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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

#851

Post by nothercastle »

lolinder wrote: post #360
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…

Also, you know who did measure every angle to make sure it was correct? The engineers who put together the initial design. They sure as hell took their time getting every detail of the design right before it ever made it to the assembly line. Who's filling that role in this brave new world?

Not true anymore, lots of places want to reduce engineering hours and let production eat the cost of defects.

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

#853

Post by thejazzman »

mattfca wrote: post #797
thejazzman wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's how engineers used it, sure, but instead many pretend they're brilliant by committing 10k lines they don't understand. I quit my last very good job because I became so fed up with this situation. It was bad enough before the CTO started using LLMs. It was ABSURD after. (This was a YC company that sold quickly after I quit, at a loss, presumably because they didn't know what else to do)

the classification of a tool being right for the job does not depend on how people use it someone holding a hammer by the head and failing at getting the nail in doesnt mean a hammer is a bad tool for nailing

> If that's how engineers used it, sure

No part of what I said suggested the tool wasn't capable of being a useful tool.

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

#854

Post by Shocka1 »

mk89 wrote: post #102
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.

Yes, because from my observations these are the people who cannot write anymore code today - they really don't understand the newer paradigms or technologies. So Copilot enabled a lot of people to write POCs and ship them to production fast, without thinking too much about edge cases, HA, etc. And these people have become advocates in their respective companies, so that everyone is actually following inaccurate claim…

Not that I disagree, but Anthropic put out some usage statistics for their products a few months ago and IIRC, something like 40% was used for software engineering.

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

#855

Post by larodi »

amrocha wrote: post #332
larodi wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, in all honesty, a lot of code that actually works in production, and delivers... goods, services, etc. is an over patched mess of code snippets. that sad part is that cpus are so powerful that it works.

This argument ignores the fact that AI makes it so much easier to ship a ton of garbage. It’s like comparing a machine gun to a matchlock pistol and saying they’re the same thing.

point is people been shipping/shitting tons of shit...ty code in production for very long now. only matters in very large cyber conflicts.

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

#856

Post by Reefersleep »

RUnconcerned wrote: post #575
zelphirkalt wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already imagine future devs wide-eyed saying things like: "He/She can _debug_!!"

This reminded me of Asimov's short story "The Feeling of Power" https://hex.ooo/library/power.html

Thank you for that, what a fun read :D

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

#857

Post by inadequatespace »

timkam wrote: post #15

Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely…

Right. What the article is unsurprisingly glossing over (per usual) is that just because AI is perceived (by higher-ups that don’t actually do the work) to speed up coding work doesn't mean it actually does.

and that probably to some extent all involved (depending on how delusional they are) know that it's simply an excuse to do layoffs (replaced by offshoring) by artificially so-called raising the bar to what is unrealistic for most people

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

#858

Post by nradclif »

pjmlp wrote: post #155
locococo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.

It has been a factory job for decades. Not everyone gets to code the next ground breaking algorithm at some R&D department. Most programming tasks are rather repetitive, and in many countries there is hardly anything to look up to software developers, it is another blue collar job. And in many cultures if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career.

> if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career

I don't see how that's possible. Wouldn't such a norm result in something like a 7:1 ration of managers to engineers (i.e., assuming a 40ish year career, the first 5 years are spent as an engineer, and the remaining 35 as a manager)? For team managers, I've generally seen around a 1:10 ratio of engineers to managers. So a 7:1 ratio of managers to engineers just doesn't seem plausible, even including non-people leaders in management.

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

#859

Post by Supermancho »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #324
Supermancho wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing? Ever? Brainwashed? Interesting to see A imagine what B meant, then assert that A believes some metric will always go up because they always saw it go up? It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.

> It's not clear what they meant I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.

> I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to.

This kind of statement does not make a point, nor is it appealing to engage with. Good luck with whatever.

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

#860

Post by almostgotcaught »

Supermancho wrote: post #859
almostgotcaught wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not clear what they meant I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. But even if it weren't (admittedly you have to have actually read Marx for it to jump out at you) by the time you responded there was another comment that very clearly spells it out, complete with citations.

> I know reading skills are in short supply in a group of people that only read code but I thought it was pretty obvious what I was alluding to. This kind of statement does not make a point, nor is it appealing to engage with. Good luck with whatever.

I love when people in glass houses throw stones;

> It's not clear what they meant, making this response as nonsensical as the response. An AI level exchange.

Does this kind of statement make a point? Is it appealing to engage with?

I saw this on Reddit and it captured this phenomenon beautifully: you're not a victim here, you're just starting a fight and then losing that fight.

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