5 ms·

Amazon has already begun automating its white-collar jobs

27 points by sikim 8y ago

mtgx 8y ago
Poor Jeff Bezos. Now he'll be even more confused about what to do with all of his billions of dollars. He's the the real victim of this development.
- tunap 8y ago
  one single anecdote: instead of installing commercial/industrial chillers on a certain warehouse in the desest, someone opted to install hundreds of 5 ton commercial/residential package units on the roof. That single location is going to burn a few million in maintenance, alone. AFAIK, robots don't do well in > 110°F ambient temps long and they haven't automated replacing motors, blowers, filters, txvs, pistons nor do leak detection/recharging or any other service duties yet. Gotta love corporate: where big decisions are made by the least qualified.
  - southern_cross 8y ago
    What might have been the reasoning behind doing something like that?
    - tunap 8y ago
      I imagine simple ignorance, short-sighted savings or someone(project manager/accountant/consultant) "knew better" than the professionals. It happens all the time, this was one of the more egregious "disruptions" of late.
    - captain_perl 8y ago
      From what I've heard and read: 1) AWS came up with their AZ layout (small nearby buildings) to avoid needing industrial-scale power and cooling gear. 2) Industrial electricians despise working with web startups because they ask stupid questions like, "can we failover the megawatt bus bars periodically?". Those are intended for emergency failovers annually, not like some kind of API you call repeatedly.
AdamM12 8y ago
I mean couldn't one say that a lot of sys admin jobs have been automated by VM's, further by containers and other automated deployment tools? Read somewhere SRE at Google are responsible for a ridiculous amount of computing power per person. Albeit could make the argument that those levels of scale would be impossible to achieve without those tech so maybe not really count.
- segmondy 8y ago
  yup, I'm automating ops away as much as possible by running in cloud, terraform, container & k8s. I'm automating QA away by writing tests. I'm even automating developers away by creating DSLs so I can hand it over to business unit so they don't come to dev for every little request. It's the nature of the beast. Hell, I feel that if I do a great enough job I automate myself away. My goal is always to do so and move on to the next big thing.
- mmt 8y ago
  > I mean couldn't one say that a lot of sys admin jobs have been automated by VM's, further by containers and other automated deployment tools? I think one could only say that if those jobs didn't still exist with the new name "Devops Engineer". I would argue that abstraction layers like VMs and containers have a significant potential to create more work, as they increase overall complexity/configurability. > SRE at Google are responsible for a ridiculous amount of computing power per person. Although I'm confident Google still has remarkable "compute" infrastructure efficiency, even looking just at human labor, you'd need to count more than just the SREs. You'd certainly need to include all of their network, hardware, and datacenter operations folks, and a good number of their software engineers working on internal tools. I'm pretty sure people grossly under-estimate how custom and exotic Google's environment is, to the point where it's not possible to translate to something even vaguely close in the rest of the tech world.
  - AdamM12 8y ago
    > I think one could only say that if those jobs didn't still exist with the new name "Devops Engineer". Yeah devops is the same thing but I still think in general that person regardless of title can provision more computing power than ever before. Just the in vogue name right now. On the other point I read one time that they do a ton of custom work like adding all kinds of sensors to their servers to they can use automation to turn them off and on as needed. But yeah I think you could argue there are whole teams dedicated to tooling and their labor hours are moved to them.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
I can’t help but chuckle that Amazon is turning into an automated central planning authority through ruthless capitalism.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  Isn't it gennerally accepted that companies are islands of central planning?
southern_cross 8y ago
Those same algorithms and the lack of human supervision may now be coming back to haunt them. For example, obvious counterfeiting and other similar scams have become a huge problem for Amazon (from a PR level, if nothing else) and they appear to be struggling to get that under control. My wife and daughter have always been big Amazon fans but lately they've been complaining a lot about problems with their orders, so now I'm seeing more shipments coming in from Walmart and Target and such. Shipping from all sources has lately become far more problematic, too.

27 points by sikim 8y ago

mtgx 8y ago

Poor Jeff Bezos. Now he'll be even more confused about what to do with all of his billions of dollars. He's the the real victim of this development.

tunap 8y ago
one single anecdote: instead of installing commercial/industrial chillers on a certain warehouse in the desest, someone opted to install hundreds of 5 ton commercial/residential package units on the roof. That single location is going to burn a few million in maintenance, alone. AFAIK, robots don't do well in > 110°F ambient temps long and they haven't automated replacing motors, blowers, filters, txvs, pistons nor do leak detection/recharging or any other service duties yet. Gotta love corporate: where big decisions are made by the least qualified.
- southern_cross 8y ago
  What might have been the reasoning behind doing something like that?
  - tunap 8y ago
    I imagine simple ignorance, short-sighted savings or someone(project manager/accountant/consultant) "knew better" than the professionals. It happens all the time, this was one of the more egregious "disruptions" of late.
  - captain_perl 8y ago
    From what I've heard and read: 1) AWS came up with their AZ layout (small nearby buildings) to avoid needing industrial-scale power and cooling gear. 2) Industrial electricians despise working with web startups because they ask stupid questions like, "can we failover the megawatt bus bars periodically?". Those are intended for emergency failovers annually, not like some kind of API you call repeatedly.

AdamM12 8y ago

I mean couldn't one say that a lot of sys admin jobs have been automated by VM's, further by containers and other automated deployment tools? Read somewhere SRE at Google are responsible for a ridiculous amount of computing power per person. Albeit could make the argument that those levels of scale would be impossible to achieve without those tech so maybe not really count.

segmondy 8y ago
yup, I'm automating ops away as much as possible by running in cloud, terraform, container & k8s. I'm automating QA away by writing tests. I'm even automating developers away by creating DSLs so I can hand it over to business unit so they don't come to dev for every little request. It's the nature of the beast. Hell, I feel that if I do a great enough job I automate myself away. My goal is always to do so and move on to the next big thing.
mmt 8y ago
> I mean couldn't one say that a lot of sys admin jobs have been automated by VM's, further by containers and other automated deployment tools? I think one could only say that if those jobs didn't still exist with the new name "Devops Engineer". I would argue that abstraction layers like VMs and containers have a significant potential to create more work, as they increase overall complexity/configurability. > SRE at Google are responsible for a ridiculous amount of computing power per person. Although I'm confident Google still has remarkable "compute" infrastructure efficiency, even looking just at human labor, you'd need to count more than just the SREs. You'd certainly need to include all of their network, hardware, and datacenter operations folks, and a good number of their software engineers working on internal tools. I'm pretty sure people grossly under-estimate how custom and exotic Google's environment is, to the point where it's not possible to translate to something even vaguely close in the rest of the tech world.
- AdamM12 8y ago
  > I think one could only say that if those jobs didn't still exist with the new name "Devops Engineer". Yeah devops is the same thing but I still think in general that person regardless of title can provision more computing power than ever before. Just the in vogue name right now. On the other point I read one time that they do a ton of custom work like adding all kinds of sensors to their servers to they can use automation to turn them off and on as needed. But yeah I think you could argue there are whole teams dedicated to tooling and their labor hours are moved to them.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

I can’t help but chuckle that Amazon is turning into an automated central planning authority through ruthless capitalism.

gizmo686 8y ago
Isn't it gennerally accepted that companies are islands of central planning?

southern_cross 8y ago

Those same algorithms and the lack of human supervision may now be coming back to haunt them. For example, obvious counterfeiting and other similar scams have become a huge problem for Amazon (from a PR level, if nothing else) and they appear to be struggling to get that under control. My wife and daughter have always been big Amazon fans but lately they've been complaining a lot about problems with their orders, so now I'm seeing more shipments coming in from Walmart and Target and such. Shipping from all sources has lately become far more problematic, too.