The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/

by martin-t • 4 months ago

59 17 4 months ago

martin-t3• 4 months ago

A year later, do you see it now?

I always say humans are not smart enough. First they came for the communists... You know the rest but how many of you would pick up a rifle and stand against evil?

Well, first they came for the manual workers and many on HN were happy to help. Now they and their autocompletes came for open source devs, taking our work without consent, credit or respecting the licenses and almost nobody stands up against it. They expect me to pay for me own stolen code and most devs are OK with it because it's not their stolen code and they can get their job slightly faster.

So how long before they come for you? Because by then you will be economically irrelevant and unable to do anything about it.

skybrian2• 4 months ago

How far back do you want to go? Programmers have been automating jobs away for a long time. Some historical context:

When Craig Newmark created Craigslist (along with Ebay), it was devastating for the economics of newspapers. Lots of jobs selling classified ads went away, as well as funding for the other jobs.

Wikipedia made other encyclopedias obsolete.

It used to be that you had to do things by mail, by phone, or in person. The websites that we now take for granted probably eliminated lots of jobs processing transactions.

Companies used to have typing pools.

Were these bad improvements? How is it different now?

forgetfreeman2• 4 months ago

If I was given a choice between robust journalism and whatever Craigslist is the choice seems rather plain. A dispassionate analysis of the majority of tech industry "improvements" reveals similar choices.

martin-t3• 4 months ago

How is it different now?

Most cases, it was either:

a) a new technology unrelated to the original job, which made the job redundant - the printing press was not made by watching scribes doing their mechanical movements faster, it was a fundamentally different principle. It was fair competition between independent 2 options, neither of which exploited the other.

In contrast, LLMs cannot exist without programmers first writing immense, astronomical amounts of code as training data.

b) people coming together and making something for free which was paid. Wikipedia is not just subsidized by some corporation which makes money from ads, it is made by people who willingly spend their time to make the world a better place for everyone. And none of them, neither a megacorp stand to become rich from it.

In contrast, LLMs are trained on people's work without their consent, quite offer against explicitly stated wishes. And it's not a common good, it's a for-profit business which ultimately funnels the gains to the top.

---

I am not even against LLMs, they are a tool - neither good or bad. I am against how they are created - LLMs trained on AGPL shoud be AGPL and their output should be AGPL. And I am against how they are used - they extract value from people and redirect the reward for work to people who didn't contribute any work.

Fundamentally, people should (collectively) own the product of their work and should negotiate how the reward is distributed on equal footing.

amazingamazing• 4 months ago

remote work was foolish for disassociating the value of swes to just code. llms are here to finish off the job. the profession will still exist of course

KnuthIsGod3• 4 months ago

""Code reviewer" is a much less fulfilling job than "programmer." Code reviewers are also easier to replace than programmers.

A code reviewer is a reverse-centaur, a servant to the machine.

Every time you hear "AI-assisted programmer," you should substitute "programmer-assisted AI.""

add-sub-mul-div• 4 months ago

Right. Even if headcount stays the same, replacing previously highly skilled roles with low-paid fungible operators of AI is a big win for employers.

EarlKing2• 4 months ago

I'm sure I'm supposed to sympathize with the plight of the poor Amazon coder, but since everyone in the valley are encouraged to systematically shit on everyone they believe is beneath them.... I can't.

...and don't tell me they don't. I've been to way too many corporate parties and seen how they act when they think no one is watching.

martin-t3• 4 months ago

Yes but not every dev is an Amazon coder.

I have the privilege of working for a robotics company small enough that I (a SW dev) can walk a few doors down the hallway and talk to anyone from mechanics, to electronics, to sales, to the people who actually operate the robors on customers' sites. And I have a lot of respect for people who pull a 16 hour shift in freezing cold or with water pouring down their necks.

For the company to function, it requires a lot of people with different skills to come together and each do what they're best at.

As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.

EarlKing2• 4 months ago

As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.

This is my point. I've grown tired of telling people to hate those who exploit us all when they're tossed crumbs from their master's table and decide that is sufficient to make common cause with him.

I'll shed a tear for the common coder when they can spare a tear for the rest of us.

nylon4831• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

palmotea• 4 months ago

I'm sure I'm supposed to sympathize with the plight of the poor Amazon coder, but since everyone in the valley are encouraged to systematically shit on everyone they believe is beneath them.... I can't.

That's one of the mechanisms capital uses to keep the workers under control: divide and conquer. AI hurts workers, and benefits the shareholders, but some workers will stay on the sidelines due to schadenfreude towards arrogant software engineers.

But I've said it before: for people who see themselves as soooo smart, software engineers have been pretty fucking dumb. They fooled themselves into thinking their high salaries and 401ks to meant they were like their bosses and not other workers, so behaved like temporarily embarrassed billionaires: embracing libertarianism, regurgitating anti-union propaganda from their bosses.

If software engineers were actually smart, we'd have unionized decades ago, when we had more power.

daft_pink• 4 months ago

Amazon has the reputation of being a difficult place to work for.

The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

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