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As a current Amazon employee I can confirm this is no longer the case or only applies to such a select few pieces of software that it doesn't actually mean what

As a current Amazon employee I can confirm this is no longer the case or only applies to such a select few pieces of software that it doesn't actually mean what you think it does. The amount of day to day stuff that is relied upon that runs on greasemonkey scripts and web scraping is insane. API's for a ton of things don't exist or are have heavy gatekeeping. (eg. contact x to get onboarded to our API and they just ghost you). Of course you can get a high level leader to tell you to use a proper API in a mailing list email thread where you are trying to get help to solve a problem but they will not actually help you get working API access, all talk no action. A perfect example is there is this basic CRUD app that I rely upon and I see the current maintainer is working on all these feature requests, the problem for me is that the site has a ton of AJAX and takes like 20 mouse clicks to get retrieve basic information. So I open a ticket / feature request just to get a basic REST API for the reads and they politely tell me I am an idiot and close the request. So much pointless work is created at Amazon from lack of API access.

geodel 5y ago
This seems so true. A friend of mine got hired in Northern Virginia. He was Java developer for ten years. But at Amazon it is about same as you described.
biztos 5y ago
Sounds like the maintainer is optimizing for job security and/or work-life balance. And from all the comments on this post, it sounds like that’s a pretty rational course of action.
phkahler 5y ago
Sounds like they're allowing people to treat the systems as "infrastructure" and "applications" with only the infra having exposed APIs? That's super common in software of all sorts. There are a lot of people who can make good use of a decent API and appreciate it, but are not experienced (or smart, or have time, etc) enough to design a good API themselves. Most software is mortar, not bricks.
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  Most all of the time wasting or hacky things like this there are just because people don't have time to improve things they scraped together to provide value somewhere. Everyone at AWS ran around with their heads cut off back when there were 6 regions because everyone was so overworked or had to drop everything they were doing for a week because a new Xen bug was published to the email list and would go out of embargo at the end of the week. I can only imagine how insane it is now with ~20 regions to support.

geodel 5y ago

This seems so true. A friend of mine got hired in Northern Virginia. He was Java developer for ten years. But at Amazon it is about same as you described.

biztos 5y ago

Sounds like the maintainer is optimizing for job security and/or work-life balance. And from all the comments on this post, it sounds like that’s a pretty rational course of action.

phkahler 5y ago

Sounds like they're allowing people to treat the systems as "infrastructure" and "applications" with only the infra having exposed APIs? That's super common in software of all sorts. There are a lot of people who can make good use of a decent API and appreciate it, but are not experienced (or smart, or have time, etc) enough to design a good API themselves. Most software is mortar, not bricks.

res0nat0r 5y ago
Most all of the time wasting or hacky things like this there are just because people don't have time to improve things they scraped together to provide value somewhere. Everyone at AWS ran around with their heads cut off back when there were 6 regions because everyone was so overworked or had to drop everything they were doing for a week because a new Xen bug was published to the email list and would go out of embargo at the end of the week. I can only imagine how insane it is now with ~20 regions to support.