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If you follow Rick Houlihan (@houlihan_rick) then all the accolades that AWS for DynamoDB pale in comparison to its current team and execution in that the compa

If you follow Rick Houlihan (@houlihan_rick) then all the accolades that AWS for DynamoDB pale in comparison to its current team and execution in that the company seems to not be investing in it so much so that Rick left to join MongoDB.

vslira 5y ago
Man I love Rick’s talks as much as anyone but let’s be real, he likely left AWS not for his love of first class geographical indexes but because Mongo offered a giant pile of money for him to evangelize their tech. Though I have no doubts that he actually had a lot of reservations around Dynamo’s DX before, he likely has some around mongodb but those won’t be the bulk of his content
- gigatexal 5y ago
  At his rank at AWS I don’t know if money was such an issue. He strikes me as a person who cares deeply about the underlying tech. But I have no idea one way or the other.
  - awsthro00945 5y ago
    I think I've seen you post something similar on r/aws about how Rick was "top DynamoDb person at AWS" (apologies if that wasn't you). I think you are overestimating Rick's "rank". I just looked him up (I had not heard of him before seeing his name mentioned on r/aws a few days ago) and he was an L7 TPM/Practice Manager in AWS's sales organization. That's not really a notably high position, and in the grand scheme of Amazon pay scales, isn't that high up. An L7 TPM gets paid about the same as, or sometimes less than, an L6 software dev (L6 is "senior", which is ~5-10 years of experience). Also, him being in the sales org means he had practically nothing to do with the engineering of the service. AWS Sales is a revolving door of people. I mean no offense towards Rick (again, I didn't know him or even know of him before I read his name in a comment a few days ago), but I would not read anything at all into the fact that an L7 Sales TPM left for another company.
    - gigatexal 5y ago
      was not me at r/aws unless he posts here about it we can't really know -- we can only speculate but I think he had a higher amount of influence than his title/rank might suggest. I think Rick's influence with respect to DynamoDB is akin to that of Kelsey Hightower's influence over k8s at Google.
    - belter 5y ago
      You never heard of Rick Houlihan? He is the 90% of DynamoDB Evangelism... At the same time you are able to this internal lookups? Do you work with DynamoDB? AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401) https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns (DAT403-R1) https://youtu.be/6yqfmXiZTlM https://youtu.be/6yqfmXiZTlM AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 1 https://youtu.be/MF9a1UNOAQo https://youtu.be/MF9a1UNOAQo AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 2 https://youtu.be/_KNrRdWD25M https://youtu.be/_KNrRdWD25M AWS re:Invent 2021 - DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0 https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0 Amazon DynamoDB | Office Hours with Rick Houlihan: Breaking down the design process for NoSQL applications https://www.twitch.tv/videos/761425806 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/761425806
      - amzn-throw 5y ago
        Do you expect the engineers on your team to know the top sales person at your company? This person might be responsible for the majority of evangelism and revenue for the company. Do you expect the SDEs to know about him? Again, no shot against against Rick - he is amazing, smart, technical, competent, and a deep owner. But the average SDE on the team won't know about these or watch these talks. There are too many deep internal engineering challenges to solve.
        belter 5y ago
        Are you calling the person who did the core DynamoDB Technical Deep Dive sessions at reInvent, for the last 4 years in a row, a sales person?

vslira 5y ago

Man I love Rick’s talks as much as anyone but let’s be real, he likely left AWS not for his love of first class geographical indexes but because Mongo offered a giant pile of money for him to evangelize their tech. Though I have no doubts that he actually had a lot of reservations around Dynamo’s DX before, he likely has some around mongodb but those won’t be the bulk of his content

gigatexal 5y ago
At his rank at AWS I don’t know if money was such an issue. He strikes me as a person who cares deeply about the underlying tech. But I have no idea one way or the other.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  I think I've seen you post something similar on r/aws about how Rick was "top DynamoDb person at AWS" (apologies if that wasn't you). I think you are overestimating Rick's "rank". I just looked him up (I had not heard of him before seeing his name mentioned on r/aws a few days ago) and he was an L7 TPM/Practice Manager in AWS's sales organization. That's not really a notably high position, and in the grand scheme of Amazon pay scales, isn't that high up. An L7 TPM gets paid about the same as, or sometimes less than, an L6 software dev (L6 is "senior", which is ~5-10 years of experience). Also, him being in the sales org means he had practically nothing to do with the engineering of the service. AWS Sales is a revolving door of people. I mean no offense towards Rick (again, I didn't know him or even know of him before I read his name in a comment a few days ago), but I would not read anything at all into the fact that an L7 Sales TPM left for another company.
  - gigatexal 5y ago
    was not me at r/aws unless he posts here about it we can't really know -- we can only speculate but I think he had a higher amount of influence than his title/rank might suggest. I think Rick's influence with respect to DynamoDB is akin to that of Kelsey Hightower's influence over k8s at Google.
  - belter 5y ago
    You never heard of Rick Houlihan? He is the 90% of DynamoDB Evangelism... At the same time you are able to this internal lookups? Do you work with DynamoDB? AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401) https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k https://youtu.be/HaEPXoXVf2k AWS re:Invent 2019: [REPEAT 1] Amazon DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns (DAT403-R1) https://youtu.be/6yqfmXiZTlM https://youtu.be/6yqfmXiZTlM AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 1 https://youtu.be/MF9a1UNOAQo https://youtu.be/MF9a1UNOAQo AWS re:Invent 2020: Amazon DynamoDB advanced design patterns – Part 2 https://youtu.be/_KNrRdWD25M https://youtu.be/_KNrRdWD25M AWS re:Invent 2021 - DynamoDB deep dive: Advanced design patterns https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0 https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0 Amazon DynamoDB | Office Hours with Rick Houlihan: Breaking down the design process for NoSQL applications https://www.twitch.tv/videos/761425806 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/761425806
    - amzn-throw 5y ago
      Do you expect the engineers on your team to know the top sales person at your company? This person might be responsible for the majority of evangelism and revenue for the company. Do you expect the SDEs to know about him? Again, no shot against against Rick - he is amazing, smart, technical, competent, and a deep owner. But the average SDE on the team won't know about these or watch these talks. There are too many deep internal engineering challenges to solve.
      - belter 5y ago
        Are you calling the person who did the core DynamoDB Technical Deep Dive sessions at reInvent, for the last 4 years in a row, a sales person?