Amazon Found Out Its Developers Spend Just an Hour a Day Coding. That’s About to Change

To draw an analogy to today’s reality, software developers are akin to the operators who ran looms during the Industrial Revolution. They’re key players in the world of technology, though their working conditions are far from idyllic.

According to a report published by Amazon Web Services (AWS), its developers spend barely an hour a day doing what is supposed to be their primary job: coding. But that doesn’t mean they spend the rest of their day idle. Instead, they perform repetitive activities categorized as “management” rather than coding.

“They spend most of their time on tedious, undifferentiated tasks such as learning codebases, writing and reviewing documentation, testing, managing deployments, troubleshooting issues, or finding and fixing vulnerabilities,” AWS said. While these activities are essential, they often stifle creativity and productivity—something AWS aims to address.

An Intern for Programmers: AI

To tackle this issue, Amazon’s AI system, Amazon Q Developer, will help the company’s programmers eliminate “administrative” tasks and focus on the work they were hired to do.

The company has enhanced the capabilities of these AI systems. As senior project manager Jessica Feng said at the AWS re:Invent event, the goal is to “give more time back to developers to enable creativity and innovation.”

“We know the traditional software development lifecycle can be improved,” Feng said. “It currently requires developers to write code and spend a lot of time debugging. The process often hampers productivity, and people get bogged down with repetitive tasks.”

Big Tech Sees It Clearly

Amazon isn’t the only company that believes programmers waste time—and salaries—on tasks other than programming. Google has also incorporated AI systems into its development processes.

During the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that AI systems generate more than 25% of Google’s new code.

“Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster,” Pichai said, emphasizing the positive impact of AI models on the company’s productivity.

While tools like Amazon Q Developer make programmers’ jobs easier, they also raise questions about the future of employment in the sector. Statements by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AWS CEO Matt Garman, who have suggested that learning to code may no longer be necessary in the future, don’t dispel these doubts.

Indeed, developers’ biggest fears revolve around the impact of AI systems on their jobs. The report “Jobs of Tomorrow: Large Language Models and Jobs,” prepared by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Accenture, suggests the technology sector will be one of the most affected by AI-driven automation.

Garman has a more optimistic view of this shift. While he acknowledged that developers’ roles will change, he said the change will focus on improving services rather than simply delivering them.

“It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build, because that’s going to be more and more of what the work is, as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code,” Garman said.

Image | Ilya Pavlov (Unsplash)

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