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You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS. T

by ranman 2y ago

You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS. That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough. What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results. This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.

hughesjj 2y ago
Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM. There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry. Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential. MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap. AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap. It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
  - hug 2y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "what happened". If what you're talking about happening to those companies is how much money they make, you're totally right. That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing. I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.
- bmitc 2y ago
  I've never been truly impressed with an Amazon product. Is Amazon's engineering culture really that strong?
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    Really, none? IDK, I've always thought DynamoDB and S3 were amazing, and Lambda, albeit not perfect on launch, was highly innovative and useful for many, many, many circumstances you'd either needs a k8s cluster or fleet of little used servers at the time. SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.
  - jimmaswell 2y ago
    Amazon the shopping website is useful and reliable at least.
    - Maledictus 2y ago
      They can't even sort by price.
      - replwoacause 2y ago
        Yeah but they can ship me my Nespresso pods and scrub brush drill bit attachments and vitamin b complex by 4am the next day.
        bmitc 2y ago
        That may or may not be counterfeit.
        2y ago
- JBlue42 2y ago
  >Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now? It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lubesGordi 2y ago
What's their narrative and what's the reality? Sounds like you got something to say!
goostavos 2y ago
>entrenched management class This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea of low performers.
hintymad 2y ago
> That said there are a ton of cons. Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls? What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.
- dboreham 2y ago
  The software equivalent of a The Onion article..
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  > even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls? I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
  - lokar 2y ago
    Have you used many cli tools that consume a meaningful amount of cpu (in terms of cost)? They are generally used by a human, so the scale can’t be all that big.
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      Yeah, go to a place with poor bandwidth and run any tool that downloads and hashes large files. It will spend a large time waiting on the download and also a large time hashing the files.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - lazyant 2y ago
    If the CLI runs on an engineer's laptop (like AWS CLI for ex) then it doesn't matter

by ranman 2y ago

hughesjj 2y ago

Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM. There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry. Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential. MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap. AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap. It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
- hug 2y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "what happened". If what you're talking about happening to those companies is how much money they make, you're totally right. That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing. I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.
bmitc 2y ago
I've never been truly impressed with an Amazon product. Is Amazon's engineering culture really that strong?
- hughesjj 2y ago
  Really, none? IDK, I've always thought DynamoDB and S3 were amazing, and Lambda, albeit not perfect on launch, was highly innovative and useful for many, many, many circumstances you'd either needs a k8s cluster or fleet of little used servers at the time. SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.
- jimmaswell 2y ago
  Amazon the shopping website is useful and reliable at least.
  - Maledictus 2y ago
    They can't even sort by price.
    - replwoacause 2y ago
      Yeah but they can ship me my Nespresso pods and scrub brush drill bit attachments and vitamin b complex by 4am the next day.
      - bmitc 2y ago
        That may or may not be counterfeit.
      - 2y ago
JBlue42 2y ago
>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now? It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lubesGordi 2y ago

What's their narrative and what's the reality? Sounds like you got something to say!

goostavos 2y ago

>entrenched management class This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea of low performers.

hintymad 2y ago

> That said there are a ton of cons. Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls? What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.

dboreham 2y ago
The software equivalent of a The Onion article..
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls? I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
- lokar 2y ago
  Have you used many cli tools that consume a meaningful amount of cpu (in terms of cost)? They are generally used by a human, so the scale can’t be all that big.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    Yeah, go to a place with poor bandwidth and run any tool that downloads and hashes large files. It will spend a large time waiting on the download and also a large time hashing the files.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- lazyant 2y ago
  If the CLI runs on an engineer's laptop (like AWS CLI for ex) then it doesn't matter