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

nytimes.com

861–870 of 897 posts

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

#861
post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The fact that they used the auto industry as an example is funny, because the Toyota way and six sigma came out of that industry." It's even funnier when you consider that Toyota has learned how bad of an idea lean manufacturing/6-Sig/5S can be thanks to the pandemic - they're moving away from it in some degrees, now.

JIT is totally independent from 6-sig.

They all come together to form a cohesive quality and production program.

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

#862
post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also seems, to me, like composer/npm issues. An entire generation of devs, who grew up using unaudited, unverified, unknown license code. And which at a moments notice, can be sold to a threat actor. And I've seen devs try to add packages to the project without even considering the source. Using forks of forks of forks, without considering the root project. Or examing if it's just a private fork, or what is most…

After putting off learning JS for a decade, I finally bit the bullet since I can talk to an LLM about it while going through the slog of getting a mental model up and running. After a month, I can say that the inmates run that whole ecosystem, from the language spec, to the interpreter, to packaging. And worse, the tools for everyone else have to cater to them. I can see why someone who has never had a stable foundat…

Interview with a Senior JS Developer (satire)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk

(you've probably already seen it--everyone else has. But if not, you're in for a treat)

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

#863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They took their time precisely specifying the robot movements so they're always repeatable. Almost like...some sort of carefully crafted code.

You misconstrue the analogy. The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy. It’s the thing that generates the code. The robot operates deterministically, it has a fixed input and a fixed output. This is what makes it reliable. Your “AI coder” is nothing like that. It’s non deterministic on its best day, and it gets everything thrown at it so even more of a coin toss. This seriously undermines any expectation…

> The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy

I never said it is. The code is the code that controls the robot and makes it behave deterministically.

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

#864
post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs almost always operate at least partly stochastically.

Of course but the code they generate only operates in one way.

Who determines if that code operates in the intended way?

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

#865
post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a project is way too large for AI to process as a whole. So yes it's true.

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?

Get the LLM to read and summarise N pages at a time, and store the outputs. Then, you concatenate those outputs into one "super summary" and use _that_ as context.

Theres some fidelity loss but it works for text, because there's quite often so much redundancy.

However, I'm not sure this technique could work on code.

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

#866

>At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work Only because the people responding have never done warehouse work.

As someone who packed pears for my first job in a warehouse at 15 1/2 years old for 10 hours a week, this comment is great. Working in a warehouse for pennies is about as worse as it gets. Now, as a well paid software engineer, a very bad day doesn't even come close to that experience.

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

#867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the process an LLM uses to generate code based on an input is definitely not entirely deterministic Technically correct is the least useful kind of correct when it's wrong in practice. And in practice the process AI coding tools use to generate code is not deterministic which is what matters. To make matters worse in the comparison with a manufacturing robot, even the input is never the same. While a robot get the…

I don't really understand your point. An LLM is loaded with a seed value, which is a number. The number may be chosen through some pseudo- or random process, or specified manually. For any given seed value, say 80085, the LLM will always and exactly generate the same tokens. It is not like stamped sheet metal, because it is digital information not matter. Say you load up R1, and give it a seed value of 80085, then sa…

WRONG lol.

First you're assuming a brand new conversation: no context. Second you're assuming a local-first LLM because a remote one could change behavior at any time. Third, the way the input is expressed is inexact, so minor differences in input can have an effect. Fourth, if the data to be operated on has changed you will be using new parts of the model that were never previously used.

But I understand how nuance is not as exciting as using the word WRONG in all caps.

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

#868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out that doing a good job at work is more important than having fun.

You might get some pushback there. But obviously I would choose both. (And believe we had both before management started dictating how we coded.)

In my experience shops that dont have testing guidelines end up with untested code, and in my experience untested code always has bugs.

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

#869
post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild times where a task that used to be described as "good at using google" now gets the title of "Engineer". It was bonkers enough when software devs co-opted the title.

Just wait to you hear what some traditional capital “E” engineers (meaning licensed) think about programmers usurping the title “engineer”. It’s been a joke for decades and decades that “engineer” is used to church up any job, including “domestic engineering” (housekeeping/homemaking).

Sanitation engineer and custodial engineer are older than I am, as well.

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

#870
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…

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 that the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 344.3 in the United States. This indicates that, on average, CEOs received more than 344 times the annual average salary of production and nonsupervisory workers in the key industry of their firm."

> Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.

You can wager whatever you want, but statistically you'd be wrong.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240404-global-retirem...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/retirement-crisis-savings-short...

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