[TusharK]

When technology transformed auto-making, meatpacking 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 speed-up, work intensification, and work degradation,” as the labor 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 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.

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.

Other tech companies are moving in the same direction.

In a memo to employees in April, the chief executive of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that “A.I. usage is now a baseline expectation” and that the company would “add A.I. usage questions” to performance reviews.

Google recently told employees it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating A.I. tools that could “enhance their overall daily productivity,” according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000. A Google spokesman noted that more than 30 percent of the company’s code is now suggested by A.I. and accepted by developers.

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.

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.

Bystanders in Their Own Jobs

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

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.

One 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 A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas.

As at Microsoft, many Amazon engineers use an A.I. assistant that suggests lines of code. But the company has more recently rolled out A.I. tools that can generate large portions of a program on its own. One engineer called the tools “scarily good.”

“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.

This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs.

They also use A.I. to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding. One said that automating these functions could deprive junior engineers of the know-how they need to get promoted.

Amazon said that collaboration and experimentation remain critical and that it considers A.I. a tool for augmenting rather than replacing engineers’ expertise. It said it makes the requirements for promotions clear to employees.

The Dreaded Speed Up

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 organizers say they are in touch with several hundred Amazon employees on a regular basis and that the workers increasingly discuss the stress of using A.I. on the job...

The complaints have centered around “what their careers are going to look like,” said Eliza Pan, a former Amazon employee who is a spokeswoman for the group. “And not just their careers, but the quality of the work.”

Source: NYTimes