At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun To Resemble Warehouse Work (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0177783615
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/05/26/1541224/at-amazon-some-coders-say-their-jobs-have-begun-to-resemble-warehouse-work
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html
Three Amazon engineers told the New York Times that the company has raised productivity goals over the past year and expects developers to use AI assistants that suggest code snippets or generate entire program sections. One engineer said his team was cut roughly in half but still expected to produce the same amount of code by relying on AI tools.
The shift mirrors historical workplace changes during industrialization, the Times argues, where technology didn't eliminate jobs but made them more routine and fast-paced. Engineers describe feeling like "bystanders in their own jobs" as they spend more time reviewing AI-generated code rather than writing it themselves. Tasks that once took weeks now must be completed in days, with less time for meetings and collaborative problem-solving, according to the engineers.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html
Re: (Score:2)
"Better" means releasing more value per iteration, even though we don't tell you what value is produced by the feature requests. So we'll size everything a 1. Oh it's not a 1? Must break it down so it can be completed in one day. Let's create a definition of ready. Fully-spec'd. Have as many meetings as necessary until it is fully defined. You can't start on it until previous phase is done. Once you complete your phase, it goes to the next. There's no backwards movement. Why are you moaning "waterfall"? W
Re: 40% better (Score:2, Insightful)
Fuck iterations, and the entire Agile. It's a make-believe tool that keeps managers busy with admin and developers miserable. Never works as intended, the other way around, in practice. Never.
Re: (Score:2)
> Well, there is a famous Canadian company that asks their employees to write down, for their annual review, how they could be 40% better in the coming year than the year that just passed.
I could be 40% better by working a three-day workweek instead of five. Done.
> That means, in two years, an employee must basically double their "productivity".
Depends on how you define "better". It need not mean "more productive". :-)
> Funnily, no one explained what does "better" mean in this context, and we were joking, should our salary also match that 40% increase every year?
Yes, it should. Or else three-day workweeks. :-D
Re: (Score:1)
Answer: learn how percentages work.
It was fun while it lasted (Score:4, Interesting)
I made my first money as a teenager writing code in 1980. After Y2k I became the guy who gets called in to save the day when the overpaid teams are flailing. I made a very good living at it for a while. I'm not the best, but I'm pretty fucking good and I have a lot of experience to guide me.
I am forced to admit that our new robot overlords are better than me and rapidly improving. Thank $DEITY I'm in a position to retire. Best of luck to those still working in the field.
Our overlords aren't robots (Score:3)
It's a handful of greasy dudes that blundered into billions of dollars though a combination of nepotism, antitrust violations and government handouts.
They maintain their power by tricking us with moral panics and Petty bigotries and we let them do it because reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
I rarely use any of the proprietary AI services. Nearly all of my LLM inference is done locally with free range, organic, non-GMO open weight models.
The genie is out of the bottle. The good news is that the greasy billionaire dudes don't control the genie like we thought they would a couple of years ago.
I don't know what you mean (Score:2)
Of course they control it. It doesn't matter if you can run an open source LLM model. If you don't have a multi-million dollar Data center to run those queries you don't have control they do. And you won't have access to the capital you need to run that data center because we haven't been enforcing antitrust law so they will just shut you out of it.
You're thinking about power to linearly. You're thinking that if you have access to a technology that you have power over that technology. It doesn't work li
Re: (Score:2)
> If you don't have a multi-million dollar Data center to run those queries you don't have control they do.
Did you not understand what I wrote?
> Nearly all of my LLM inference is done locally ...
Emphasis added for the reading impaired. I am running these models on my laptop , which is a $2,400 Macbook Pro--nothing super special. Performance is amazing and rapidly improving; new open weight models are being released almost faster than I can try them out.
Re: Our overlords aren't robots (Score:1)
Organic code - but is it free range and gluten free?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I did say it's free range.
Gluten is what keeps source files together, however.
Poor babies (Score:2, Insightful)
If sitting at a desk typing in code all dsy resembles warehouse work to you- youve never done warehouse work.
Re: (Score:2)
There is more of a chance that they've done warehouse work, than there is a chance that you've done coding. Dumb statements like yours tell it all.
The article is specifically about not coding, and instead is about mundane, fast-paced work with timely quotas using AI instead. They used to use their brain to think about and code around problems. Now they're reviewing code and clipping it together so that it works, under a figurative whip. Monkey work.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Some of us have actually done warehouse work.
Re: (Score:2)
You're being obtuse, that wasn't the point being made.
Assemble, Not Create (Score:2)
From the article, AI coding is considered by the executives a full replacement for creating code.
The old way, and in use by some today, was to create code by hand, similar to writing a story. Your mind created it. Then add autocomplete, which most of the time saved on typing, but sometimes interrupts the train of thought.
Now, instead of creating, you get to assemble AI generated snippets, with what amounts to productivity quotas.
The worst part for the Dev and QA teams will come later, when the AI generat
I learned software engineering in the 70s (Score:2)
Back then there were not very many of us and even fewer who were good at it. Based on the laws of supply and demand, we were paid well. Then the word spread that software engineering paid well and a flood of people of varying talent jumped in. Now, powerful tools are making the job easier. Change is coming and the best of the best will adapt and thrive. The others, not so much
Let me translate (Score:3)
"I got mine fuck you"
That's what I'm hearing. Honestly that's what everyone's hearing they're just too weak to call you out on it.
They're not going to adapt and thrive. That's literally what the article says they're not doing. Instead they're being forced to work longer and longer hours to increase productivity because they have been broken down into cogs that can be replaced with ease.
If you had any historic education you would recognize this as the alienation of work. If you had done a little
Re: (Score:2)
> Even in the seventies your boss was keenly aware that you had leverage over him and it made him very very angry. It took them longer than your lifetime to eliminate that leverage but they never stopped working on it.
Institutional memory. The second employees are promoted in the 2020's into management, they absorbed the anger and hate that managers in the 70's imbued into the walls and cube partitions.
> Your kids and your grandkids are going to be working 60 to 80 hours a week. Eventually by the time they hit 40 or 50 they won't be able to do that and they will break down and face homelessness.
But, also.
> We are already seeing a lot of that in Japan they just a really good at hiding it you can find videos on YouTube about guys in their 40s and 50s who just couldn't keep up with the grind and they now live in internet cafes.
It's not institutional memory (Score:2)
It is a process called Taylorism.
Google it. The MBA perfected it and AI automates it.
Briefly it is the process of taking a skilled artisan and breaking their work down into tasks that can be done without skill so that you can replace the skilled artisan with an unskilled laborer who is paid a fraction what the artisan was.
Re: (Score:2)
Good job missing parent's point. Re-read for comprehension, maybe?
Re: (Score:2)
Dude he literally said the best will adapt and thrive. That is some fucking eugenics grade shit right there.
I got the guys point you're just uncomfortable with it so you're going to read whatever the hell you want to and do it.
Good job I guess. I mean whatever helps you sleep at night until the oligarchs take your house.
Maybe you will get lucky and die before that happens like the grandparent is planning to.
Re: (Score:2)
Please provide a quote from the OP's post that included him/herself in that group and justified your leading line:
> "I got mine fuck you"
What MpVpRb wrote is self-evidently true: things are indeed changing, and like all times of change people either adapt and thrive or they don't, and don't. But you look at things through a pair of asshole-colored glasses and respond to things people don't say--like elsewhere in this thread where you ignored the whole point of my response and went blathering on as if I had said the opposite.
Wonder how this impacts testing (Score:2)
Is the code being tested to the extent it was before LLMs came into use? Or has "move fast and break things" devolved to "put shit out there and don't worry - it will be obsolete before anyone has a chance to complain about how terrible it is"?
Re: (Score:3)
If your business can't be described as "end-stage" yet, someone trying to win the race to the bottom will probably buy it from you.
"Put shit out there and don't worry" isn't just becoming a way of life in programming, but the entire business world, and the society at large.
Are they pissing in bottles? (Score:5, Funny)
Let us know when they don't get to go to the bathroom, then it'll be like doing warehouse work for Amazon.
Re: Are they pissing in bottles? (Score:3)
This might seem like a good comparison, but there's a key difference in that salaried intellectual work doesn't have strictly quantifiable output metrics. You can find yourself in a position where a feature, once explored in depth is really a rats nest of features. Developers can poop or pee, but they may find themselves under immense pressure to deliver something where a project manager has underestimated the effort required to complete it. The developer then finds themselves virtually shackled to a chair
Re: (Score:1)
I took a temp job stuffing DVDs for Netflix. It was the only "production type" job have had. By that I mean you had defined break times and such, and never did anything other than the actual work. No talking or anything, just work.
There were about ten people in the room, each with their own little workstations, and you either were stuffing DVDs into envelopes, or unstuffing them.
Well, I was working for a while and needed to piss, so I got up and went to the restroom. You should have seen the looks on people
Whiplash (Score:5, Funny)
> Tasks that once took weeks now must be completed in days, with less time for meetings and collaborative problem-solving, according to the engineers.
Amazon, pushing RTO: you need to spend more time collaborating face to face with your coworkers!
Amazon, pushing AI: you need to spend less time collaborating face to face with your coworkers!
Great timing (Score:5, Insightful)
I retired from a long career in software development two years ago.
Looks like my timing was awesome. I would absolutely hate to be looking for a software development job now. The tech industry has jumped the shark.
Now I just happily work on my hobby projects, making software the way I like to make it and nary an AI assistant within 100km.
Re: Great timing (Score:5, Insightful)
You may be onto something. Perhaps the future is in simply being a plumber or an electrician wiring up data centres; the types of jobs that can't be (yet) done safely be robots and AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, I think going into the trades is a good plan, or personal care such as a health care assistant or masseur/masseuse. Those professions still need humans (for now...)
Re: (Score:2)
You have clearly not sat in a modern massage chair. A massage therapist friend of mine has one, and it's amazing.
Re: (Score:2)
I have, and I've also had professional massages. There is no comparison.
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Except that those jobs pay like pure shit.
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, just because huge tech companies are terrible employers, doesn't mean that software development jobs everywhere are crap. There are still plenty of companies, especially smaller ones, that still care about their people.
Re: (Score:1)
Late stage capitalism will destroy everything you enjoy.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no such thing as "late stage capitalism." There are certainly "late stage" companies within capitalism. But the big picture is more like a pendulum than a single incline. As Paul Harvey used to say, excesses always inevitably become their own undoing.
Re: (Score:1)
To be honest, no one gives a fuck what you think. Also, you're wrong.
> The concept of late capitalism (in German: Spätkapitalismus) was first used by the German social scientist Werner Sombart (1863-1941) in 1928.
Re: (Score:2)
Sombart was a communist, of course he would use derogatory language to describe capitalism. We all see how well communism turned out. Most countries no longer use the term, and the ones that do (like China) are really capitalist under the hood, and communist in name only.
Re: (Score:1)
Nice ad hominem attack and strawman!! He was also a nazi.
> Most countries no longer use the term, and the ones that do (like China) are really capitalist under the hood, and communist in name only.
> To be honest, no one gives a fuck what you think.
I can tell you're a far right nutjob. You can't read. My turn!!!
Re: (Score:2)
You say you don't care, but you keep replying.
It's possible to be both Nazi and Communist at the same time. Naziism isn't an economic system, it's a political system.
Calling him Communist isn't ad hominem, it's the truth. It would only be seen as ad hominem if "Communist" were considered a disparaging term. Do you think it is? I don't. I think Communists are wrong about economics, but I don't hate Communists.
Re: (Score:2)
> You say you don't care, but you keep replying.
> It's possible to be both Nazi and Communist at the same time. Naziism isn't an economic system, it's a political system.
> Calling him Communist isn't ad hominem, it's the truth. It would only be seen as ad hominem if "Communist" were considered a disparaging term. Do you think it is? I don't. I think Communists are wrong about economics, but I don't hate Communists.
Again, you can't read. No one is not just me. Coming from you it is 100% disparaging.
Re: (Score:2)
That is the point of strawman and ad hominem attack, smart guy. You no longer want the argument on late stage capitalism. Instead, you name call and switch to communism, china and whatever right wing buzzwords, Fox News and company teaches you.
Re: (Score:2)
For the record, my opinion of Fox News is that it's nothing more than a tabloid.
The point of bringing up communism, is that a communist would consider capitalism "evil" and would disparage it by calling big, impersonal companies, examples of "late stage" capitalism. In reality, there are also many, many small, caring companies that are possible due to capitalism. The US Chamber of Commerce sees small businesses booming in the US. [1]https://www.uschamber.com/smal... [uschamber.com]. These are companies where individual employ
[1] https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data-center#:~:text=Entrepreneurship%20is%20booming%20in%20the,applications%20filed%20annually%20since%20then
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, this is true. My last job before retirement was at one such small company, and it was a fantastic place to work. However, those companies are becoming harder to find and are being squeezed out by the massive oligarch-run companies, and/or are buying into the AI bullshit because everyone else is.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you're not looking in the right places. According to the US Chamber of Commerce, small businesses are booming in the US. [1]https://www.uschamber.com/smal... [uschamber.com].
[1] https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data-center#:~:text=Entrepreneurship%20is%20booming%20in%20the,applications%20filed%20annually%20since%20then
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I'm not looking at all, because I am retired, and I don't live in the US.
And while small businesses may be booming, how many of them need software developers? Especially Linux developers? (I would never touch Windows...)
Re: (Score:2)
So yes, if you start constraining the criteria to a very narrow slice of the software development world, then yes, you'll probably have a hard time finding work (if you weren't retired). The vast majority of enterprise software development is on Windows, and that's where most of the jobs are, especially in small business. Linux tends to be used only by major corporations that can afford the extra maintenance effort required for Linux.
There are small software development shops everywhere. There's literally o
Re: (Score:2)
There are a fair number of small Linux shops too... I owned one for 19 years. And I would change your wording to read "the perception of extra maintenance effort required for Linux..."
However, even the small shops are prone to the AI hype and all the bullshit trends that periodically sweep through the software industry. For me, it all started to go wrong when the obvious joke that is "Agile" began to be taken seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh also... embedded work is almost all Linux (or bare metal). There are lots of IoT businesses out there doing stuff with embedded Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
I can see that we are on opposite ends of the dev spectrum. I'm a Windows guy (though I've spent several years doing Linux too), and I wholeheartedly buy the "agile" mindset. In fact, I'd go so far as to assert that waterfall teams that are successful, are actually doing agile under the hood. I refuse to work in a waterfall shop, full stop.
Less time for meetings (Score:2)
> ... with less time for meetings ...
So how is this a bad thing? What engineer wants to spend soul-sucking time in meetings (with managers, marketing, etc.).
I keep saying this (Score:2)
But it doesn't matter if AI works or not.
Your boss is going to replace you with AI. If the AI works and you're one of the survivors then you get to gradually wait it out until the AI completely replaces you.
If the AI doesn't work and you're one of the survivors you will be forced to work twice as hard or you'll get fired and replaced by one of the thousands of people they just laid off.
This is what happens when you stop enforcing antitrust law. In the old days companies firing this many engineer
Re:You keep saying this (Score:2)
Yes, you do indeed keep saying this, over and over in almost the exact same words, and hardly anybody ever responds. Have you ever wondered why? Well, maybe because everybody here is tired of you posting the same ideas over and over and has stopped reading your posts. And, of course, there's the possibility that you're completely wrong and most posters here are tired of pointing this out.
Replace the Duping editors already (Score:2)
The "editors" clearly do not care about their work.
Replace them.
Can AI write usable, performance, quality code? (Score:4, Insightful)
Honest question, can AI write usable, performance, quality code? All these teams scaling back, and using AI, what tools are they using? I spent a good portion of last week doing LLM training for a coding AI, that I want to use locally. It was already trained, so I was feeding in my code, and trying to get it to generate the same standard of code. As of last night, the 25th of May 2025, having spent 50+ hours, of training using my own code bases, it couldn't produce a reasonable large code block, commented, with annotation.
The best it produced, was a Jr Dev style function, that lacked readability, maintainability, wasn't commented properly, lacked annotation, and had it have been deployed, could have easily been a project stopper. If AI can't generate quality code, that's readable, maintainable, understandable, annotated, and designed to be a living body of work, what's the point?
I've been a professional developer / engineer for 13+ years, worked on more code bases than I can count. I've seen good code, I've seen meh code, and of course, I've seen dump trucks of bad, terrible, horrible code. When the code is bad, and you can't just read it with understanding, hours, days, even weeks get wasted having to reverse the code, so you can fix it, or change it. Recently, I can across a calculation in an old code base, that a former coworker wrote, 4 years ago:
> (4 - Math.sqrt(MiddlePoint / 6.25)) / 4;
That's the line, I copied it, what is 4? Where does 6.25 come from? Unless you know those two values, that statement makes no sense. There were no comments, no annotation, the commit message was useless, all I knew is what it should have done, but even that had no documentation. It took 2 days, to unwind that one line, which is now commented and annotated, with examples in the code, but that's the type of nonsense AI generates, and it's useless.
All this AI stuff, it might speed up timelines now, but when it comes time to work on that code later, you're screwed, and as I've done many, many times in the past, your rushed nonsense today, it's going to take me hours, days or weeks later, to clean up. If you've never seen the code base, and you sit down, there should be enough comments and annotations that you, having no knowledge, can get up to speed on what everything is doing, what it's trying to do, why it's doing it, and even what the variables are for, with examples in the code. I honestly think at least 50% of the code base, should be added in comments, and honestly, I've had 60% even 70% because the more information you leave, the better off everyone else is later.
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of people are swearing up and down that AI can write working code on this site.
If it can, isn't it by definition doing something that's been done a bunch of times before? And that one really shouldn't have to be doing again?
Re: (Score:2)
> Recently, I can across a calculation in an old code base, that a former coworker wrote, 4 years ago:
>> (4 - Math.sqrt(MiddlePoint / 6.25)) / 4;
> That's the line, I copied it, what is 4? Where does 6.25 come from? Unless you know those two values, that statement makes no sense.
Completely aside from the AI discussion... I absolutely hate it when I have to do data archaeology / forensics just to suss out exactly what some predecessor was trying to do and why they wrote it the way they did. Sheesh, when I haven't commented my own code sufficiently, I have a hard enough time remembering what I was thinking myself, 12 months after the fact!
Re: (Score:2)
This reminds me of a time, decades ago, when I was doing a bit of maintenance coding for a small business. One small task I was given required searching a static table for a magic number to plug into a calculation. Just because I could, I wrote it as a binary search instead of the linear search that the other coders who'd worked on this would have used. As I doubted that the next person to see this would understand what I'd done, I included exactly one comment at the beginning of the function: "If you do
Re: (Score:2)
I HATE those comments, I constantly see them in one paraphrased form or another. No offence, but why not just comment the code block in its entirety instead of being lazy? I'll give you a possible out, in some older Microchip compilers, you could mess up the stack by adding commenting, so you had to keep the comment length the same as the original code, or you could change the output. That caused many wonderful issues.
Re: (Score:2)
I only figured out what 6.25 meant, well, doing a massive commenting phase, where I broke down every single step to its basic most elementary form, and built it up in stages, and doing a calculation to show how it should work, 6.25 popped out. Once I knew what that was coming from, the 4's made sense, but it took 200+ lines of comments to figure that out, it was so obscure.
Re: (Score:1)
...just came to say I have the same question as you, hoping someone replies with an answer.
I have much the same years of experience and experience with with bad code, no comment code.
P.S. I have been told many times that I place too many comments in my code but I just keep on keeping on.
Re: (Score:2)
Ya, I've been told I over comment all the time. I don't care, my code reads like a book, with tons of information so you are never confused about what I'm doing or why. I know if I ever hand off a project, the person taking care of it can't complain I left them high and dry.
Re: (Score:2)
"(4 - Math.sqrt(MiddlePoint / 6.25)) / 4;"
AI wouldn't write that. AI rather tends to over-structure and overcomment things. You can recognize AI code because it look like from a tutorial // this is the main loop
while(!end) { // here the values will be computed
do_something(); // now we do something else
do_something_else()) // set the loop variable
end = is_it_end();
}
It won't do the "i++ // increments by 1" thing, but it seems to really like to have many short secti
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot killed the formatting. Imagine each comment a line below where it currently is.
Re: (Score:2)
It wouldn't write it the same way, but it would still be useless from an understanding standpoint. There are ~50 lines of comments explaining that one line, including what 4, and 6.25 mean, and how to recalculate them in different scenarios.
Is it time yet? (Score:2)
Are the feelings of economists the reason we can't print a generous basic income and fully index the economy to adapt to nominal inflation?
Enshitification applies to everything... (Score:2)
including jobs.
time to go union! (Score:2)
time to go union!
History lesson (Score:1)
Before the bloated web frameworks came, when we used products like VB6 and PowerBuilder, one would spend most their time on domain logic and domain needs instead of fighting with CSS or whatnot. Hopefully we can go back to this.
If before AI, one simply took a written specification and turned it into a working app (or made requested changes), then either they are superfluous, or need to focus on the domain more and communicating with domain experts.
The problem is that requires people skills. My lackluster pe
Blatantly duplicate story (Score:3)
Did the moderators not notice this was [1]already posted [slashdot.org] barely a little over 12 hours ago?
[1] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/05/26/0059245/is-ai-turning-coders-into-bystanders-in-their-own-jobs
So? (Score:2)
If they can do it, and it seems to be working, so what?
It's called productivity increasing due to technology. So they should be delighted.
No? Why not?
They aren't working more hours for the same pay to get it done, are they? I don't think so.
Why would this technology be unlike every other technology, and not spur *more* development, in the end?
Rant (Score:1)
This is clearly going to be an even bigger problem. Even before AI existed companies disgustingly use this practice of ever increasing performance metrics to weed out those who can't perform to their ever changing metrics. This harder/faster is dehumanizing abuse. Tell me it is not? AI should only augment abilities, not replace people or force people to become less human. It is still an absolute necessity for human verification of AI work due to its inherent unreliability. As time goes on that might chang
Ai manager (Score:3)
Why is AI only replacing the "low" executive jobs? I bet it would flourish in a management position. Report writing, arguing, selling, convincing, hiding failures in big clouds of fancy words, ...
Give them what they want! (Score:1)
If they don't want high quality code just commit what the AI slob produces... Verbatim... Doesn't compile? Why bother? Full of security holes? Sure, this is what the master wants! The AI doesn't understand the request because that is what usually happens? Just commit the answer... If they don't want development then get paid to commit stuff generated by an AI...
Same old same old. (Score:2)
> managers pushing faster output and tighter deadlines while teams shrink in size,
Just like every job I've worked, ever.
Until there's some sort of penalty for managers asking for more while giving less, managers are going to keep asking for more and giving less.
Pro tip: Nearly everyone in every company is behind schedule, and yet, those companies that are on schedule and on budget haven't dominated the market. From this we can conclude, that meeting your bosses' schedule isn't actually that important.
Re: (Score:2)
A non-programmer who has strong opinions about what it's really like working in the field, how enlightening.
Re: (Score:3)
TIL today: A software developer can also be a software coder but the reverse is not always true. I'm not either so I thought the terms were interchangeable until I googled it.
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TBH, what you wrote doesn't really make sense.
Re: (Score:1)
Another virgin explaining sex on Slashdot, how unoriginal.
Re: Code monkeys gonna monkey (Score:2)
I spent 30 years in the field. I fully agree with your parent poster, that was spot on.
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on what you were doing.
Most programming is sausage factory business process stuff: ERP, accounting, marketing, etc. (webified or otherwise). If you're doing microcontroller firmware, FPGAs, and such, your experience will be a lot different.
Re:Code monkeys gonna monkey (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing you aren't getting is - the expectation (from the point of view of the managers, at least) seems to be that you shouldn't be "thinking about the calculation I need the code to make". Instead, you should just tell the AI "here is the general problem I'm trying to address" and let it figure out what the appropriate calculation is and spit out the solution.
Based on my somewhat limited testing of AI-generated code, I don't think it's there yet. And I'm not sure if, using the current model of "let's suck in the entire Stack Overflow history and train on that", it will really get there. But that doesn't matter, because today's managers think it's there.
It's going to be an expensive lesson for these companies at some point, but until they learn that lesson... it's already turning into a painful period for the employees of the aforementioned companies.
Side note - I do think somebody is eventually going to find the actual solution to AI coding supremacy (I just don't necessarily think it'll be via LLM). All I can say about that is, I'm glad I'm at the point where I can afford to retire.
Re: Code monkeys gonna monkey (Score:1)
Non-technical managers having skewed expectations and making decisions based on the wrong metrics was not invented at Amazon last year, it's always been a peril of specialized work and the degree to which a company permits it to happen is what has always separated the superb from the merely adequate and the awful.
Over time a company gets a reputation for over-promising and/or under-delivering. And it fades out of the business or away entirely.
Oracle used to be hot shit. Larry Ellison was at one point compet
Re: (Score:2)
Sigh... I couldn't care less about Oracle, but I have fond memories of both DEC and HP - back when they were still quality companies. My first computer interactions and first coding experiences (in high school) were on a DEC PDP 11/70. And, in my first real job, I worked with and coded on an HP 1000 mini-computer (with a disk drive the size of a portable dishwasher!).
Re: (Score:2)
Marketing from Big Tech on AI has had a repeated theme of "AI will make your job easier by saving you time." This applies to software developers as well as other roles that involve computer use.
This is perfect marketing in fact. It is something that people (in general) desire, and that sounds plausible. But this narrative leaves out a critical and ubiquitous detail: employers do not grant more time off once goals are met. "Saving time" for an employee does not mean that they will have more free time at
Is AI Coding the Latest Agile? (Score:2)
Maybe to the directors and up, AI coding is supposed to all the things that "Agile" is supposed to be, and more.