At Amazon, some programmers say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

Straits Times

4 days ago

At Amazon, which is making big investments in generative AI, the culture of coding is changing rapidly. PHOTO: DAVIDE BONAZZI/NYTIMES
NEW YORK - Since at least the industrial revolution, workers have worried that machines would replace them.
But when technology transformed automaking and even secretarial work, the response typically wasn't to slash jobs and reduce the number of workers. It was to 'degrade' the jobs, breaking them into simpler tasks to be performed over and over at a rapid clip. Small shops of skilled mechanics gave way to hundreds of workers spread across an assembly line. The personal secretary gave way to pools of typists and data-entry clerks.
The workers 'complained of speedup, work intensification and work degradation,' as labour historian Jason Resnikoff described it.
Something similar appears to be happening with artificial intelligence in one of the fields where it has been most widely adopted: coding.
As AI spreads through the labour force, many white-collar workers have expressed concern that it will lead to mass unemployment. Joblessness has ticked up and widespread layoffs might eventually come, but the more immediate downside for software engineers appears to be a change in the quality of their work. Some say it is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster paced.
Companies seem to be convinced that, like assembly lines of old, AI can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers' use of an AI coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 per cent.
At Amazon, which is making big investments in generative AI, the culture of coding is changing rapidly. In his recent letter to shareholders, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote that generative AI was yielding big returns for companies that use it for 'productivity and cost avoidance.' He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn't give customers what they want 'as quickly as possible' and cited coding as an activity where AI would 'change the norms.'
Those changing norms have not always been eagerly embraced. Three Amazon engineers said managers had increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work over the past year. The engineers said the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new AI productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it was in 2024, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using AI.
Amazon said it conducts regular reviews to make sure teams are adequately staffed and may increase their size if necessary.
Other tech companies are moving in the same direction. In a memo to employees in April, the CEO of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that 'AI usage is now a baseline expectation' and that the company would 'add AI usage questions' to performance reviews.
Google recently told employees that it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating AI tools that could 'enhance their overall daily productivity,' according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive US$10,000 (S$12,800). A Google spokesperson noted that more than 30 per cent of the company's code is now suggested by AI and accepted by developers.
The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that AI can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Mr Jassy wrote last year that the company had saved 'the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years' by using AI to do the thankless work of upgrading old software.
Eliminating such tedious work may benefit a subset of accomplished programmers, said Lawrence Katz, a labour economist at Harvard University. But for inexperienced programmers, the result of introducing AI can resemble the shift from artisanal work to factory work in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The automation of coding has special resonance for Amazon engineers, who have watched their blue-collar counterparts undergo a similar transition.
For years, many workers at Amazon warehouses walked miles each day to track down inventory. But over the past decade, Amazon has increasingly relied on so-called robotics warehouses, where pickers stand in one spot and pull inventory off shelves delivered to them by lawn-mower-like robots, no walking necessary.
The robots generally haven't displaced humans; Amazon said it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers since their introduction, while creating many new skilled roles. But the robots have increased the number of items each worker can pick from dozens an hour to hundreds. Some workers complain that the robots have also made the job hyper-repetitive and physically taxing. Amazon says it provides regular breaks and cites positive feedback from workers about its cutting-edge robots.
The Amazon engineers said this transition was on their minds as the company urged them to rely more on AI. They said that while doing so was technically optional, they had little choice if they wanted to keep up with their output goals, which affect their performance reviews.
One Amazon engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using AI to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas.
The new approach to coding at many companies has, in effect, eliminated much of the time the developer spends reflecting on his or her work.
'It used to be that you had a lot of slack because you were doing a complicated project – it would maybe take a month, maybe take two months, and no one could monitor it,' Mr Katz said. 'Now, you have the whole thing monitored, and it can be done quickly.'
Amid their frustration, many Amazon engineers have joined a group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which is pressuring the company to reduce its carbon footprint and has become a clearinghouse for workers' anxieties about other issues, like return-to-office mandates.
The group's organisers say they are in touch with several hundred Amazon employees on a regular basis and that the workers increasingly discuss the stress of using AI on the job, in addition to the effect that the technology has on the climate.
The complaints have centered around 'what their careers are going to look like,' said Eliza Pan, a former Amazon employee who is a representative for the group. 'And not just their careers but the quality of the work.' NYTIMES
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