Noam Scheiber, At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work, NYTimes, May 25, 2025.
As A.I. spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers have expressed concern that it would lead to mass unemployment. But while joblessness has ticked up and widespread layoffs might eventually come, 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 persuaded that, like assembly lines of old, A.I. can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent.
At Amazon, which is making big investments in generative A.I., the culture of coding is changing rapidly. In his recent letter to shareholders, Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. 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 A.I. would “change the norms.”
Those changing norms have not always been eagerly embraced. Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year. The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new A.I. productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
Sheiber goes on to give two other examples, Shopify and Google:
The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that A.I. 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 A.I. to do the thankless work of upgrading old software.
Eliminating such tedious work may benefit a subset of accomplished programmers, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University who has tracked research on the subject closely.
But for inexperienced programmers, the result of introducing A.I. can resemble the shift from artisanal work to factory work in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Things look like a speed-up for knowledge workers,” Dr. Katz said, describing preliminary evidence from ongoing research. “There is a sense that the employer can pile on more stuff.”
Sheiber then returns to Amazon noting that this seems like what had happened in the warehouses where robotic warehouses were adopted:
But the robots have increased the number of items each worker can pick to hundreds from dozens an hour. 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 A.I. 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.
More about Amazon, then on to Microsoft where AI tools are writing large chunks of code:
“It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs.
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