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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

#811

Post by JKCalhoun »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #688
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.

I never found linting or writing unit tests to be particularly un-fun, but I generally really really value correctness in my code, and both of those things tend to help on that front.

I think unit tests are perfect for you then.

Unfortunately, management often dictates this for all engineers.

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

#812

Post by givemeethekeys »

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.

TDD, while a good idea, is never used because it is highly unnatural when the stakes are low, which they are most of the time. And when the stakes are high enough - you'd want to hire a real QA engineer to write all the tests anyway, including the unit tests.

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

#813

Post by xen2xen1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #156
mr_toad wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry a bit about people who like writing code but don’t like reading and debugging it. There are enough “throw it over the wall” coders.

Yeah, AI will kill all mundane brick layering jobs. The real software engineering role, with architecture, customer management, discovery phase, risk analysis and all the other kind of stuff, not yet.

I have people skills damnit!

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

#814

Post by tomhow »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #800
perching_aix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation? Yes? I know I did, still do, and will continue to at least.

[flagged]

Please don't comment like this on Hacker News.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#815

Post by Aeolun »

djtango wrote: post #447
Aeolun wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, if it’s similar to how I feel about it, that it’s more about always being able to do it, but not wanting to expend the mental effort to correctly adjust all those 30 places. Your boss is not going to care, so while it’s a bit better going forward, justifying the time to do it manually doesn’t make sense even to yourself. If you can do it using an LLM in a few hours however, suddenly making your life, and the…

So everyone is talking across each other... AI is a sharp tool, use it well and it cuts. Use it poorly and it'll cut you. Helping you overcome the activation barrier to make that redactor is great if that truly is what it is. That is probably still worth billions in the aggregate given git is considered billion dollar software. But slop piled on top of slop piled on top of slop is only going to compound all the bad t…

> But slop piled on top of slop piled on top of slop is only going to compound all the bad things we already knew about bad software

While that is true, AI isn’t going to make the big difference here. Whether the slop is written by AI or 6000 mediocre engineers is of no matter to the end result. One might argue that if it were written by AI at least those engineers could do something useful with their lives.

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

#816

Post by vijucat »

dwaltrip wrote: post #792
vijucat wrote: post #659

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…

Hubris and fragile egos run amok A burning need to dominate in a misguided attempt to fill the gaping void inside Broken and hurting people spreading their pain as they flail blindly for relief Our world creaks, cracks splintering out like spider thread The foundations tremble

Poetic

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

#817

Post by physicles »

whatever1 wrote: post #478
alonsonic wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you asked Claude for a fix and it gave you a proper fix to your badly designed api endpoint. If it's an operation that's taking that long then yes, implementing it asynchronously is a good idea. If what you wanted was a simple ductape quick fix I'm sure you could have asked for that and Claude would have recommended what you did, increasing the timeout window which I guess "fixes" the problem.

So would you revamp your entire stack to accommodate one single endpoint and solve a fictional problem? What is the risk introduced by a long request that requires you to increase to your code complexity by 100x? Sure I could also dump completely Django and build from scratch with the provision for 10B concurrent users. My point is that when coding, business context is needed. I was expecting to see from the model wh…

I think you’ve nailed it: which fix is better depends on how bulletproof the solution needs to be. If a few people (not paying customers) call the api a few times a week and everyone’s on good WiFi or fiber, it’s probably fine. If you start hearing complaints from your users about failed requests, probably time to switch to polling.

I wonder if this is something you could get Claude to think about by adding some rules about your business context, how it should always prefer the simplest solution no matter what.

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

#818

Post by physicles »

thih9 wrote: post #480

> The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts. Why generate that memo at all - maybe scattered thoughts would be enough and the AI could help managers understand them. Then again, if the goal is to replace the engineers and not…

My hot take is if you’re writing a memo or a spec for internal consumption, using AI is an anti-pattern. The doc isn’t the important product, the act of writing the doc is, because that’s how you clarify your own thinking.

We know AIs are fine for bouncing ideas off of, but they’re not senior-level architects yet.

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

#819

Post by physicles »

xtracto wrote: post #136
softwaredoug wrote: post #55

I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embr…

You raise a good point. Ba k in the early 90s when i started with programming, my source of knowledge were magazines with code, a "programming with C/C++" book, and a lot of time. Then the internet came, and it felt like 'cheating'. Then forums came and it felt like cheating, Then SO, and so on and so forth. Now AI is eating the [software] world, and to a lot of people, it feels like cheating. I am just amazed of wha…

I was there for those changes too (I taught myself programming a couple years before we got internet), and I disagree that the internet and SO felt like cheating. No matter what resources you had, you could never get very far if you didn’t understand what your code was doing.

That’s no longer true. And that democratizes these skills, which I agree could be a great thing.

But do you agree that it’s important for kids to learn to think critically and systematically? Because it’s super hard to stay motivated to learn those things when LLMs do that for you (and you’re too young to tell when they’re doing a bad job of it).

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

#820

Post by insane_dreamer »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #595
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…

Additionally production lines are all about doing the same thing over and over again, with fairly minimal variations. Software isn't like that. Because code is relatively easy to reuse, novelty tends to dominate new code written. Software developers are acting like integrators in at least partly novel contexts, not stamping out part number 100k of 200k that are identical. I do think modern ML has a place as a coding…

But they are processing data 100k out of 200k in identical ways.
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