At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work

Noam Scheiber draws a historical parallel: past waves of automation in auto-making, meatpacking and secretarial work rarely eliminated jobs outright. They degraded them, breaking skilled work into simpler, faster, more repetitive tasks. Scheiber reports the same pattern at Amazon: three engineers describe rising output goals, tighter deadlines, and managers pushing AI adoption over the past year, while the company’s official line calls the technology augmentation.

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• One Amazon engineer said a website feature that used to take a few weeks must now often ship in a few days, achieved by leaning on AI for code generation and cutting meetings held to solicit feedback and explore alternatives; a second engineer reported more modest gains, since usage intensity varies by team across Amazon’s 10,000+ engineers.
• Labor economist Lawrence Katz frames the shift as removing the “slack” that used to let a complicated project run a month or two unmonitored. Now the whole thing is monitored and expected to move fast, which he says can benefit accomplished programmers while resembling a speed-up for less experienced ones.
• The piece draws a direct comparison to Amazon’s warehouse robotics, where pickers stand in place while robots deliver inventory. Job counts haven’t fallen, but items handled per hour have jumped, which some workers describe as hyper-repetitive and physically taxing.
• Simon Willison, quoted in the piece, says reading code has replaced writing it as the bulk of the job; code review was never the fun part of programming to begin with.
• One engineer worried that automating testing, previously a tedious task that forced engineers to think deeply about their code, could deprive junior engineers of the know-how they need for promotion.
• The article closes on labor organizing: while there’s no active push to unionize Amazon coders, historian Sidney Fine’s account of the 1936 General Motors sit-down strike frames the “speed-up” as the specific grievance that has historically turned workplace intensification into collective action.