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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

#101

Post by bgwalter »

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.

Nonsense. Literally the first random example I chose:

https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-h13ssl-n-bulk-mbd-h13ssl-n-b-...

  Cheapest price: EUR 675
  Amazon price:   EUR 875
The vendors with the cheapest price have good customer reviews as well, unlike Amazon, which has terrible ones.

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

#102

Post by mk89 »

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 claims about productivity improvements. These are the same people quoting Google's ceo who say that 30% of newly generated code at Google is written by AI, without possibility to deny or validate it. Just blindly quote a company that has a huge conflict of interests in this field and you'll look smarter than you are.

This is where we're at today. I understand these are great tools, but all I am seeing madness around. And who works with these tools on a daily basis knows it. Knows what it means, how they can be misleading, etc.

But hey, everyone says we must use them ...

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

#104

Post by SpaceNoodled »

layer8 wrote: post #71
usrnm wrote: post #12

I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.

The problem I see is less that of losing jobs, but the fact that the jobs get less enjoyable, less deep work, more mindlessness and less reflection, and possibly also the quality of the produced software decreasing. Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for de…

LLMs can't do creative or unique work. They're really only useful for boilerplate, which is the tedious part.

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

#105

Post by layer8 »

rvz wrote: post #23
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #5

Welcome to the club. Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions? I thought that was a joke where everyone was in on it, not that they were serious. I assumed it was clear we're all replaceable cogs in a machine, baring a few exceptions of brilliant and innovation people.

> Have coders really psyopped themselves into thinking their job is somehow that much more special than the rest simply because it paid better due to temporarily market conditions? Yes. We don't need to pay $$$ for simply changing elements on a page or adopting the next web framework to replace another. The hype in many web technologies that lots of developers that have fell for also contributed to the low quality of…

AI is good at web developer roles because that’s what has been most prevalent in the training material.

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

#106

Post by devnullbrain »

sokoloff wrote: post #99
devnullbrain wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web devs are a tiny proportion of the employees needed for e-commerce.

Without them (and mobile devs, though there’s increasing cross-over), e-commerce doesn’t get done. Ergo, web devs are directly contributing to the outcomes that e-commerce enables.

Ok, but so is everyone involved with building the fulfillment centre, the sorting machines, the roads for delivery, the trucks, the railways...

If it sounds like I'm including a lot of jobs, it's because every non-service job in the history of the post-industrial revolution economy has revolved around making things more efficient. Software development is not some uniquely evil domain.

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

#107

Post by sokoloff »

devnullbrain wrote: post #106
sokoloff wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without them (and mobile devs, though there’s increasing cross-over), e-commerce doesn’t get done. Ergo, web devs are directly contributing to the outcomes that e-commerce enables.

Ok, but so is everyone involved with building the fulfillment centre, the sorting machines, the roads for delivery, the trucks, the railways... If it sounds like I'm including a lot of jobs, it's because every non-service job in the history of the post-industrial revolution economy has revolved around making things more efficient. Software development is not some uniquely evil domain.

I agree. I was just answering the upthread question, which seemed to imply that web devs have no part in it.

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

#108

Post by neom »

timkam wrote: post #100
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.

The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the ski…

Why are you using the word "demoting"?

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

#109

Post by ManBeardPc »

nlitened wrote: post #80
ManBeardPc wrote: post #70

I feel my job in the future will be more secure than ever. Tons and tons of AI generated garbage code (trained on more and more existing garbage code) that the „developer“ will at a certain point no longer be able to maintain or fix. Not even speaking about trusting the output. Feels similar to all the outsourced development to cheap suppliers that inevitably collapse or create horrible maintenance overhead.

Do you feel you would be able to “maintain and fix” LLM-generated 100-megabyte source code blobs? And if you could, do you think it would be a job you’d want to do?

No, writing a replacement. Either part by part or a whole new software system.

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

#110

Post by cmiles74 »

locococo wrote: post #24
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…

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.

When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements.

Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.

I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.

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