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I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I

I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I got a first hand view of their messaging and strategy. Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a “Day 2” company now and not out in front of trends As if the original RTO policies weren’t bad enough for instance, now they are forcing their “field by design” workers to be in the office 5 days a week when they aren’t at a customers site. These are the consultants (full time employees), sales, SAs etc who spend most of their time interacting with the customer and where you rarely have your internal teammates in your same office. Before anyone asked why I worked there if I knew it was shitty. I worked remotely the entire time, it looked great on my resume and I like money. It definitely opened some doors

late2part 2y ago
Were you one of the many overemployed people that also worked at AWS?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I am 50. I have always had a strict policy of never doing two jobs or a “side hustle”. Whatever we can’t do from my working one job, we don’t do. That means no open source work worrying about my GitHub profile, no BS “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn. Nothing. When I get off of work, I shut my computer down and live my life - exercising, travel, spending time with friends and family, etc.
  - Temporary_31337 2y ago
    Imagine if Amazon acted the same way- oh we already have 1 customer, we won’t bother with the next 6 billion because we have one shittty one already.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      What exactly is your point? I should be part of the “hustle culture” and work my main job and a have a side gig and sacrifice my free time?
  - OptionOfT 2y ago
    That's a wonderful attitude. I'm the same. The stuff that's on my GitHub is there for me, I needed it and/or I wanted to contribute to it. It's not for visibility. But with that I do feel that I've had a couple of jobs slip through the cracks. Not enough exposure.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      The truth about not doing open source work and a personal GitHub profile is kind of lie. The department I worked for at AWS had a very easy to use open source approval process to open source work we did from scratch for a client as long as it didn’t have client information we could put it here after approval. https://github.com/aws-samples https://github.com/aws-samples I was able to legally/ethically fork all of the work I submitted (MIT Licensed) to my own profile after I left. But, no one cared or even looked at my open source profile. However, I was also a major contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” that was big in its niche. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/ That did lead to two interviews and one job offer in 2023 year. Almost all of my projects and the “solution” are obsolete now. I was able to use most of them last year with some tweaking.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I’ve heard most of the AWS services that are actually profitable are the old ones, and that all the new ones barely make money. Is that true?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  What do you mean by making money? That’s not a simple question to answer. At the end of the day, all of AWS runs on a bunch of VMs that are spun up with a certain AMI depending on what the workload is. I’m sure AWS is charging enough to make the price more than the compute costs except for services that are completely free like CloudFormation. If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making for income, that’s how tech companies work - high fixed costs for initial development and low marginal costs that are spread across the customers. They have started canceling projects where the cost of continued development doesn’t make a direct or indirect profit and don’t add to the ecosystem. The two I can think of most recently are CodeCommit (a very bad hosted git repository) and Cloud9 (hosted development environment).
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    I mean that only a few of the services generate all the profit in AWS, and the rest are currently priced at a loss. Surprised to hear they’re canceling some of them. That usually scares away developers.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      I mean it’s literally one command to retarget the remote url of your git repository and Cloud9 was just a remote hosted VSCode with some AWS extensions you can get locally
shell_game 2y ago
Which business unit were you in?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  WWPS

late2part 2y ago

Were you one of the many overemployed people that also worked at AWS?

scarface_74 2y ago
I am 50. I have always had a strict policy of never doing two jobs or a “side hustle”. Whatever we can’t do from my working one job, we don’t do. That means no open source work worrying about my GitHub profile, no BS “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn. Nothing. When I get off of work, I shut my computer down and live my life - exercising, travel, spending time with friends and family, etc.
- Temporary_31337 2y ago
  Imagine if Amazon acted the same way- oh we already have 1 customer, we won’t bother with the next 6 billion because we have one shittty one already.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    What exactly is your point? I should be part of the “hustle culture” and work my main job and a have a side gig and sacrifice my free time?
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  That's a wonderful attitude. I'm the same. The stuff that's on my GitHub is there for me, I needed it and/or I wanted to contribute to it. It's not for visibility. But with that I do feel that I've had a couple of jobs slip through the cracks. Not enough exposure.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    The truth about not doing open source work and a personal GitHub profile is kind of lie. The department I worked for at AWS had a very easy to use open source approval process to open source work we did from scratch for a client as long as it didn’t have client information we could put it here after approval. https://github.com/aws-samples https://github.com/aws-samples I was able to legally/ethically fork all of the work I submitted (MIT Licensed) to my own profile after I left. But, no one cared or even looked at my open source profile. However, I was also a major contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” that was big in its niche. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/ That did lead to two interviews and one job offer in 2023 year. Almost all of my projects and the “solution” are obsolete now. I was able to use most of them last year with some tweaking.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I’ve heard most of the AWS services that are actually profitable are the old ones, and that all the new ones barely make money. Is that true?

scarface_74 2y ago
What do you mean by making money? That’s not a simple question to answer. At the end of the day, all of AWS runs on a bunch of VMs that are spun up with a certain AMI depending on what the workload is. I’m sure AWS is charging enough to make the price more than the compute costs except for services that are completely free like CloudFormation. If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making for income, that’s how tech companies work - high fixed costs for initial development and low marginal costs that are spread across the customers. They have started canceling projects where the cost of continued development doesn’t make a direct or indirect profit and don’t add to the ecosystem. The two I can think of most recently are CodeCommit (a very bad hosted git repository) and Cloud9 (hosted development environment).
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  I mean that only a few of the services generate all the profit in AWS, and the rest are currently priced at a loss. Surprised to hear they’re canceling some of them. That usually scares away developers.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    I mean it’s literally one command to retarget the remote url of your git repository and Cloud9 was just a remote hosted VSCode with some AWS extensions you can get locally

shell_game 2y ago

Which business unit were you in?

scarface_74 2y ago
WWPS