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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

#51

Post by selfselfgo »

datavirtue wrote: post #40
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's been like this for decades.

Yeah that’s what really worries me, many people have been clinging to this ability as something that’s really special and AI is really going to disillusion them.

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

#52

Post by iLoveOncall »

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…

> I get significant pushback when I submit a CR more than a few pages long.

Hum yeah, because it's insanely hard to properly review a CR that's more than a few pages long?

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

#54

Post by telesilla »

Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?

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

#55

Post by softwaredoug »

I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term

What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced.

Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.

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

#56

Post by mananaysiempre »

bgwalter wrote: post #34

Amazon is going down. 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now they are violating EU laws and cheat the gmp developers out of a CPU replacement: https://gmplib.org/ Granlund's gcc optimizations probably save Amazon millions in electricity each year. But evidently they don't care about real programmers.

> 20 years ago they had excellent customer service, now

... you will use them anyway because, customer service or no, there’s a good chance you don’t have a choice that doesn’t cost half again as much. (Regional availability may vary.)

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

#57

Post by placardloop »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #32

I'm a software engineer at Amazon and I'm directly and indirectly involved a lot in programs related to GenAI tooling. I can safely say this article is bullshit. While there are a lot of programs ongoing to allow builders to adopt GenAI tooling, and while there is definitely a lot of communication ongoing around those programs, nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools. None are installed by default or ena…

If you truly believe what you’re saying, then you’re uninformed as to what is going on outside your own team. And just because it’s not happening in your team does not mean it isn’t happening.

Q is installed by default in all browsers on Amazon laptops now, and literally cannot be uninstalled. If you don’t have it installed in your IDE, you get a non-dismissible popup nagging you to install it until you do. Many teams are being told they must use AI every single day (some VPs have sent out org-wide emails saying that AI must be used), and engineers have to tell their managers how they are making use of it day-to-day. In my org, OP1 docs must include at least one section about how the team will increase use of AI. Hackathons aren’t allowed to happen anymore unless they are AI-themed. I could keep going. Amazon is absolutely forcing AI usage, and the article undersells how egregious it is.

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

#58

Post by aatd86 »

smokel wrote: post #48
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.

I have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less. It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.

not necessarily. the economies of scale might be increasing as dev productivity increases. the goal of many businesses being to do more with less.

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

#59

Post by devnullbrain »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #41
Braxton1980 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it poetic justice? Were we advocating for automation?

Email made the corporate mailroom obsolete and the letter carrier.

So would it be poetic justice when an electrician gets laid off?

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

#60

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

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 doing. I am sure there will always be devs who are doing interesting work but I feel these opportunities will be less and less.

In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,

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