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I've been both an IC and a manager at FANG. In some cases the work is terrible, an example is CloudFront at Amazon. It is a weirdly badly run organization whic

I've been both an IC and a manager at FANG. In some cases the work is terrible, an example is CloudFront at Amazon. It is a weirdly badly run organization which causes heavy operational stress on the teams that support the service and which is not sufficiently staffed to deal with the load. I don't know how it got into such a large hole. More commonly, at least in big tech, is that the person has reached their Peter Principle in software (they may have other traits, like being a creator or whatever was in the article that allow them to succeed in other fields) and that is causing them tremendous stress, usually without them knowing the root cause.

gardenhedge 3y ago
I find what happens is that people are promoted and expected to do the new job at the same level as the old one without additional training.
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
I spent some time on core services within amazon. I think theres just no upside in major rewrites when the system is working. Any major outage with cloudfront is a huge liability for the company, and so AWS decides to just pay their engineers a ton of money to sit there and hammer out operational issues day by day. This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. On some teams, the work is actually not SWE work, even though people think it is. Its really an on call rotation, with some product related work to keep people busy while they recover from on-call. Managers will never admit it though. There will be good SWE work, but some guy who has been in that same org for 6+ years will quickly snatch the best parts. Less tenured engineers will slog
- jwestbury 3y ago
  > This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. After working there for >5 years (premium support at AWS, then EC2), I've found myself missing Amazon's operations culture and observability stack (as well as CI/CD toolchain) at every other job. Carnaval in particular is hugely missed.
- GreedClarifies 3y ago
  Some truth to what you are saying. AWS is amazing at operations, it came from the top down and was a marvel to observe. It could be company culture based, as Amazon retail is simply an operations company (and perhaps the best one in the world), or it could be personality based and will fade in time due to Charlie and Andy taking new roles. However, from what little I could see of CloudFront it was a cluster **. I didn't see how they could justify that amount of operational load without investing in addressing the root causes. VGery strange.

gardenhedge 3y ago

I find what happens is that people are promoted and expected to do the new job at the same level as the old one without additional training.

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago

I spent some time on core services within amazon. I think theres just no upside in major rewrites when the system is working. Any major outage with cloudfront is a huge liability for the company, and so AWS decides to just pay their engineers a ton of money to sit there and hammer out operational issues day by day. This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. On some teams, the work is actually not SWE work, even though people think it is. Its really an on call rotation, with some product related work to keep people busy while they recover from on-call. Managers will never admit it though. There will be good SWE work, but some guy who has been in that same org for 6+ years will quickly snatch the best parts. Less tenured engineers will slog

jwestbury 3y ago
> This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. After working there for >5 years (premium support at AWS, then EC2), I've found myself missing Amazon's operations culture and observability stack (as well as CI/CD toolchain) at every other job. Carnaval in particular is hugely missed.
GreedClarifies 3y ago
Some truth to what you are saying. AWS is amazing at operations, it came from the top down and was a marvel to observe. It could be company culture based, as Amazon retail is simply an operations company (and perhaps the best one in the world), or it could be personality based and will fade in time due to Charlie and Andy taking new roles. However, from what little I could see of CloudFront it was a cluster **. I didn't see how they could justify that amount of operational load without investing in addressing the root causes. VGery strange.