3 ms·

Long ago AWS reached the point where feature prioritization was discussed in terms of millions of $$ in revenue. When you have CTOs at Fortune 500 companies wav

by cle 5y ago

Long ago AWS reached the point where feature prioritization was discussed in terms of millions of $$ in revenue. When you have CTOs at Fortune 500 companies waving 10s of millions of dollars in front of your face to build a feature, it's much much easier to prioritize building that over one that is requested by smaller developers with uncertain revenue impact. > The only conclusion is: bad tooling isn't affecting their sales. I actually think bad tooling does affect their sales and long-term growth, but that they're blind to it because they can't easily measure it, and they have an obsession with data-driven decision making. I suspect this is also exacerbated by hiring problems due to their reputation as an employer, forcing them to make tradeoffs that sacrifice dev UX more often than they'd like.

hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
The old problem of data-driven decision making: you tend to only measure success with easily observed metrics. # of features launched is the new # loc.
cipher_system 5y ago
Shouldn't a company of that size and revenue be able to do both at the same time? I have absolutely no evidence to back this but I think they are actually making money of the bad tooling. Firstly, because it requires and also creates an army of cloud AWS consultants that works as free sales persons for AWS. Secondly, this army creates overly complicated and expensive solutions which then only they can change, and they never do because it looks good on CV. Maybe a bit too cynical.
- cle 5y ago
  > Shouldn't a company of that size and revenue be able to do both at the same time? On its own, probably, but holistically it’s always more complicated than that. They don’t have infinite resources and zero coordination costs, so they still have to make product development tradeoffs.
pid-1 5y ago
> I actually think bad tooling does affect their sales and long-term growth, Anecdotally, I know a fair amount of companies that gave up on using AWS native stuff and went to EKS for the K8s tooling and ecosystem.
quinnjh 5y ago
Data driven design is exactly why their UX is so awful. Give it a few years and someone else will be able to compete just by offering a unified view of deployed resources. Data says no easy single source of truth- must hide everything in submenus for true kafka maze

by cle 5y ago

hcarvalhoalves 5y ago

The old problem of data-driven decision making: you tend to only measure success with easily observed metrics. # of features launched is the new # loc.

cipher_system 5y ago

Shouldn't a company of that size and revenue be able to do both at the same time? I have absolutely no evidence to back this but I think they are actually making money of the bad tooling. Firstly, because it requires and also creates an army of cloud AWS consultants that works as free sales persons for AWS. Secondly, this army creates overly complicated and expensive solutions which then only they can change, and they never do because it looks good on CV. Maybe a bit too cynical.

cle 5y ago
> Shouldn't a company of that size and revenue be able to do both at the same time? On its own, probably, but holistically it’s always more complicated than that. They don’t have infinite resources and zero coordination costs, so they still have to make product development tradeoffs.

pid-1 5y ago

> I actually think bad tooling does affect their sales and long-term growth, Anecdotally, I know a fair amount of companies that gave up on using AWS native stuff and went to EKS for the K8s tooling and ecosystem.

quinnjh 5y ago

Data driven design is exactly why their UX is so awful. Give it a few years and someone else will be able to compete just by offering a unified view of deployed resources. Data says no easy single source of truth- must hide everything in submenus for true kafka maze