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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

#361

Post by wat10000 »

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…

More to the point, there are people who carefully ensure that those angles are correct, and that all of the angles result in the car’s occupants arriving at their destination instead of turning into a ball of fire. It’s just that this process takes place at design time, not assembly time.

Software the same way. It’s even more automated than auto factories. Assembly is 100% automated. Design is what we get paid to do, and that requires understanding, just like the engineers at Ford need to understand how their cars work.

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

#362

Post by OccamsMirror »

firecall wrote: post #327
makeitdouble wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI has help me refactor things where I normally couldn’t. Reading "couldn't" as, you would technically not be able to do it because of the complexity or intricacy of the problem, how did you guarantee that the change offered by the AI made proper sense and didn't leave out critical patterns that were too complex for you to detect ? Your comment makes it sound like you're now dependent on AI to refactor again if dir…

That's an important distinction! There's a difference between not intellectually understanding something and not being able to refactor something because if you start pulling on a thread, you are not sure what will unravel! And often there just isn't time allocated in a budget to begin an unlimited game of bug testing whack-a-mole!

To makeitdouble's point, how is this any different with an LLM provided solution? What confidence do you have that isn't also beginning an unlimited game of bug testing whack-a-mole?

My confidence in LLMs is not that high and I use Claude a lot. The limitations are very apparent very quickly. They're great for simple refactors and doing some busy work, but if you're refactoring something you're too afraid to do by hand then I fear you've simply deferred responsibility to the LLM - assuming it will understand the code better than you do, which seems foolhardy.

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

#363

Post by School-Cotton »

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…

The pandemic is ongoing.

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

#364

Post by mji »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #312
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #60

With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are…

> Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" w…

> you say some filler to get someone incapable of understanding what it is that you're doing off your back for 24 more hours has consistently been one of the most useless and unpleasant parts of the job

This sucks for the 50% or so who are like you, but there's another 50% who won't really get much done otherwise, either because they don't know what to do and aren't self-motivated or capable enough to figure it out (common) or because they're actively cheating you and barely working (less common)

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

#365

Post by School-Cotton »

rynohack wrote: post #132
timkam wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for the time SEs are substantially better paid than working-class jobs, they are not the working class. For now, this applies at least to some regions, not only within the US. I agree in that I have at times felt some level of arrogance among some people taking up software engineering jobs, but IMO this just confirms the social class aspect of it. So there may have been some level of delusion to it, but at leas…

Working class is not defined by income level. The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears. That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.

This might be the definition in Marxist theory but in normal colloquial language “working class” absolutely does not mean the same thing as “anyone who doesn’t own the means of production”. But I think you know what OP meant and are just derailing the conversation.

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

#366

Post by tdeck »

wat10000 wrote: post #361
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…

More to the point, there are people who carefully ensure that those angles are correct, and that all of the angles result in the car’s occupants arriving at their destination instead of turning into a ball of fire. It’s just that this process takes place at design time, not assembly time. Software the same way. It’s even more automated than auto factories. Assembly is 100% automated. Design is what we get paid to do,…

You're just not visionary enough to see the potential in vibe-CADing an automobile!

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

#367

Post by majormajor »

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…

One of the reasons outsourcing for software fizzled out some compared to manufacturing is because in a factory you don't have "measuring to make sure every angle is correct" because (a) the manufacturing tools are tested and repeatable already and (b) the heavy lifting of figuring out all the angles was done ahead of time. So it was easy to mechanize and send to wherever the labor was cheapest since the value was in the tools and in the plans.

The vast majority of software, especially since waterfall methods were largely abandoned, has the planning being done at the same time as the "execution". Many edge cases aren't discovered until the programmer says "oh, huh, what about this other case that the specs didn't consider?" And outsourcing then became costly because that feedback loop for the spec-refinement ran really slowly, or not at all. Spend lots of money, find out you got the wrong thing later. So good luck with complex, long-running projects without deeply understanding the system.

Alternately, compare to something more bespoke and manual like building a house, where the tools are less precise and more of the work is done in the field. If you don't make sure all those angles are correct, you're gonna get crappy results.

(The most common answer here seems to be "just tell the agent what was wrong and let it iterate until it fixes it." I think it remains to be seen how well "find out everything that is wrong after all the code is written, and then tell the coding agent(s) to fix all of those" will work in practice. If nothing else, it will require a HUGE shift in manual testing appetite. Maybe all the software engineers turn into QA engineers + deployment engineers.)

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

#368

Post by wat10000 »

analog31 wrote: post #325
rynohack wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working class is not defined by income level. The working class is those who own no significant means of production and thus must sell their labor at whatever price the market bears. That the market for SE labor is good(for the workers), doesn't mean SE's don't need to work to earn money.

Something I've always puzzled over is whether the means of production are our laptops, or our knowledge and expertise. I still work for a wage, but expect to be paid above subsistence. I don't own the laptop that I use at work, but also don't own the carpeting on the floor. Both are commodities. Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or bo…

For factory workers, the means of production is the factory.

What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.

You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.

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

#369

Post by JeremyNT »

pbw wrote: post #30

Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead. The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work f…

The whole thing with gen AI is so depressing to me.

For the first time now I can feel the joy of what I do slipping away from me. I don't even mind my employer capturing more productivity, but I do mind if all the things I love about the job are done by robots instead.

Maybe I'm in the minority but I love writing code! I love writing tests! If I wanted to ask for this stuff to be done for me, I would be a manager!

Now, I'll need to use gen AI to replace the fun part of the job, or I'll be put out to pasture.

It's not a future I look forward to, even if I'm able to keep up and continue working in the industry.

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

#370

Post by [deleted] »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #312
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #60

With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are…

> Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing Yeah the consistent "reporting" of "status" on "stand-ups" w…

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