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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

#871

Post by ath3nd »

Ray20 wrote: post #604
ath3nd wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think that way of defining the working class is very sound Oh, really? Is that why both "white-collar worker" and "blue-collar worker" contain the word "worker"? Working class is everyone who has to work for their money. Can most programmers, on a whim, afford to never work again? An average programmer's salary is 2x the average coal miner's. A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker htt…

Weak argument. The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones. So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime. You just choose to spend all your money on things you don't need to survive, that's the only reason you neede…

> The objective level of reproduction of labor force is about $2 per day. Cheaper for warm climates, slightly more expensive for cold ones.

I also like making random numbers up. Here are other numbers. 420. 1337. 1911.

> So by that logic there is no working class in the US whatsoever because you don't have to work to survive. At all. Maybe half a year in your entire lifetime.

I have no words to express how weak this argument is. The US has MOSTLY working class people because less and less people can survive on their salaries.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...

> So, using your logic, "You are making more than 50 cents an hour? You're not working class. You don't have to work most of your life to survive yourself or to provide for your children. You're closer to Elon Musk than to workers forced to work for $2 a day to survive."

I am not sure if this sentence is a troll, or comes from genuine misunderstanding. I don't know what to advice. I genuinely chuckled. Here are a three numbers, elementary math:

7.25

53

1 600 000

Which two of these numbers are closer to one another? 7.25 and 53, right (I hope)? Well, let's look what those numbers mean:

7.25 - minimum wage https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage

53 - average hourly salary of a software engineer: https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries

1 600 000 average hourly wage of Elon Musk: https://moneyzine.com/personal-finance/how-much-does-elon-mu...

So...who is a software engineer closer in terms of income to? Elon Musk or a minimum wage worker?

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

#872

Post by randomjoe2 »

guappa wrote: post #830
throwaway2037 wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question: Many people have spoken about their experience of using LLMs to summarise long, complex PDFs. I am so ignorant on this matter. What is so different about reading a long PDF vs reading a large source base? Or can a modern LLM handle, say, 100 pages, but 10,000 pages is way too much? What happens to an LLM that tries to read 10,000 pages and summarise it? Is the summary rubbish?

It can't handle large contexts, so the way they often do it is file by file, which loses the overall context.

Lots of models CAN handle large contexts, gemini 2.5 pro their latest model can take 1 million tokens of context

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

#873

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ath3nd wrote: post #870
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-founder (i.e. external hire) CEOs and other corporate executives also have to work for their money, therefore they are working class. The definition may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) but it is useless. ("A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.) Aside from that, I…

> A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well. We are nitpicking, and you are wrong: https://therealnews.com/average-ceo-makes-339-times-more-tha... https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com... "In 2022, it was estimated tha…

Dude, your own link https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/ says "We focus on the average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. firms (firms that sell stock on the open market) by revenue."

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

#874

Post by gerdesj »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #385
gerdesj wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please give some worked examples. I'm not sure what: "'deskilling' to something reliable through bureaucratic procedures" ... means. I'm the Managing Director of a small company and I'm pretty sure you are digging at the likes of me (int al) - so what am I doing wrong?

Are you familiar with Taylorism? From the 19th century onwards, businesses have wanted to replace high-skilled craftsmen with low-skilled workers who would simply follow a repeatable process. A famous example is Ford. Ford didn't want an army of craftsmen, who each knew how to build a car. He wanted workers to stay at one station and perform the same single action all day. The knowledge of how to build a car would be…

I'm happy to report that for businesses on the scale as mine, we don't work like that.

We give a shit.

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

#875

Post by bustling-noose »

I want to know if I can use an LLM during problem solving at an interview for SDE jobs at Amazon, Google and Microsoft who have boldly claimed lot of their work is done by LLMs. I will be able to point out the algorithm and explain how it works including the time complexity, but I will need the LLM first to solve it.

Will SDE interviews change ? Are these companies gearing up to let AI engineers in ? I highly doubt this is ever going to happen.

There is a quote by buffet that I think applies to a lot of scenarios not just investing : 'to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.'

ML IoT 5G blockchain etc. so many technologies are great that had their gaussian curve moment during greed. But these things take a back seat after that.

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

#876

Post by Flemlo »

ModernMech wrote: post #847
Flemlo wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Nope not marketing. I researched this topic myself. I'm not aware that Nvidia mentioned this.

But hey it seems I can't convince you of my enthusiasm regarding ai. It's fine I still will play around with it often and looking forward to it's progress.

Regarding your researcher: NotebookLM is great and you might need to invest a few hundred bucks to really try out more.

We will see anyway we're it's going

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

#877

Post by Anamon »

picardo wrote: post #13

Sure, AI makes writing code easy, but code review remains a bottleneck. The individual coders are finding ways to use AI to improve their workflows, but as long as organizational culture remains stuck in the old ways of reviewing code, the overall throughput will not improve significantly. That's been my personal experience at Amazon. I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long. You need…

Stuck in the old ways of reviewing code? In other words, what you're suggesting should be the new way is to simply accept the LLM's code salad and push it to production as soon as the pipeline lights up green?

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

#878

Post by Anamon »

cj wrote: post #165
overgard wrote: post #158

You know, the point of AI in coding seems to be so that you can code in English, instead of a formal language. (And for some reason we're pretending like these formalisms are hard and the people that understand them evil gatekeepers, to which I'd say: nope to both propositions. It has never been easier to learn how to code.) The thing I don't understand is why anyone thinks this is an improvement. I think anyone that…

> I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code. IME there's an inverse relationship between how excited the person is about AI coding and their seniority as an engineer. Juniors (and non-coders) love it because now they can suddenly do things they didn't know how to do before. Seniors don't love it because it gets in their way, causes coworkers to put up low-quality AI-generated code for peer rev…

It's a very different thing from SO, in my opinion, because SO involves human discussion. One of the most valuable, educational things about using SO is the comments underneath some answers saying that it's a bad idea, and explaining why. This critical reflection is completely missing from LLM coding. Good suggestion, horrible suggestion – there's no distinction that would be noticed by someone not already experienced in the topic.

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

#879

Post by Anamon »

biosboiii wrote: post #85
bgwalter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the EU, use this search engine: https://geizhals.eu/ Amazon is not nearly the cheapest or most reliable one for hardware.

I am sorry but this is insane cope, Amazon is still on-top everywhere, also in Europe.

Also not true in Switzerland. Amazon was ranked #4 overall, #2 in tech, based on sales in 2024, with a massive distance to the leaders. It's not that popular around here, and with current U.S. boycotts I expect it to drop further this year.

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

#880

Post by Anamon »

"In a memo to employees in April, the chief executive of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that “A.I. usage is now a baseline expectation” and that the company would “add A.I. usage questions” to performance reviews."

Usage of a tool becoming a performance metric is a clear sign that the tool isn't doing what it's promised to do. This is managers desperately trying to prevent their investment in GenAI from blowing up in their faces.

This is as clear an admission as any that the supposed productivity or quality gains from LLM coding aren't showing up in the results. If a tool is effective, management generally doesn't have to micromanage and force employees into using it.

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