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Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
- stephan411 4mo agoThank you for writing this
- Hard_Space 4mo agoI used to see AI generated images with lots of unintelligible writing or misspelled words in slides, but the speaker left them in anyway. “Good enough” is not customer obsession. This enforced adoption of immature GenAI reminds me of Milo Minderbinder trying to make people eat cotton in Catch 22, because he had inadvertently obtained a huge amount of it.
- breppp 4mo agoAt least everyone gets an RSU
- throw5 4mo agoI don't know if there is another industry that behaves this childishly. There might be. But good grief, how much more juvenile can ours possibly get? AI-generated images with obviously nonsensical text is something I never thought I'd see in professional meetings. But it is becoming more and more common.
- nacozarina 4mo agowe’re witnessing how advanced civilizations actually die there’s no heroic clash with other civilizations, they simply rot away
- oddly 4mo agoCheck the podcast “Fall of Civilizations”, this is very true. This advanced civilization is actually dying.
- supriyo-biswas 4mo agoIt remains to be seen whether GenAI only acts as an accelerant of organizational decline, by amplifying the laziness inherent in people.
- Spooky23 4mo agoIt’s worse. Remember the “Prussian general 2x2”? https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/ AI enables the stupid and diligent. When I get long form emails from people I don’t know well, I assume that 80% of the time it’s AI bullshit. People are having AI respond with bullshit to other people’s bullshit. I’m actually deliberately adding bad grammar to communications as a hook that you should read it. It hurts my soul.
- freeopinion 4mo agoDuring a recent semester final exam with fill in the blank questions, a student raised their hand to ask the teacher, "Do we get marked off for spelling?" The class was bewildered when the teacher answered, "Of course." Some students immediately turned in their exam assuming it would be impossible to pass.
- fweimer 4mo agoLong before GenAI, I saw people using meme generators a lot in corporate presentations. I found that equally jarring. Replacing that with GenAI stuff is probably an improvement. At least it's reducing legal risk. It seems more understandable to a global audience, too. I still don't have an explanation why people are doing this. Is it part of leadership training? Or do presenters have their own theory that including this stuff makes the presentation more memorable and enjoyable?
- anal_reactor 4mo agoPeople have a thing that they mimic the behavior of those above them in the hierarchy. CEO used a meme once because they thought it's funny, then everyone did this in order to mimic CEO. Why was leetcode so popular? Because Google did it and they were the cool kids at the time.
- lokar 4mo agoAnd that started when we hired a couple people who were into competitive programming an started an event/contest
- _DeadFred_ 4mo agoBeing a grey beard, white board tests were popular because we didn't have an applicant pool experienced in software development. So we gave people logic and problem solving tests to see if they had the right type of thinking/temperament to train them up to be software devs. They didn't evolve into the trash they are now until later.
- SilverElfin 4mo ago> In this whole pivot to GenAI, AWS has lost its focus on the customer. Instead of working backwards from a genuine customer need, the goal seems to be to create as many things as fast as possible, throw them into the world and see which ones gain traction, whether or not they serve a real need. AWS has been this way for a lot longer than GenAI, since the basic infrastructure products were built out early on. But when I read this line about throwing things out there quickly, I also think of Google and even Anthropic. Google has a long list of products that got created and killed, as part of their internal politics and promotion culture. Anthropic is currently rushing vibe coded slop all the time to try and win over OpenAI and set up their IPO. Maybe all the rich high funding companies can afford to this and maybe it is the right thing for them to do. They can afford to make big mistakes without hurting their stability. A true startup or smaller company can’t - they would shutdown because one big investment that fails is enough to destroy the whole company.
- willsmith72 4mo agoto be fair, even though they have "working backwards" and "customer obsession", amazon has always been about making lots of different experimental bets. Bezos: > To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
- antonvs 4mo ago> Maybe all the rich high funding companies can afford to this and maybe it is the right thing for them to do. They can afford to make big mistakes without hurting their stability. A true startup or smaller company can’t - they would shutdown because one big investment that fails is enough to destroy the whole company. Both are following the same strategy. Amazon has a $2.86 trillion market cap. That's the equivalent of 143,000 $20 million Series A startups. Companies like Amazon and Google are basically an integrated herd of cash cows plus a VC portfolio.
- grebc 4mo agoNot that I disagree with the points in the article, but 2022 is hardly the high point of Amazon. That ship sailed decades ago.
- nchmy 4mo agoDecades...?
- swiftcoder 4mo agoAt least 1 decade. I left in 2017, and that was already past the peak
- grebc 4mo agoYeah late 90’s, early 2000’s.
- N_Lens 4mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 4mo agoYou can't comment like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- N_Lens 4mo agoI can and did!
- tomhow 4mo agoPlease don't act like a jerk. This site is only a place where people like to participate because we have guidelines that we uphold daily, and others make the effort to observe them. When accounts repeatedly post low-substance or snarky comments, we have to penalize them then eventually ban them if they keep it up. Please do your part to raise the standards rather than drag them down.
- fhub 4mo agoI think a key goal of senior management at any big company in the last 6 months is to make rank and file fungible or obsolete. It’s one big experiment. There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
- georgemcbay 4mo ago> There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so. And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue. There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value. I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (and possibly violent) transition to whatever comes next.
- Rekindle8090 4mo agoThe actual Industrial Revolution labor wars happened because workers were being maimed, killed, and disposed of with zero legal recourse. The Ludlow Massacre in 1914 ended with the Colorado National Guard machine-gunning a tent colony and burning women and children alive. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 had the United States Army bombing American coal miners from biplanes. Pinkertons routinely shot organizers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed 146 garment workers because management locked the exit doors to prevent unauthorized breaks. Coal miners were paid in company scrip redeemable only at company stores in towns the company also owned and policed. Black workers attempting to organize in the South were lynched. Children were maimed in textile mills. A software engineer getting four months severance after a layoff exists in a different universe from this so no. There is no precedent. Don't you dare talk about the industrial revolution because its not even in the parking lot of the ballpark.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoThat your examples come from the 1900s but the changes that caused them started in the 1800s might give you pause.
- kspetkov79 4mo agoThe account recovery story says a lot. At some size, companies start handling people as tickets. Sometimes it only gets fixed because one person inside still cares.
- bix6 4mo agoI’ve been hearing Amazon is going to run out of bodies for years now and yet they keep chugging along.
- Traubenfuchs 4mo agoThere are now more highly competent devs ready to work for cheap available now than ever before and all of them are boosted with state of the art coding agents… It‘s the golden age for software engineer employers.
- kibwen 4mo agoCorrection: it's the golden age for code monkey employers. We as an industry have never deserved to use the term "engineering" to describe ourselves, and we are further from that ideal than ever.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoThe economy sucks, and they do pay decently for software engineers. Especially now that the rest of FAANG aren't massively over-paying for college hires, I doubt the supply of bright young minds will ever entirely dry up.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoI'd work there (if they hired here lmao), they pay good and it looks good on a CV. Or well, it would where I live (europe).
- samiv 4mo agoThis genai is going to bring about huge quality drop in software across the stack and across the domains. I already see orgs that had reasonable software processes transform into orgs where the only metric is how much generated code you can slap and slop together and how fast. There's no success here for anyone. And this is not a dink on the ai tooling itself but on the organizationan processes that provide the context in which the AI code generation is being used. Bad processes will always produce bad low quality outcomes regardless of tbe technology.
- ncr100 4mo agoBeing fired for calling out Corruption. That's how I read this.
- rdtsc 4mo agoAbsolutely. With his name in the public and apologizing to the customer for sheer internal incompetence. Then also cheered on internally. I bet as the managers publicly nodded in praise for his heroic act, their hands were already typing his name to be sent to HR for “get this guy out of here on any excuse you can” note. (In reality it would be a nonverbal hint of sorts. Nothing to leave any trace discoverable by lawsuit)
- iLoveOncall 4mo agoMeh you always read one side of the story. I have seen a lot of people getting PIPed out of Amazon and only one or two didn't deserve it, yet all claimed they didn't.
- fer 4mo agoHe doesn't think that was the cause, and I don't think it was either. Much spicier material has been posted before. Also the meme is still up fwiw.
- smitty1e 4mo agoThe "fungible" point sounds as though the "cattle, not pets" ethos of the infrastructure management has leaked into the management of the staff.
- baq 4mo agoAlways has been, IT has been resisting due to (as pointed out in the article) institutional knowledge required, but this is now going away as LLMs can efficiently and accurately write it down and search it. Meta turning ICs into data labelers is trying to make knowledge workers fungible; expect others to follow.
- CachedaCodes 4mo agoThe story about recovering the account rings very close to me. At least they had coworkers cheering for him, I feel teams are shrinking so much that we'll end up with just the LLM of choice to pat our back with "good work" and "you're absolutely right"
- rdtsc 4mo agoCo-workers cheered while managers were sharpening their axes. One doesn’t do such “heroics” without approval, making the system look incompetent and broken and then apologizing for it without being decapitated in the public square for everyone to learn the implicit lesson. Anyone cheering for him publicly should watch their back, too.
- eisa01 4mo agoI thought Amazon only did memos, not slide decks. Has that changed, or is it the non-AWS part of Amazon?
- swiftcoder 4mo agoThey have always done slide decks for external communications. Internally the 1/6 pager were king across the engineering teams at least
- boundless88 4mo agoOur company also requires everyone to use more AI-related tools, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But the quality of work produced using these tools really depends on the individual's ability. Some people don't put in much effort, and the results they produce are really sloppy, which bothers me a lot.
- bigstrat2003 4mo agoI think there is actually something wrong with that. What should matter is the work produced, not the tools used to produce it. If AI tools really are all they are cracked up to be, then people using them will get ahead, and the company can justifiably point out "your peer gets twice the work done as you" to the other employees. But mandating tool use in and of itself is senseless and counterproductive.
- fooster 4mo agoThe unfortunate reality is that unless you use these tools it is impossible to keep up. People using these tools well are substantially more productive, and often they were already the most productive.
- baq 4mo agoForce multipliers need force to multiply, but also remember force is a vector, so watch out for multiplying in the wrong direction
- mapleleaf1921 4mo agoArguably, what should matters is the impact your work has on your end user. I agree with you that it's up to the people to adopt new tooling so they don't get left behind. But from the company perspective, it's beneficial to get people using the new tools as fast as possible so that the overall impact on end user is accelerated. An example is the adoption of CNC machines in factories. If you're a old timer using mill and lathe, you may argue that the company should not enforce all its workers to learn how to use CNC machines because you can still use the lathe and mill just fine. But from the company perspective, having you learn and run 3 CNC machines at the same time is much better than have you run 1 mill or lathe.
- ath3nd 4mo ago[dead]
- mattmanser 4mo agoI was enjoying the article and then he makes some of the most bizarre claims about what cloud did and how we had to provision servers If any of you young'uns read this, that is not how we had to do provisioning before cloud. VMs already existed before AWS came out. You could already provision a new server usually in minutes and rent it month to month. In fact, all the existing VM server companies had to start calling themselves cloud companies because pointy haired bosses couldn't understand what cloud really was.
- fooker 4mo agoAWS was launched around 2006 (2002 internally at Amazon I think). Where could you rent VMs in 2006? IIRC there were two ways to run stuff, get your own server or get an account on a big shared computer.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mattmanser 4mo agoEverywhere. You could rent VMs everywhere. And they were cheaper than renting AWS. MUCH cheaper. They still are. The original point of AWS is that could scale according to demand. Have 10 VMs running at lunchtime and 1 VM running at midnight. But using a cloud VM also required less server admin experience. It was a bit easier and came.pre-configured with things like firewalls. And THAT is what ended up being the USP of cloud hosting. Especially when they started rolling out all the SQL as a service, redis as a service, etc. You didn't need to really understand servers to run a server, and it turned out almost all developers really didn't want to understand servers. TBH, I don't, server admin sucks. Right now I'm working somewhere where I have to think about SSL certs occasionally and I consider it a complete waste of my life. Digital Ocean came out like 5 years after AWS, what was revolutionary about that wasn't that you could spin up VMs quickly, it was the price. VMs went from $20-30 p/m to $5. For developers who weren't SV rich, that meant you could run a side project without it being a significant cost.
- vkazanov 4mo ago
- gigatexal 4mo ago“I have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company.” Many storied companies can be described this way. It’s a shame. Have any companies hit such scale and kept the ethos and magic of before? Is it inevitable for companies to enshitify themselves in the pursuit of their shareholder’s goals?
- Traubenfuchs 4mo agoNot possible once big parts of the company start not knowing other big parts of the company and the company also has a board of directors that must increase shareholder value at all costs.
- Traubenfuchs 4mo ago> Long story short, I was able to get his resources restored. All I did was manage to poke the right bear and the support team did the rest of the work (and they were amazing). No they utterly failed and needed a special non fungible employee to get them to do their job.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago> They view almost all employees as “fungible” I'm glad to see that one core amazon principle has endured the 10 years since I worked there, even if none of the actual leadership principles have survived /s
- dsign 4mo ago> Amazon has a really odd viewpoint when it comes to the people who work there. They view almost all employees as “fungible”. Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die. With that said, due to its late-stage capitalistic ethos, Amazon is just too overly gleeful about this tasteless reality of life. It's the equivalent of a nephew coming to an aunt's funeral and shouting "A week ago, I told her everybody dies! And now she did! Wasn't I right??? Everybody dies!" > Also, last year the focus at AWS turned fully and almost desperately toward GenAI. I wonder if I'm being too cynical, but late-stage capitalism companies also love profiteering, and the mere prospect of firing all those pesky workers and not having to pay their salaries is like cocaine to those organizations. Which is why I think Amazon fulfillment centers will at some point rent robots at a price point between 2x and 3x their current human labor costs, in the hope that it will eventually make economic sense.
- surgical_fire 4mo ago> Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die. Enterprises typically have this mindset. Most corporations I worked for in fact treated employees exactly like this. As for needing this mindset, I am not so sure. There is a spectrum in between going under because a storied employee retired and treating employees as meaningless numbers in a spreadsheet. But ultimately I fully agree with the whole of your post. I just had to nitpick about this.
- zjaffee 4mo agoI'm also an AWS alumni from many years back now, and truthfully, the organizational problems really took off when Jassy moved to being CEO of amazon as a whole and major leaders left the company (Charlie Bell, et al.). There were always other problems too, pressure on the company in both directions across many different product lines on both cost (any number of cheaper baremetal providers who are much faster at providing customers instances than they were a decade ago), and product quality (any number of startups to now bigger companies, databricks probably being the biggest success) along with a number of expensive bets that were made that didn't work out especially as interest rates began to rise (there were numbers of of different services ranging from IoT, AI, business support, robotics, groundstation, that essentially all failed). AI infra being their latest bet, along with doubling down on custom hardware is smart, but these roles don't require the same number of SWEs and instead require a different type of high skilled professional.
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago> I'm also an AWS alumni Unrelated to your main point, but it's "alumnus" in the singular form. For bonus language nerd points, you would use "alumna" to refer to a woman, or "alumnae" to refer to multiple women. Not sure how Latin handles mixed gender groups, though I would guess it's "alumni".
- paduc 4mo agoIf you want to go deeper, you also have to takes into account the grammatical roles the word has in the sentence. I personally think it’s not worth it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension
- sokoloff 4mo agoI find it hard to call Amazon robotics a failure. All of the small/binnable item FCs make extensive (and, as an outsider, apparently very productive) use of robotics.
- zjaffee 4mo ago
- Max-Ganz-II 4mo agoOver the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years. This was for a question about how billing works. It went like this; 1. Case created. 2. Unassigned for seven days. 3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn't find an answer, he couldn't - which is good, he didn't try to give me the wrong answer - he escalates. That's fine - a lot of questions are simple and even silly, and first line support is there to handle them - but they could have done all this without me, if they'd opened the ticket themselves rather than me having to chase. 4. Eleven days later, comes back with exactly the wrong answer. In the meantime, I had figured out the correct answer, and reply, explaining it to him. 5. Next day, I get a wall of plainly AI generated text telling me my answer is correct. It seems to me a key issue here relating to AI generated text, is a misunderstanding on the part of AWS that I as a consumer will value that answer exactly (or indeed, even remotely) as I would value the answer from a human. I do not. I almost ignore AI generated text, as I think it as unvalidated response.
- SilverElfin 4mo ago[flagged]
- thin_carapace 4mo agowesterners are loaded with the context that much work is outsourced to india for profit purposes. is indian a race? if it isnt a race, why are you making this about race?
- Barbing 4mo agoWhat are the chances of someone winning the “(whatever) is not a race“
- thin_carapace 4mo agoturnabout is fair play
- Dunedan 4mo agoAll the AI hype aside, I wonder if there is a way to avoid becoming one of these faceless corporations where customers are just numbers. For years Amazon has been fantastically customer centered, but at some point they just lost it. I could compile a list where Amazon is actually way more customer unfriendly than in the past now, but I guess everybody already got their own anecdotes about that. So what exactly went wrong and how could that be avoided at other companies?
- killingtime74 4mo agoThere are definitely admired companies in the world. Costco comes to mind.
- rglover 4mo ago> All the AI hype aside, I wonder if there is a way to avoid becoming one of these faceless corporations where customers are just numbers. Limit scale. Enjoy your craft. Become immune to hype and "what's popular," instead focusing on "what otherwise inaccessible experience can we make possible for our customers?" When you let the money guys take the wheel (not the "passionate nerd" types), it inevitably (and I would argue necessarily to keep the lights on for such a big org) results in a shift to spreadsheet brain. If you haven't seen it, watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi and see if that way of life resonates. Also check out his interview with René Redzepi from Noma. Lots of great insight into how focusing on your craft implicitly creates the opportunity for creating and delivering great things to others.
- mactavish88 4mo agoHave you read Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification" yet? He describes the process quite well. Not sure how to address it though. I suspect keeping companies small and focused on quality, sustainability, and free of VC influence would be a solution. It'd take continual work though, like tending to a bonsai.
- willtemperley 4mo agoS3 is quite good. The rest ranges from meh to no thanks.
- immanuwell 4mo ago[flagged]
- arianvanp 4mo agoWas inspiring to meet you at NixCon. Thanks for all your energy and advocacy! You'll always be welcome in our open source community.
- ghostlyy 4mo ago[flagged]
- Ozzie-D 4mo ago[flagged]
- dev_l1x_be 4mo agoAWS lost its way. S3, SQS, EC2 and VPC were great innovations and those services were done by a bunch of engineers who wanted to have a reliable elastically scalable system. This was coincidentally cost effective at the same time. What came after especially the data stack and now the AI services were done by a MBA heavy management team who does not understand innovation and treats engineering like a bank does: putting it in the cost category. Recent financial results show the impact: Google grew almost twice as much as AWS did. Maybe it is just coincidence.
- fer 4mo ago#actual-aws-memes mentioned! I also joined in 2022, and it aligns so much with my experience. Good manager that moves on, then a gradual erosion of "insist in the highest standards" towards a dreaded "good enough", GenAI only accelerated it IMO.
- cmiles8 4mo agoAWS has lost its way. It’s well into the IBM phase now. Primarily providing important but boring commodity infrastructure, but the top talent that can drive real innovation has long since left the building. It’s race to stay relevant in AI but always seeming 2-3 steps behind everyone else is one such example of the current sad state of affairs.
- slumberlust 4mo agoDay 2 (maybe even 3 or 4) for sure. https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon-defines-and-operationalizes-a-day-1-culture/ https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon...
- pards 4mo ago> When AWS first introduced a viable cloud to the world, it was amazing. Back in the 1990s when you wanted to implement an enterprise software solution, you first had to take a guess at what computing power you would need. Next, you would have to order hardware from companies like Sun Microsystems or Dell and that could take weeks if not months to be delivered. It would then need to be racked, powered and provisioned, and then you were screwed if you happened to undersize it or criticized if you spent too much and oversized it. This is how many large enterprises still operate today. Ironically, the main argument is that it's faster to provision VMs on-prem than it is to get approval to run in the cloud. Bureaucracy always beats tech.
- baq 4mo agoAgents are already getting budgets, what ‘customer obsession’ looks like when you’re marketing and selling to clankers?
- guevae2 4mo ago[flagged]
- figassis 4mo ago> the goal seems to be to create as many things as fast as possible, throw them into the world and see which ones gain traction, whether or not they serve a real need The goal was never to solve a real problem, like we evangelized for decades. That was how it was explained when resources (mainly time, but also money) were scarce and we could not just throw things at walls. Now we can, and you won't see anyone talk about "make something people need". Things will be low quality until something sticks, and then money will be poured into it. It's not a bad strategy, but my takeaway from this is: there are multiple plausible explanations for the same thing. People have an incentive to not give you the correct one if it helps you compete with them. But they will give you a sensible one. AI won't protect you from this, experience and real knowledge will.
- cebert 4mo agoI read every comment on this thread at the time of my posting and believe it’s fair to categorize the general sentiment that Amazon has lost its way and may even be in its “IBM stage.” AWS services still are generally reliable and available. I’d think we’d be seeing cracks here if the organization were in shambles. AWS seems to keep humming along.
- jreynar 4mo agoI'm sure things could be better and maybe we've gotten lucky or perhaps being part of the AWS startup program bumps you to the front of the queue but we've had two recent issues -- both with cloudfront -- that were dealt with fairly promptly. Not quite as quick as the timeline they suggested but very hard to complain about when we're paying for support and AWS services themselves with credits from their startup program.
- rglover 4mo ago> In this whole pivot to GenAI, AWS has lost its focus on the customer. Instead of working backwards from a genuine customer need, the goal seems to be to create as many things as fast as possible, throw them into the world and see which ones gain traction, whether or not they serve a real need. Anecdotally, this seems to be the new "mission statement" of many companies.
- jawns 4mo agoI have been advocating within my org to replace "fungible" with "flexible" or "generalist." "Fungible" implies they are a commodity, easily swapped for someone else. In other words, they are so low-value that they are interchangeable. "Flexible" or "generalist" instead connotes that they are so high-value that they can operate well in multiple domains, easily shifting to where they are needed most.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- akutlay 4mo ago“Flexible” would work if Amazon prioritized moving people around when the priorities change instead of laying off and rehiring. You can easily call the typical Japanese life-long employees as “flexible” or “generalist” but not an employee of a company with median tenure rate of 1-2 years. That’s fungible.
- lowellniles 4mo agoLOL That meme. Funny because it's true.
- eranation 4mo agoSad to hear. I was at AWS between 2016 and 2021 and had a much different experience. Side note, and unpopular opinion ahead: while it takes a lot of courage to write things like this and I respect it, but being fired and writing negatively (no matter how justly) about your former employer is considered by many employers as a red flag and can hurt you going forward (even if you are 100% right).
- iJohnDoe 4mo agoReally crazy they openly talk about "fungible" in general. It shouldn't even be a thing. Also, the following line from the article is key, because that is what AWS should be concerned about. Unfortunately, due to the layoffs, they will get many applicants. However, hiring I'm sure is so broken at AWS that they won't really hire anyone. Plus, if they already are downsizing due to AI, then it's not like they will be on a hiring spree. > It also assumes that there is a limitless supply of people with the required skills, and a willingness to work for Amazon. I think one major concern here is that "apparently" AWS is in such good place they don't have to worry about anything. People, their reputation, their employees, future stability, growth. Nothing is of worry. They have reached the IBM status where everything is awesome. However, executives are usually paid precisely to worry about these things. Though, we've seen executives are pretty stupid these days. So, I guess it's clear AWS is clearly not the exception.
- luodaint 4mo agoFor organizations that make this an operational reality rather than a slogan, there is likely to be at least one individual for each product development cycle that has had recent contact with a customer. Not from reading a support transcript. From contact. That direct, uncensored communication is what the principle truly represents. The recovery from being an orphaned customer account serves as the litmus test. In this case, it took someone who was unique and non-interchangeable and poked "the right bear" -- and it succeeded. But that's precisely the way that enshittification of the principle occurs.
- newtonianrules 4mo ago[dead]