites wouldn't…

Except that, at least in the US, even factory workers could arguably be considered middle class.

They could buy/build a decent home in a safe neighborhood, had decent health care, good schools for their kids, disposable income for leisure.

Now, every single fucking productivity gain is going for the finance overlords.

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

#804

Post by elzbardico »

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…

The plague of the two-week sprint.

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

#805

Post by JKCalhoun »

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.

We used to do a kind of unit tests in place. (We called them param checking.)

In my experience unit tests have been simply a questionable yardstick management uses to feel at ease shipping code.

"98% code coverage with unit tests? Sounds good. It must be 98% bug-free — ship it."

Not that anyone ever exactly said that but that's essentially what is going on.

Code reviews seem to bring out the code-nazi types. Code reviews then break any goodwill between team members.

I preferred when I would go to a co-workers office and talk through an issue, come up with a plan to solve the problem. We trusted the other to execute.

When code reviews became a requirement it seemed to suck the joy out of being a team.

Too frequently a code review would turn into "here's how I would have implemented it therefore you're wrong, rewrite it this way, code does not pass."

Was that a shitty code reviewer? Maybe. But that's just human nature — the kind of behaviors that code "gate keeping" invites.

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

#806

Post by JKCalhoun »

HEmanZ wrote: post #774
noisem4ker wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my experience. Maybe I've been lucky. Try working for bigger, established firms for better chances.

Microsoft and Facebook not large and established enough?

Yep, add Apple. (Although it varies across teams so I can only speak for my own experiences.)

Once upon a time (my career there was 26 years) code reviews, unit tests were alien. I enjoyed my job much more then.

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

#807

Post by JKCalhoun »

thom wrote: post #780
dbolgheroni wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If teams care about each other’s code, they ought to collaborate on its design and implementation from the start. I’ve come to see code reviews (as a gate at the end of some cycle) as an abdication of responsibility and the worst possible way to achieve alignment and high quality. Any team that gets to the end of a feature without confidence that it can be immediately rolled out to create value for users has a fundam…

> they ought to collaborate on its design and implementation from the start

That's exactly right. After said process, it comes down to trusting your coworkers to execute capably. And if you don't think coworker is capable, say so (or if they're junior, more prudently hand them the simpler tasks — perhaps code review behind their back and let it go if the code is "valid" — even if it is not the Best Way™ in your opinion.)

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

#808

Post by solaire_oa »

strogonoff wrote: post #741
solaire_oa wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Writing/reading code and reviewing code are distinct and separate activities. It's completely common to contribute code which is not production ready.

If you need an example, it's easy to add a debugging/logging statement like `console.log`, but if the coder committed and submitted the log statement, then they clearly didn't review the code at all, and there are probably much bigger code issues at stake. This is a problem even without LLMs.

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

#809

Post by JKCalhoun »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #798
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.

It turns out that doing a good job at work is more important than having fun.

You might get some pushback there. But obviously I would choose both. (And believe we had both before management started dictating how we coded.)

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

#810

Post by JKCalhoun »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #723
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.

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…

In my experience that did not happen. I've been lucky perhaps to always work with engineers I trusted.

And frankly, giving ownership to code ("it's yours") has, also in my experience, been an excellent way to give an engineer "pride of ownership". No one wants to have that "stinking pile".

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