6 ms·

Amazon Employees Say AI Is Just Increasing Workload

123 points by jamesgill 7mo ago

Ancalagon 7mo ago
Let the execs eat cake. Stop correcting the AI's mistakes.
- chung8123 7mo ago
  I think developers will be paid to use AI to develop and part of that pay is to correct AI mistakes. When the AI doesn't make any mistakes is the time development takes another different turn.
  - orphea 7mo ago
    This is a big when.
quantified 7mo ago
Come on. Machines that save physical labor can shorten the workday, but don't. They do lessen the calories you burn. Email, laptops and phones, all the cogntive and information inventions increase the workload. Either expectations rise (hello 3am Slack message) or employees are trimmed.
- ptak_dev 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - quantified 7mo ago
    You're downvoted, idk why, maybe someone can comment. My workplace is less sophisticated than Amazon and walking that same path: expected to so more, but the tools are not baked and the models keep shifting too.
    - khedoros1 7mo ago
      Probably because they're advertising their product, and the comment also sounds like it was written/edited by AI itself.
    - mikestew 7mo ago
      Because it's a spam account, go look at comment history.
      - gnabgib 7mo ago
        Not sure quantified is better. Double spam account, what does it mean?
      - lovich 7mo ago
        Someone suggested giving older accounts or ones with high karma the ability to nuke green accounts with no mercy. Shit like this account makes me want that more and more.
- MattDamonSpace 7mo ago
  Prime age labor force participation is as high as ever
8note 7mo ago
interested in what part - i found making qcli agents to run through SOPs was real effective and turned 20min of busy work async. there might be a misattribution though. over time, id say the top down initiatives and quality at tracking them has gone up maybe 100% used to be one big project for getting rid of oracle that went for 3-7 years, but nowadays theres maybe 5 per month that disrupts the whole company at once. There's a desire to make that LLM/agent based, but the agent still doesnt cover all the communication overhead to actually communicate the change across teams for deployments, nor is it so seamless that you dont have to take time out to understand whats happening and schedule the work, even if it is sometimes just approving an automated code change
lovich 7mo ago
Yea. They are half assed tools that can do _something_ but aren’t a magic bullet, yet executives put guidelines in like increase productivity by 100% because they either believe or, want to manifest into reality, that they are a magic bullet for the deadly sin of paying employees. So now expectations are based on a false reality and everyone has to work harder.
HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago
This is happening to me too. I am so productive now, with this super power, that my reward is to be given more work.
- Pet_Ant 7mo ago
  That's because everyone else has access to the same tools. If you don't become more productive then you will be replaced with someone who will. They only way it'd help you is if you controlled access to AI and it was a competitive advantage for you over a fellow developer. A rising tide lifts all boats... but you are only paid for how much taller you are than the other boats. It's important to understand that AI is capital, and it's to the owner of the capital go the spoils. Your capital is in your skills, but they are a commodity and thus you have limited leverage. Who benefits from AI is smaller businesses who could not afford custom application development at previous development costs. It's like faster laptops and better IDEs didn't boost developer salaries.
  - flossposse 7mo ago
    >Who benefits from AI is smaller businesses who could not afford custom application development at previous development costs. Of course, as AI reduces the cost to operate in niches, those small businesses who just gained the ability to build an app are also more likely than before to see a bigger player drink their milkshake. Not to mention that small businesses will have a harder time absorbing the inevitable price hike that will come once everyone has made themselves completely dependent on AI to get any work done.
  - thewhitetulip 7mo ago
    VSCode has advanced editor functionalities that not many use. But devs using that functionality aren't replacing devs not using it. Although they also save hours of manual work thanks to multi line cursors Thing is, AI is being shoved top-down on devs because it's a goal for everyone, without checking if it's actually helping or hindering. What I am seeing is juniors are blindly trusting AI output and say in a few years, it's going to be a disaster because nobody understands anything except seniors
wolvoleo 7mo ago
Not seeing this yet but our place is still trying to figure things out. We have strong KPIs on how much we use copilot so I must say woof woof to it every day or so to make sure it shows me as an active user (luckily it only shows the latest date someone has used it in each application). For programming I find it pretty useful. For MS Office it's so far not a hell of a lot more useful than clippy. The one thing it's good at is finding old stuff in SharePoint and Outlook but that's more a sign of how terrible the search functions are in those than of how good copilot is.
- jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
  A friend of a friend has too - they just ask the AI some random questions in the morning to hit their KPIs because AI doesn't make for a good accountant.
  - dyauspitr 7mo ago
    That’s far from the truth. LLMs are excellent accountants, especially for net zero balance stuff which is how most companies run.
    - jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
      Maybe - I think my friend's friend is more in the giving nuanced advice space of accounting rather than anything too mathematical.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - FuckButtons 7mo ago
      I know accountants, most of the stuff they deal with is getting stuff to make sense when your dealing with an unreliable narrator dealing with push back from their employers and then attempting to synthesize a coherent narrative over a large corpus of heterogeneous internal documents, controls, spreadsheets and legal agreements. LLM’s as they exist now are yes men, they are not good at making coherent fact patterns, especially when someone pushes back on them or gives them a red herring or mis-represents something. There’s a long list of things that need to improve for them to gain traction in that industry.
ta9000 7mo ago
Duh, it’s Amazon. They love piling more work on. Why anyone still works there is beyond me unless they have no other choice. The word was out a decade ago.
- tty456 7mo ago
  Only 2 reasons one would stick around: Money and/or visa constraints
k32k 7mo ago
This year is either going to show that LLMs are really going to be super-transformative, or, the investment thesis is a basket-case. Strap in.
lowbloodsugar 7mo ago
> The AI tools ultimately helped the company in its quest for more output, but didn’t help the employee who is looking to ease her work burden That seems like it’s doing exactly what it is supposed to. Did people think that AI would give them a four hour work day? Have you not lived under capitalism for years now?
penguin_booze 7mo ago
> maximizing profit for shareholders This is the only phrase where I see where the concern for others is so deeply and genuinely expressed in america.
wolvesechoes 7mo ago
Of course it does, the same way that industrial revolution increased it. Those that tell you about automation by itself is leading to better quality of life, better working conditions etc. either are ignorant, or simply lie to you. All the good stuff we have was obtained through political means. Yes, technology was something that enabled particular outcome, but only if harnessed by political means. The fact we can today enjoy 40 hours workweek is not a necessary consequence of steam machine. It is a consequence of people dying while fighting with police and capital henchmen in Chicago, and it other places. But keep believing your overlords and their servants.
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  > keep believing your overlords and their servants. HN is full of servants hoping to be overlords one day. For all the intelligence on this site it's amazing how many lapdogs there are here Money makes people pathetic
sershe 7mo ago
One positive consequence of AI is for people working on old, constantly updated codebases. Especially the stuff created in a data scientist development paradigm (my adhoc python script produces good results, let me clean up a bit and merge into prod codebase). There's suddenly much more interest in refactoring, test coverage, etc. and more space for this work, both because it enables more AI work and because AI on clunky code makes it even clunkier much faster than human developers (who are not data scientists ;)) In addition AI makes it easier. Tell me which ones of the 70 fields in this monster class are not used for anything of consequence anymore, this kind of stuff .

123 points by jamesgill 7mo ago

Ancalagon 7mo ago

Let the execs eat cake. Stop correcting the AI's mistakes.

chung8123 7mo ago
I think developers will be paid to use AI to develop and part of that pay is to correct AI mistakes. When the AI doesn't make any mistakes is the time development takes another different turn.
- orphea 7mo ago
  This is a big when.

quantified 7mo ago

Come on. Machines that save physical labor can shorten the workday, but don't. They do lessen the calories you burn. Email, laptops and phones, all the cogntive and information inventions increase the workload. Either expectations rise (hello 3am Slack message) or employees are trimmed.

ptak_dev 7mo ago
[flagged]
- quantified 7mo ago
  You're downvoted, idk why, maybe someone can comment. My workplace is less sophisticated than Amazon and walking that same path: expected to so more, but the tools are not baked and the models keep shifting too.
  - khedoros1 7mo ago
    Probably because they're advertising their product, and the comment also sounds like it was written/edited by AI itself.
  - mikestew 7mo ago
    Because it's a spam account, go look at comment history.
    - gnabgib 7mo ago
      Not sure quantified is better. Double spam account, what does it mean?
    - lovich 7mo ago
      Someone suggested giving older accounts or ones with high karma the ability to nuke green accounts with no mercy. Shit like this account makes me want that more and more.
MattDamonSpace 7mo ago
Prime age labor force participation is as high as ever

8note 7mo ago

interested in what part - i found making qcli agents to run through SOPs was real effective and turned 20min of busy work async. there might be a misattribution though. over time, id say the top down initiatives and quality at tracking them has gone up maybe 100% used to be one big project for getting rid of oracle that went for 3-7 years, but nowadays theres maybe 5 per month that disrupts the whole company at once. There's a desire to make that LLM/agent based, but the agent still doesnt cover all the communication overhead to actually communicate the change across teams for deployments, nor is it so seamless that you dont have to take time out to understand whats happening and schedule the work, even if it is sometimes just approving an automated code change

lovich 7mo ago

Yea. They are half assed tools that can do _something_ but aren’t a magic bullet, yet executives put guidelines in like increase productivity by 100% because they either believe or, want to manifest into reality, that they are a magic bullet for the deadly sin of paying employees. So now expectations are based on a false reality and everyone has to work harder.

HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago

This is happening to me too. I am so productive now, with this super power, that my reward is to be given more work.

Pet_Ant 7mo ago
That's because everyone else has access to the same tools. If you don't become more productive then you will be replaced with someone who will. They only way it'd help you is if you controlled access to AI and it was a competitive advantage for you over a fellow developer. A rising tide lifts all boats... but you are only paid for how much taller you are than the other boats. It's important to understand that AI is capital, and it's to the owner of the capital go the spoils. Your capital is in your skills, but they are a commodity and thus you have limited leverage. Who benefits from AI is smaller businesses who could not afford custom application development at previous development costs. It's like faster laptops and better IDEs didn't boost developer salaries.
- flossposse 7mo ago
  >Who benefits from AI is smaller businesses who could not afford custom application development at previous development costs. Of course, as AI reduces the cost to operate in niches, those small businesses who just gained the ability to build an app are also more likely than before to see a bigger player drink their milkshake. Not to mention that small businesses will have a harder time absorbing the inevitable price hike that will come once everyone has made themselves completely dependent on AI to get any work done.
- thewhitetulip 7mo ago
  VSCode has advanced editor functionalities that not many use. But devs using that functionality aren't replacing devs not using it. Although they also save hours of manual work thanks to multi line cursors Thing is, AI is being shoved top-down on devs because it's a goal for everyone, without checking if it's actually helping or hindering. What I am seeing is juniors are blindly trusting AI output and say in a few years, it's going to be a disaster because nobody understands anything except seniors

wolvoleo 7mo ago

Not seeing this yet but our place is still trying to figure things out. We have strong KPIs on how much we use copilot so I must say woof woof to it every day or so to make sure it shows me as an active user (luckily it only shows the latest date someone has used it in each application). For programming I find it pretty useful. For MS Office it's so far not a hell of a lot more useful than clippy. The one thing it's good at is finding old stuff in SharePoint and Outlook but that's more a sign of how terrible the search functions are in those than of how good copilot is.

jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
A friend of a friend has too - they just ask the AI some random questions in the morning to hit their KPIs because AI doesn't make for a good accountant.
- dyauspitr 7mo ago
  That’s far from the truth. LLMs are excellent accountants, especially for net zero balance stuff which is how most companies run.
  - jamesfinlayson 7mo ago
    Maybe - I think my friend's friend is more in the giving nuanced advice space of accounting rather than anything too mathematical.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - FuckButtons 7mo ago
    I know accountants, most of the stuff they deal with is getting stuff to make sense when your dealing with an unreliable narrator dealing with push back from their employers and then attempting to synthesize a coherent narrative over a large corpus of heterogeneous internal documents, controls, spreadsheets and legal agreements. LLM’s as they exist now are yes men, they are not good at making coherent fact patterns, especially when someone pushes back on them or gives them a red herring or mis-represents something. There’s a long list of things that need to improve for them to gain traction in that industry.

ta9000 7mo ago

Duh, it’s Amazon. They love piling more work on. Why anyone still works there is beyond me unless they have no other choice. The word was out a decade ago.

tty456 7mo ago
Only 2 reasons one would stick around: Money and/or visa constraints

k32k 7mo ago

This year is either going to show that LLMs are really going to be super-transformative, or, the investment thesis is a basket-case. Strap in.

lowbloodsugar 7mo ago

> The AI tools ultimately helped the company in its quest for more output, but didn’t help the employee who is looking to ease her work burden That seems like it’s doing exactly what it is supposed to. Did people think that AI would give them a four hour work day? Have you not lived under capitalism for years now?

penguin_booze 7mo ago

> maximizing profit for shareholders This is the only phrase where I see where the concern for others is so deeply and genuinely expressed in america.

wolvesechoes 7mo ago

Of course it does, the same way that industrial revolution increased it. Those that tell you about automation by itself is leading to better quality of life, better working conditions etc. either are ignorant, or simply lie to you. All the good stuff we have was obtained through political means. Yes, technology was something that enabled particular outcome, but only if harnessed by political means. The fact we can today enjoy 40 hours workweek is not a necessary consequence of steam machine. It is a consequence of people dying while fighting with police and capital henchmen in Chicago, and it other places. But keep believing your overlords and their servants.

bluefirebrand 7mo ago
> keep believing your overlords and their servants. HN is full of servants hoping to be overlords one day. For all the intelligence on this site it's amazing how many lapdogs there are here Money makes people pathetic

sershe 7mo ago

One positive consequence of AI is for people working on old, constantly updated codebases. Especially the stuff created in a data scientist development paradigm (my adhoc python script produces good results, let me clean up a bit and merge into prod codebase). There's suddenly much more interest in refactoring, test coverage, etc. and more space for this work, both because it enables more AI work and because AI on clunky code makes it even clunkier much faster than human developers (who are not data scientists ;)) In addition AI makes it easier. Tell me which ones of the 70 fields in this monster class are not used for anything of consequence anymore, this kind of stuff .