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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

#841

Post by [deleted] »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #702
33hsiidhkl wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any given seed value, the output of an LLM will be identical- it is deterministic. You can try this at home with Llama.cpp by specifying a seed value when you load a LLM, and then seeing that for a given input the output will always be the same. Of course there may be some exceptions (cosmic ray bit flips). Also, if you are only using online models, you can't set the seed value, plus there are multiple models, so…

I feel this is technically correct but intentionally cheating. no one - including the model creators - expects that to be the interface; it undermines they entire value proposition of using an LLM in the first place if I need to engineer the inputs to ensure reproducability. I'd love to hear some real world scenarios that do this where it wouldn't be simpler to NOT use AI.

[deleted]

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

#842

Post by bartread »

fisf wrote: post #713
bartread wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And except that the factory analogy of software delivery has always been utterly terrible. If you want to draw parallels between software delivery and automotive delivery then most of what software engineers do would fall into the design and development phases. The bit that doesn’t: the manufacturing phase - I.e., creating lots of copies of the car - is most closely modelled by deployment, or distribution of delivera…

> The “manufacturing phase” of software is super thin, even for most basic crud apps, because every application is different, and creating copies is practically free. This is not true from a manager's perspective (indoctrinated by Taylorism). From a manager's perspective, development is manufacturing, and underlying business process is the blueprint.

I don't know about that: I'm a manager, I'm aware of Taylorism (and isn't that guy discredited by sensible people anyway?), and I don't think the factory view holds up. Manufacturing is about making the same thing (or very similar things) over and over and over again at scale. That almost couldn't be further from software development: every project is different, every requirement is different, the effort in every new release goes into a different area of the software. Just because, after it's gone through the CD pipeline the output is 98% the same is irrelevant, because all the software development effort for that release went into the 2%.

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

#843

Post by bumby »

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.

Just wait to you hear what some traditional capital “E” engineers (meaning licensed) think about programmers usurping the title “engineer”.

It’s been a joke for decades and decades that “engineer” is used to church up any job, including “domestic engineering” (housekeeping/homemaking).

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

#844

Post by bartread »

kloop wrote: post #423
bartread wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And except that the factory analogy of software delivery has always been utterly terrible. If you want to draw parallels between software delivery and automotive delivery then most of what software engineers do would fall into the design and development phases. The bit that doesn’t: the manufacturing phase - I.e., creating lots of copies of the car - is most closely modelled by deployment, or distribution of delivera…

> The idea that because software goes through a standardised workflow and pipeline over and over and over again as it’s built it’s somehow like a factory is also bullshit. I don't think it's bs. The pipeline system is almost exactly like a factory. In fact, the entire system we've created is probably what you get when cost of creating a factory approaches instantaneous and free. The compilation step really does corre…

You're misunderstanding my meaning with pipeline: you're thinking it's just the CD part of the equation. I'm thinking about it as the whole software development and delivery process (planning, design, UX, dev, test, PR reviews, CD, etc), which can be standardised (and indeed some certifications require it to be standardised). In that context, even when the development pipeline follows a standardised process, most of it's nothing like a factory: just the CD part, as you've correctly identified. Because the output of CD will be, for mature software, 99+% similar to the output of the previous build - it is definitely somewhat analagous to manufacturing, although if you think about adding tests, etc., the process evolves a lot more often and rapidly than many production lines.

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

#845

Post by collingreen »

skydhash wrote: post #766
a1j9o94 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whatev…

> 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.

This is so good I just wanted to quote it so it showed up in this thread twice. Very well said.

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

#846

Post by solaire_oa »

strogonoff wrote: post #827
solaire_oa wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Just call it “committing bad code”. LLM autocomplete aside, I don’t see how reviewing own code can happen without either a split personality, or putting enough time that you completely forgot what exactly you were doing and have fresh eyes and mind. If person A committed code that looks bad to person B, it just means person A commits bad code by the standard of person B, not that person A “does not review own code”.…

Person A as can commit atrocious code all day, that's fine, but they still need to proofread their MR/PR and fix the outstanding issues. The only way to see outstanding issues is by reviewing the MR/PR. Good writers proofread their documents.

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

#847

Post by ModernMech »

Flemlo wrote: post #789
ModernMech wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tried it too and I know this test for a while. Not only did Claude respond correctly, I also wrote it in German. You're missing the point though. If it worked for you when you tried it, that's great, but we know these tools are stochastic, so that's not enough to call it "solved". That I tried it and it didn't work tells me it's not. And that's actually worse than it not working at all, because it leads to the fa…

I believe we are seeing the new car, Internet etc And we live now in such a fast pace that it feels like Ai should be perfect already and it's of course not. I also see that an expert can leverage Ai a lot better because you still need to know enough to make good things without. But Ai progresses very fast and still has achieved things were we have not had any answer than before. What it can already do is still very…

You're reinforcing the disparity that I'm pointing out in my original reply. My expectations for AI are calibrated by the people selling it. You say "AI progress is very fast" but again, I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing the same things I saw years ago when ChatGPT first came on the scene. If you go back to the hype of those days, they were saying "Things will change so rapidly now that AI is here, we will start seeing exponential gains in what we can accomplish."

They would point to the increasing model sizes and the ability to solve various benchmarks as proof of that exponential rise, but things have really tapered off since then in terms of how rapidly things are changing. I was promised a Ph.D. level researcher. A 20% better result on your OCR is not that. That's not to say it's a good thing and an improvement, but it's not what they are selling.

> Blackwell is the first chip to hit the lower estimation for brain compute performance.

What does that even mean? That's just more hype and marketing.

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

#848

Post by s1mplicissimus »

looofooo0 wrote: post #525
dragandj wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, AI is just a replacement for google search and Stack Overflow, automated and served as an IDE plugin...

Also serves as a manual on steroids, where you can find example of library usage for your problem.

It's such a good manual too, that it will make up entries for whole libraries if they don't exist. So convenient to waste time discovering those cases!

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

#849

Post by strogonoff »

solaire_oa wrote: post #846
strogonoff wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just call it “committing bad code”. LLM autocomplete aside, I don’t see how reviewing own code can happen without either a split personality, or putting enough time that you completely forgot what exactly you were doing and have fresh eyes and mind. If person A committed code that looks bad to person B, it just means person A commits bad code by the standard of person B, not that person A “does not review own code”.…

Person A as can commit atrocious code all day, that's fine, but they still need to proofread their MR/PR and fix the outstanding issues. The only way to see outstanding issues is by reviewing the MR/PR. Good writers proofread their documents.

I just don’t see reading your own stuff as a different activity from writing. Generally, there is the author, and proofreader is a dedicated role.

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

#850

Post by rco8786 »

lolinder wrote: post #740
rco8786 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Yea I think we're saying the same thing
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