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It remains weird and disturbing to me that "AWS" is treated as a skill. Not "cloud system management", but "AWS". Edit: I do understand why it can be lucrative

• dharmab 7y ago
  No weirder than putting "Java" instead of "Object Oriented Programming"
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Not really. Using Java doesn't come with having to have a relationship with a company (beyond the the JDK EULA nobody reads or cares about anyway).
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    Yes, it is. I can build anything in Java and run it on any computer owned by anybody. AWS isn't a technology, it's just Amazon's computers and the constraints and interfaces they wrap around them.
    • sgt 7y ago
      One could then argue that Java is owned by Oracle, and could be called Oracle Java, an Oracle technology. I tend to agree with you though, AWS is more of a company's interpretation of the cloud hosting technologies. It's too close for comfort, to be honest. I prefer to self host, but I tend to host in the cloud due to financial constraints.
      • _bxg1 7y ago
        I don't have any problem with cloud hosting, as long as there's portability. I wouldn't want to design my architecture to be completely specific to one hosting provider.
        • freehunter 7y ago
          It's nothing to do with the hosting or portability and everything to do with talking the language and navigating the interface. You can set up a bare VM and install your own OS and manage everything yourself and avoid any kind of lock-in, but if you don't know how to navigate AWS your entire operations collapses with bad IAM policies, world-readable S3 buckets, and VPCs that let the entire world in. On the other hand, enterprises don't care as much about vendor lock-in or portability as people on HN do. As a consultant working with many Fortune 500 enterprises, "we're an IBM shop" or "we're a Dell shop" or "we're a Windows shop" is more common than you might think. Enterprise companies want relationships, stability, and a business partner. They don't care about anything else. If they're an IBM shop, your default choice is IBM and any exceptions have to be run up through management. If they're a Windows shop, any request for Mac desktops or Linux servers has to be an exception as well. I've seen clients ditch million-dollar products they've used for years just because their digital transformation was AWS-only and that product didn't support running in AWS. Enterprise companies WANT to be locked to one vendor, as it makes choices easier, makes the relationship easier, and provides stability to their IT operations. Cost and portability doesn't even factor into it. Lock-in is just a part of enterprise IT, has been for decades.
          • UweSchmidt 7y ago
            All true. Point is that it used to be that a key piece of intrastructure was based on "open", general tech, and now it's not, and that's regrettable.
            • pjmlp 7y ago
              Started dealing with computers since the mid-80's, I never remember big corporations being big into any kind of "open", beyond standard specifications like X/Open and similar. Even Linux's adoption was more with not paying UNIX licenses than caring about any kind of openness.
            • freehunter 7y ago
              I’m not sure enterprise computing was ever based on open/general tech. In the 80s everything ran on closed-source for-pat Unix systems and big-iron proprietary mainframes. In the 90s that shifted more to Linux but increasingly companies would buy “appliances”, which are pieces of general purpose hardware combined with specific software. Those appliances were never meant to be opened or toyed with and the hardware lifecycle was based on the software lifecycle. If the software was discontinued, the hardware was thrown out as well. Appliances are still very popular today because again enterprise companies like stability and predictability. An appliance is the ultimate lock-in and enterprise companies LOVE them.
• chrisseaton 7y ago
  Different clouds operate in different ways - people probably want the skill of knowing how the various parts of AWS best integrate and I’m sure that there is a lot of subtlety and non-obvious things to this. Seems reasonable to me? I don’t think it’s disturbing to seek a specific practical skill that you know you need. Not everyone has to be a master of everything.
  • charles_f 7y ago
    In my experience there's much more transferability of skills laterally between cloud platforms than there is within the platform itself, ie. knowing how to design a high-volume transaction platform on Azure or AWS is going to be leveraging the same kind of technologies with the same kind of behaviors and features, the real change is going to be in details that in my opinion are quick to figure out. But arguably if you are specialized in building internal tooling in AWS, the gap to design an effective HVT platform in AWS will be much harder to fill. Same thing goes if your specialization is more on the infra side of AWS or on the application development using paas.
  • ownagefool 7y ago
    I think the biggest problem with hiring an AWS or Azure consultant, is you might not get someone who actually does infrastructure as code (at least this happens a fair bit in London). I'd rather hire someone who knows terraform and another cloud, than somebody who'll click on the GUI for my preferred cloud, and make excuses around not being able to follow process.
    • nostrebored 7y ago
      This is insane -- how do these people pass through an interview?
      • ownagefool 7y ago
        It depends on the person interviewing you. It's common enough for them no to be technical at all, such as a scrum master or project manager, it's also common enough for the first person on site (those working for really low remuneration and a lottery ticket) to just not be that good.
• bradleyjg 7y ago
  There’s a lot of details to learn before you can manage a complex aws set up. Sure someone with “cloud system management” skills can ramp up on those details. But if you need someone to be productive right away, you want to hire someone that already has them at his or her fingertips. And in a world where people jump ship every year or two being productive right away is pretty important.
  • Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
    If you need productivity right away then you don't need an employee, you need a consultant.
    • all_blue_chucks 7y ago
      Sure, but the consulting firms need employees right away. With specific skills.
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
        That just means they don't know how to read demand trends or are overextended.
• auspex 7y ago
  The skill sets needed for the three big cloud providers are very different. At a high level it seems the same... VMs, VPC, Firewalls etc. but they all are configured and managed differently on each platform. You need the experience as an AWS, GCP or Azure expert.
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    Then it's disturbing that they're so non-standardized. I personally wouldn't want to spend a bunch of time becoming an expert in a skill that only applies to one company's physical servers.
    • chrisseaton 7y ago
      Why would they standardise? They see their way of doing things as their competitive advantage - they each think their approach is better. Maybe you don’t understand how much people spend on these services? If you’re spending a million dollars a month on AWS then it pays to have a few people who focus on AWS full time and know it intimately. I really don’t think you need to let yourself get disturbed by this.
    • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      Lol. Are you new to technology or something?
      • dang 7y ago
        If you keep breaking the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
          You know what? Fuck it. Ban me. If you really think the above comment is egregious, fuck you. Dumb motherfucker.
• SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Having spent some time in AWS, it’s not to me. I get it. You can “learn AWS”. Strictly talking policies, there is a lot to know there. Gotchas abound. Things that don’t transfer at all outside their ecosystem and I assume vice versa to azure or etc.
• moltar 7y ago
  You can say smithing like, “weird to see Linux admin, instead of OS admin”. But doesn’t make sense in a business context, if you want a Linux admin.
  • _bxg1 7y ago
    The difference is that Linux isn't owned by a single company. It runs on virtually every platform, including all of these hosting providers.
    • detaro 7y ago
      Windows Admin vs OS Admin then.
    • sitkack 7y ago
      Bingo! There isn't a cloud OS and then an standards-ish implementation of that standard. All of the clouds are bespoke and closed source. That said, nothing weird about needing specific knowledge for running on the specific thing. If I run a motorpool that is all Prius, then I'll want Prius mechanics.
      • yowlingcat 7y ago
        At some point, I think I hoped that Kubernetes would be that "cloud OS" but as time passes, I'm not sure that's going to happen and I continue to make sure I stay abreast of the various closed source cloud ecosystems, including AWS which has served me reliably for over a decade.
    • skrebbel 7y ago
      So if it's owned by a single company you can't list it as a skill? Huh?
• jedberg 7y ago
  There were people who made entire careers being experts in Cisco. And Windows. And Solaris. And RedHat. Heck, you can still make a career on being an expert in IBM 360. It's pretty common to go deep on a particular vendor's technology and make a career of that.
• imhoguy 7y ago
  > I would personally be wary of making "ability to effectively use Amazon's servers" a pillar of my career. It is SEO for consultants to effectively catch customers/agencies with specific platform needs: AWS Architect, SAP Developer, Tibco Developer, Wordpress Programmer...
• skrebbel 7y ago
  It's the same as calling PostgreSQL a skill. You can know SQL in general, and you can know all Postgres's little ins and outs. It's not the same thing. Personally I wouldn't make knowing all Postgres's ins and outs the "pillar of my career" but some people do. I don't see how doing that with AWS is any different.
• nostrebored 7y ago
  Realistically skills in one are transferrable as long as you're thinking of the components in terms of abstractions. For instance, use a deployment pipeline to deploy your microservice with a frontend api for queries against your scalable database, subscribe to your event source and create your faas consumers to push data to your next bounded, isolated component. This is something you can do with any provider, the names are irrelevant. Some features are lock in, but this lock in can be seen as tech debt prior to delivery. Being able to architect cloud systems is just being able to architect distributed systems. Specializing in one isn't a huge problem.
• smnrchrds 7y ago
  I am a mechanical engineer. Mechanical engineering jobs ask for SolidWorks/AutoCAD/CATIA/Creo/etc experience, not just computer-aided design; ANSYS/ABAQUS/NASTRAN/etc expertise, not just finite element method; Fluent/CFX/OpenFOAM/etc knowledge, not just computational fluid dynamics. With the exception of OpenFOAM, all of these software are proprietary, largely non-interoperable, and expensive—like thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for the cheapest option with basic functionality kind of expensive; like I can never imagine opening my independent consultancy business because how expensive the basic tools are kind of expensive. Outside of programming, this is the norm. The number of free and/or open-source tools available to a mechanical engineer or an electrical engineer are infinitesimally small and it is almost impossible to do a serious engineering project with only free tools. Since this is quite lucrative for the companies making those tools, I can only imagine tech companies would be more than happy to lead us to a future where software engineering is similar in this regard to other engineering disciplines. Perhaps this is what happens when a field matures, and since software is maturing, it will become more and more like this as the time goes on.
  • cushychicken 7y ago
    >Outside of programming, this is the norm. The number of free and/or open-source tools available to a mechanical engineer or an electrical engineer are infinitesimally small and it is almost impossible to do a serious engineering project with only free tools. >Since this is quite lucrative for the companies making those tools, I can only imagine tech companies would be more than happy to lead us to a future where software engineering is similar in this regard to other engineering disciplines. Perhaps this is what happens when a field matures, and since software is maturing, it will become more and more like this as the time goes on. That's a really great insight. (Sr EE here.) I wonder sometimes about the fact that SW engineers are capable of making their own tools in a way that we are not. Do you think this helps to combat some of the super high pricing associated with their tooling? For example: it'd be pretty hard for me as an EE to say "Fuck it! I'm fucking sick of Orcad! I'll just go write my own fucking Orcad!" (OK, well, easy to say. Hard to do. I've spent plenty of days cursing Orcad, but none building a suitable replacement.)
    • 7y ago
• monbis 7y ago
  Twas ever thus For as long as I been working job adverts have been asking for vendor specific skills Oracle vs SQL Visual C vs C SAP vs ,.. It can be risky, and in my experience skills are less important than general technical experience, as it’s easier to teach someone specific skills rather than teach them general aptitude. Having said that, if you are moving to AWS and have no one with AWS experience in your organisation, then it may make sense to hire someone with relevant experience.
• simonsarris 7y ago
  "AWS" seems like a much more useful delineation over "cloud system management" than "Java" does over "Programming" I could be super wrong but I'd expect a Java programmer to become useful on a C# project faster than I'd expect an AWS person to become useful building out other cloud infrastructure.
  • antonvs 7y ago
    > I could be super wrong but I'd expect a Java programmer to become useful on a C# project faster than I'd expect an AWS person to become useful building out other cloud infrastructure. I think that is indeed wrong. The major clouds are all pretty similar in terms of the commodity IaaS services - VMs, disks, networks, load balancers etc., right up to things like managed Kubernetes clusters (AWS EKS, Google GKS, etc.) The basic correspondence between those various components is obvious, and the underlying infrastructure is the same - you still end up with servers with disks and TCP network access running whatever OS you chose. The situation gets even less different if you use something like Kubernetes, since your interaction with clusters largely relies on Kubernetes tooling instead of the cloud provider's. Someone very familiar with AWS should easily be able to find corresponding services in e.g. Google Cloud - I know because I just went through that, having years of AWS experience as a software developer and architect, and now contracting with a company that uses Gcloud. There are differences, but prior knowledge of what to expect tends to make it easy to find what you need. The only real exception is when you get to proprietary SaaS products, like AWS DynamoDB or Google BigQuery. But these are managed services which require virtually zero maintenance, so it's really the software developers who have to deal with those differences. The problem with switching from something like Java to C# is that, even aside from the language syntax and semantics differences, which one can pick up fairly quickly, there's a huge ecosystem of libraries and tools that all changes, and the details matter much more - what collection of classes/functions/methods does a library have, what are their names, what do they do, which ones are better than which other ones, etc. The time to get up to speed on all that is going to be greater no matter what, just because of the sheer volume of detail involved. Not that a Java programmer couldn't get up to basic speed on C# relatively quickly, but to reach expertise with it and not have to consult docs for many little things, i.e. to get efficient and effective at it, takes much longer. I've done that too - I spent nearly two years at a company that used C#, and can't consider myself an expert at all, unlike with Java.
• ivanhoe 7y ago
  Do you find it equally disturbing that Oracle DBA (or Postgres DBA or Mysql DBA) are specific skills (and job positions)?
• tyingq 7y ago
  It's not new. I remember being turned down if I didn't have specific experience in some flavor of Unix (HPUX, AIX, Unicos, Solaris, etc). Similar for specific databases, cluster software, messaging software, etc. And, yes, as dumb then as it is now.