Submitted 4 weeks ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html
Comments
hades@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
llii@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
Always a good, albeit depressing read.
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
For Amazon, human life is a cheap renewable resource.
They’ll keep attracting desperate people to scar and discard as long as our society keeps producing desperate people.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
This video is enough for me to know to never work there:
youtu.be/VL4fYsv2q5Arottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Just like Star Wars, so nice.
I love this actually, I always wanted for computing and electronics, the relevant kind and not “how to make a shortwave receiver from an antenna, two transistors and a potato”, to be just another work, not “that thing people do glamorously with coffee and snacks receiving lots of money and we don’t want to understand it, it’s just cool and future and such”.
Even if it involves “AI” and such business practices.
Cause when it stops being glamorous magic, it starts becoming optimized and normal, like painting fences. People start using common sense more, corporate advertising less, when thinking of it.
Or so I hope.
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Cause when it stops being glamorous magic, it starts becoming optimized and normal, like painting fences.
The portrait kind of painter working like the fence kind is not a good thing. It’s not even a thing at all, it’s an illusion.
Also when it comes to accessibility for the aspiring hobbyist coding is very accessible. If you have nothing to start with, sure, more expensive than knitting, but probably not more expensive than acquiring a merino wool habit, and if you already have any kind of computer – any – it’s literally free.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Also when it comes to accessibility for the aspiring hobbyist coding is very accessible.
No. The path is easy when you know it. Except you don’t unless you are lucky.
There are a lot of false targets, a person 30 years ago willing to learn would have Basic as something normie-directed, C as something serious, x86 assembly language, with things like Pascal floating around and maybe C++.
They’d read something about DOS and how an IBM PC with DOS works and understand it probably very quickly.
Then they’d practice.
Then there was Windows 95+, and still the complexity was about similar, except there also emerged Tcl/Tk, Visual Basic, those things.
Now … you are a kid, you want to learn something, you might read about how digital electronics work, how a processor works, what interrupts are, see some words like syscalls and virtual memory and DMA, yadda-yadda. From some other side that there are operating systems, and there are compiled and interpreted languages, and there are levels of abstraction …
How the hell do you cross the gap between these and actual understanding? Other than the blind way of going up level after level, starting with a bipolar transistor, which doesn’t seem easy at all.
The hardship of finding the learning path shouldn’t be ignored. And the cost of all that complexity.
About Arduino, too, - well, there at least you can write something in AVR assembly and almost transparently flash it to the board. Arduino and such things are good. I meant the things most people actually use and how.
trungulox@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I learned python and bash over about 6 months.
I’m not a phenomenal coder yet but it’s definitely doable. I didn’t take a class or read any books I just tried to code shit until eventually the anger and frustration lead to a moment where it kind of clicked and I was just like, writing line after line after line of code.
It was so weird. When I woke up that morning I felt like I’d never learn and then I could just kind of do it.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
What the hell are you talking about?
boonhet@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
All that’s happening now is that software engineers have less job security than McDonald’s staff. If you think that’s good for anyone but corporate shareholders, I’ve a bridge to sell you.
Ideally everyone’s jobs should be getting better, but all that’s happening is that for a bunch of people, things are rapidly getting worse. Worst part is, kids are still being told to go study computer science because “it’s the future”, knowing full well they’ll be working at a fast food chain with that degree because there’s going to be one job for every 50 students. Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will continue to make record profits though. Just with fewer pesky employees to pay.
I’d rather see the fence painter be paid more than the software engineer be laid off. I thought we were all part of the same working class. But maybe that’s just me.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
“Working class” is a construct.
I agree that solidarity works.
But also in every era there’s a new direction or profession paying enough for solidarity to look worse.
And every time someone can kick the ladder behind them, they do.
Like Komsomol leaders did. USSR had something resembling democracy and social lifts two times - between civil war and Stalin’s ascent and between Khruschev and Brezhnev (arguably during Stalin too, but with a lot of nuance). The problem with Brezhnev is not that he made something worse - it’s that he didn’t change anything, letting the social and power and economic structures crystallize.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
It is already just another work. Electronics and software development has never that accessible before.
Grandma can pick up an Arduino, a few components and create a fully automated garden if she so choose, without having prior experience.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
No, it’s still overhyped compared to other work.
And I didn’t mean easiness, I meant social place.
Venator@lemmy.nz 4 weeks ago
Star wars?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yep, remember how in the EU tech workers are, well, normal workers. Even in kinda important places. Not perpetually massaged and coffee-stimulated superstars.
littleomid@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
Interesting way to think about it. Have not thought about it that way.
roofuskit@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Always have. Amazon has the same use and discard philosophy for their office workers and always had. They have firing quotas and cycle staff through constantly. In the tech industry it’s considered a right of passage to be fired from Amazon. They also have fired people on chemo for decreased performance.
IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
On top of this they are also highly compartmentalized, which sounds like a nightmare to me. A few years ago we ran into a bug with one of their AWS services (I forget the specifics at this point, but it was with a network load balancer). It was a rather novel bug, but easy enough to reproduce, so I was able to give AWS support a working example. They quickly confirmed the bug and said it would be fixed as soon as possible.
Since it was an odd bug I asked AWS support if they could provide a high level description of the fix once it was implemented. It was then that they told me how their teams were so highly siloed and couldn’t really share details like that with each other. The support rep I worked with wouldn’t even know if the bug was fixed by a load balancer team, a more generic networking team, or some other team. They would only know the bug was fixed.
chaospatterns@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I used to work in Amazon (left after 10 years because it wore me down), but it wasn’t that compartmentalized.
I’m sure there were some teams that were like that but I could easily find another team, open a ticket, get a response and see their on calls investigate the issue. It was often times possible to look at their service metrics and source code to see if I could find the problem myself.
Support just can’t share that info because they don’t know what is considered a trade secret or internal detail vs what is public.