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Amazon did the same thing to me — the AWS SDK for PHP. Except that they hired me, but then began telling me what I could and could not do with the project, how

by skyzyx 6y ago

Amazon did the same thing to me — the AWS SDK for PHP. Except that they hired me, but then began telling me what I could and could not do with the project, how I was/wasn't allowed to talk about it, and forced me to drop support for services that they didn't want to support + I wasn't allowed to communicate to customers why. A couple of years later, they brought on the creator of Boto (AWS SDK for Python), but I bitched at them so much to make absolutely sure that what happened to me wouldn't happen to Mitch. Boto is still an independent OSS project today.

skyzyx 6y ago
Getting AWS to release code on GitHub? That was me. Allowing AWS developers to communicate with people on Stack Overflow? Me. The creation of the `awslabs` GitHub org? Me. The core concepts behind AWS Lambda? Me. SDK features like _waiters_? Me. Publicly sharing the internal service models so that people could built new tools for AWS? Me. Me, fighting against the internal Amazon culture tooth-and-nail to try to get them to do things that were in the best interests of AWS customers. Some of the most brilliant and customer-centric people I've ever worked with got ran out of there by management (well, one particular engineering director) after 18-24 months. All the fighting led to them trying to "manage me out" (making my life a living hell, hoping to make me quit), so I decided to stay for a full 4 years in order to vest every ounce of my stock grants, before walking away in 2014 (six months before AWS released "Lambda"). If things are better there now, that's really great for the people who work there. But it was a hell-scape for me to try to bring AWS into the modern age for open-source software in such a backwards-ass internal culture.