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AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
- ablation 5mo agoA challenging writing style on a really difficult to read page with a sloppy AI header image means that this article was a not a great experience.
- gchamonlive 5mo agoJust use browser's reader mode already or skip to the next article.
- tcp_handshaker 5mo ago[flagged]
- bakugo 5mo agoThe author wanted to thank someone who put real human effort into helping him, and call out Amazon for firing that person and other support staff to replace them with AI. He decided the right way to do this would be to use AI to generate a post about it. Personally, the message I get out of this is: "I don't give a damn about others, but others should give a damn about me"
- agmater 5mo agoIt's like reading an article that drops in "moist" in every sentence, I'm literally uncomfortable trying to read this
- arkon_hn 5mo agoExtremely difficult to read when it's completely broken in Firefox (Focus at least).
- shiandow 5mo agoReader mode seems to salvage most of it. Though I will never understand why people mess with basic operations like scrolling.
- threatofrain 5mo agoJust have Claude digest it, that's the future we're heading toward. But what is after that?
- KolmogorovComp 5mo agoYeah, unbearable AI-writing at a level not seen often, it's like the author purposely asked it to be even more bloated than usual.
- Nevermark 5mo ago> with a sloppy AI header image Remember the good old days with real honest CGI? At some point AI is going to produce realistic situationally-sensible images, with creative restraint. That will unleash another wave of disruption and dissonance. It throws a different spin on the phrase "living in a simulation".
- almostdeadguy 5mo agoLinguists centuries from now are going to wonder why everyone suddenly started writing like Paul Graham.
- Boxxed 5mo agoThe massive AI generated image header is more than a little bit ironic
- relativeadv 5mo agoThe obviously ai generated dramatic prose. The entire site has the veneer of AI generation as well. The gradient background, the glowing header text, the monospaced fonts, the dots next to the footer subnav items that serve no purpose. If i were writing a blog today i would take comfort knowing it has never been easier to stand out by simply being yourself.
- notpushkin 5mo agoThe “Question? Answer.” format seems way overused, too. I don’t usually comment on “LLMiness” of blog posts, but here it seems to somewhat devalue the point the author is trying to make. It is, indeed, heartbreaking to learn that the one person in a giant corporation that cared about your problem enough to pull some strings and fix it gets laid off. But if you truly care about them, why don’t you try and write about it yourself, in your own voice?
- andrewstuart 5mo agoThat name looks familiar. He is the only person from AWS who contacted me after my account got locked for 5 days because AWS thought it was vaguely possible my account might possibly be (but wasn’t) hacked. Any company who wants support people who care ….. give Tarus Balog a job. He seems to be ………. “Customer Obsessed”. Everyone else ….. why are you still using AWS?
- haburka 5mo agoI think this kind of overly dramatic writing makes me struggle to respect the arguments in the piece. Like the blog writer has this style like they’re documenting the collapse of humanity or something when really it’s just a massive cloud company taking some direction that may be suboptimal. I understand this tone can be helpful to drive effective change but I think it should be reserved for situations where people are actually suffering as opposed to when extremely well paid people engineers are laid off.
- lacewing 5mo agoThis is an AI-written story. It exists to get upvoted and reshared, so overly-dramatic language is the point.
- bakugo 5mo ago> Like the blog writer has this style You mean Claude has this style.
- eoskx 5mo agoClaude's style is now overuse of sentence fragments, which this "article" has in spades. Fragments are the new emdash or "delve".
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoI’ll miss when em dashes were a key giveaway. This generation of LLM has one sure fire tell. We’ll look back on 2026 AIs fondly.
- klodolph 5mo agoBeautiful, lovely sentence fragments. Last I heard, I was on the HN em dash leaderboard, and now sentence fragments?
- pfdietz 5mo agoAnd here's the thing
- catigula 5mo ago
- tcp_handshaker 5mo agoHe should not take it personally. Its clear it was a decision by the algo...The AI probably saw "reduced escalations" and concluded he was no longer needed.
- qsxfthnkp2322 5mo agoThe only people or thing to blame for reduction of workforce is leadership/management. F** them.
- vintagedave 5mo ago> The man who triggered a CEO-level investigation into AWS’s own dysfunction? Gone within ten months. > I’m not saying there’s a direct line from saving my account to getting fired... Either way, this is a very poor look for Amazon.
- Spooky23 5mo agoWait? I thought only Google did stuff like this, and AWS was an amazing, customer obsessed(tm) organization?
- qsxfthnkp2322 5mo agoApple does this shit too.
- andrewstuart 5mo agoIt is…. in the imaginations of management.
- bayesnet 5mo ago> Not a product launch. Not a keynote. Not a revenue metric. The thing he was most proud of in four years at one of the biggest companies on … What’s tiresome about this is that people don’t even bother to edit it. I use LLMs to draft long-form text all the time because I think the hardest part is getting something on the page to refine. But I would be embarrassed to leave LLM tells like this in the final result, if only because I want people to know that I actually cared about what I’m asking them to read and that I value their time. It’s especially ironic here because this is about lauding a person who cut through the impersonal behavior of a large organization. Evidently this person was not worth even an editorial pass over the article though.
- jadar 5mo agoThis piece imputes motives that I feel like is rather impossible to prove. Is it a bad look? Yes. Did it come from malicious intentions / retribution? Unlikely.
- Octoth0rpe 5mo agoI think the lack of motives are part of the argument: that aws management is acting with complete indifference, not out of malice; and that this indifference is leading to the people who actually make a difference being forced out.
- jadar 5mo agoBut that's a weak argument, an argument from silence. And a pretty lame one at that. "You didn't say it's wrong to kill puppies, therefore you must be indifferent to killing puppies."
- hilariously 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- recursivedoubts 5mo agowhy ruin what could be a great human-centric story w/so much AI generated content? this could be a heartfelt three paragraph article and have far more emotional impact.
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoThe Bureaucracy of the mundane is totalizing and is intended to put up what look like “understandable” barriers David Graeber already covered this a decade ago > Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It also exemplifies what I have come to think of as the defining feature of certain utopian forms of practice: that is, ones where those maintaining the system, on discovering that it will regularly produce such failures, conclude that the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved—or, indeed, of human beings in general. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-ut...
- eoskx 5mo agoAI generated slop. Why would anyone waste the time to read this if you won't take the time to thoughtfully write something?
- renyicircle 5mo agoThe way the author thanks the person from AWS who helped him with a human approach is an AI generated article blaming AWS for using AI. Brilliant.
- frenchtoast8 5mo ago> Not AI-generated. Not everyone is born writing flawless English. If it sounds like an LLM, maybe it is because people like me had to learn how to write clearly from LLMs because English is not our first language. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44774474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44774474
- mh- 5mo agoYou cut off the part where he says he did "use AI to resort it". > Yes, i used AI to resort it [..]
- KolmogorovComp 5mo agofrom the same post > Yes, i used AI to resort it, It may be not "generated", as in it's a true story, but the writing is AI.
- wavemode 5mo agoThat comment appears to be from 9 months ago, regarding an entirely different article. Also, you've cut out the part where he says he did use AI, but just to "resort" the article (by which I assume he means "reorganize"). Whether one believes that is gonna be a judgment call I suppose.
- Aurornis 5mo agoThe article is clearly AI written. You can also see in their account history where they’re switching between their own writing style or copy and pasting from an LLM. Most LLM copy-paste accounts will deny it when called out.
- Planktonne 5mo agoThe author's voice in that comment doesn't sound like their writing in the article(s). Maybe they're being sincere, and they just edited it so heavily with AI that it comes out sounding generated, but that's a distinction without a difference.
- jerf 5mo agoYou know, sometimes corporate America forgets its own principles. You know, Mr. CEO, how you don't really much care why the system went down, you just want it fixed ASAP, no excuses, just get it done? You know what? We customers are the same way. We don't care why something broke. All we see is that it broke. We are going to take appropriate actions, and you can't stop us. We don't care that you say it was AI. It was broken. We don't care that you got lots of cost savings from firing the employees that actually knew what they were doing. It was broken. We don't care why it broke. It was broken. Enjoy the window of being able to say "but it was AI" and getting anything from it. It won't last long. We don't care. We don't care for this excuse any more than you're going to accept it from your own employees for much longer.
- happymellon 5mo agoThey've been milking the elevated volume of calls thats been happened over the past 6 years...
- bragr 5mo agoThe original blog post this references is a better read: https://www.adventuresinoss.com/aws-four-years/ https://www.adventuresinoss.com/aws-four-years/
- _pdp_ 5mo agoIn the age of abundant intelligence the most valuable thing will be human capital - especially those that give a damn.
- BariumBlue 5mo agoYeah, I think one issue is that AI fundamentally dgaf about you and your code base. They don't have a salary on the line, and from their perspective it's not some project they super care about. I think they're happy to help, and dutiful to orders, but if the business dies in two years because of crap code that's no skin off their back.
- schnitzelstoat 5mo ago> that’s not a career pivot. That’s a trauma response. > he wasn’t being philosophical. He was describing the exact contradiction that made his own job impossible. Is this written by AI? It has the typical "That's not X. That's Y." phrasing. A bit ironic given the content.
- jaapz 5mo ago> Is this written by AI? Would an author come here on hacker news and just post rage-baiting AI slop? For sure not!
- zdc1 5mo agoI've seen some other posts on this site and yeah it's probably AI, and low-quality writing regardless. Excellent candidate for throwing into AI and asking for a summary; if you bother reading it at all.
- hdndjsbbs 5mo agoIt sounds like this employee was on a team whose goal was to build developer goodwill in open source. Of course now that AWS is piling money into the AI furnace they're cutting that team. This article should be called "the guy who made the best sandwiches in our free staff cafeteria got laid off".
- SpaceL10n 5mo ago| When the people who built and operated your cloud would rather knead dough than touch a terminal again, that’s not a career pivot. That’s a trauma response. Yes it is and I'm glad someone has said it. I didn't realize it until now.
- protomikron 5mo ago> Not a X. Not a Y. Not a Z. The thing he was most proud [...]" This construction - how is it called? It is clear "AI speak" - at least I remember Claude talking like that (even if it is code).
- ramblurr 5mo agoGosh. I am very interested in the story here. But I find that I can't engage with the text, because all my attention is going to is noticing the AI-isms. The way in which a message is delivered matters.
- gorjusborg 5mo agoThis is what happens to companies who dominate completely; they stop playing the game that they were winning and start playing a different game. While the article speaks about an individual getting fired from a giant corporate behemoth, all I could think is, most people in the company probably have zero idea who that is. Big becomes a problem in itself, and you start having to solve the problems of bigness instead of the problems you were solving that made you big.
- huflungdung 5mo ago[dead]
- zug_zug 5mo agoThough perhaps a bit long-winded and emotional, it's charming to see something so sincere still in this era. It's not clear that this individual was fired for being too helpful, but it's been my experience that escalation 2 or more levels to report a problem is always a threat to your career, because it means you're exposing a failure within your management chain. In this case it went all the way up to the CEO, so it's entirely possible he was mentally marked for "eventual downsizing after enough time to not raise red flags" (To be clear this is a failure by organizations to protect their own bottom line. By not protecting/rewarding people for calling out systemic they incentivize all sorts of dishonesty by managers and directors which are the rule and not the exception in my experience. Famously there was the amazon case about how long customer support took to answer)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ath3nd 5mo ago[dead]
- jalev 5mo agoExisting HN discussion from the ex-AWS engineer's side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254475 AI writing aside, I still think the author has a point: the customer-centric AWS/Amazon of yesterday is not really there any more, or at least appears in a form that isn't recognisable or useful to every day users.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoIf Jeff Bezos was a less terrible person AWS might be a better product and Amazon a better place to work. In this story, AI is front and center. It plays the protagonist, and while we all know AI is terrible, I think this distracts somewhat from the poisonous Amazon corporate culture that created the situation where AI became that villain.
- ritzaco 5mo agoIt's annoying when people post slop with no substance, but it's somehow worse when there's actual substance _hidden_ by the slop. I'd probably much rather have read the prompt for this article than whatever this is. Anyway, I use my `buzzoff.wtf` slop site for this kind of thing. Originally built so I could figure out what startups actually did behind all their buzzword landing pages, but now also to get a summary of articles like this to decide if it's worth reading or not https://buzzoff.wtf/https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-fired-the-human-who-made-the-difference/ https://buzzoff.wtf/https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-fired-th...
- jms703 5mo agoCompanies are not loyal to the employees. When choosing people for layoffs, I don’t believe anyone cares about the things this person did or was known for. As long as the site stays up.
- squeedles 5mo agoEvery corporation of sufficient size turns into a blind elephant, walking in one direction and trampling everything in its path. This is just the nature of bureaucracy, but there has always been someone somewhere within the organization that could tug on the elephants ear or whack it with a stick in the right place, to make it avoid an obstacle now and then. The trick was always finding the person, but now the elephant has no handlers because all of the people are gradually being removed. It's like all the tech bros watched "The Matrix" thirty years ago and said "What a great business model!"
- hansvm 5mo ago> a -dry vs --dry flag I've mentioned this before, but you want the default to be a dry run and for there to be a --commit, --prod, --for-real, or whatever you want to call it to opt in to the destructive behavior.
- SG- 5mo agofired or laid off?
- jmclnx 5mo agoYour management not caring about 1 user's satisfaction in Computing is as old as multi-user systems. Nice to see someone in this day and age still cared to help out a user.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- krinne 5mo agoAmazon has this thing of stack ranking and firing the lowest performing employees - its just a pattern that works for them as it creates urgency with all the employees who remain. This is probably all there is to it.
- nunez 5mo ago100% AI generated according to Pangram.
- hansmayer 5mo ago[flagged]
- mawadev 5mo agoThe article is clearly AI generated and I was assuming the author was using AI to write from the perspective of the guy Tarus helped out. Seems like it is a real story, but using AI to write this article over dramatically is a very odd delivery and put me off initially. I just hope the guy rewrites this post to be less AI and drama and more about the human essence of what just happened here. It is a very human story and an interesting discussion nonetheless.
- harrouet 5mo ago[dead]
- mlinhares 5mo agoI'm surprised these companies still have people on devrel, it always felt like the easiest layoff to do as its very hard to tie direct results to devrel work. If you're in a position like that, better start thinking about plan B cos it isn't getting any better.
- benterix 5mo agoI'm torn these days. The subject matter is interesting, but the LLM writing cliches just make it unreadable, I gave up after half a minute.
- roncesvalles 5mo agoAlso, can we normalize calling layoffs "firings" because that's exactly what they are? You weren't "laid off", you were fired, because the company doesn't need you anymore. Calling it a "layoff" exonerates the company, as if it was something unfortunate and outside their control.
- dzogchen 5mo agoWhy use an AI slop image in an article that complains about AI?
- obieonek 5mo agoI found this article looking for one or any of employees speaking out just like I found one title Google Employees Say Stop Selling Technology to Cops. The following will give an idea of my concern. The problem that nobody addresses is that police have overtaken FBI in authority because of their ability to commit espionage. The courts and all agencies have been accessed in every way possible by AWS "highly available" services "mission critical". So an agenda is there given by unelected officials. It looks like the WTO is Firstnet Authority and has created a network under the secrecy of DHS fusion centers run by a version of "Nazified Police."If we treat this like a coup and the fraud, which you have no idea how extensive it is thanks to AWS, as a bounty, we would be better off. From their site . aws Government Improve public safety and justice outcomes with the AWS Cloud Justice and Public Safety (JPS) agencies are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy cost-effective and highly-available mission critical services to serve their public and protect their employees.
- costa_fot 5mo agoI am sorry this is such a slopfest how did it even get this high on HN
- Gerry_Kelly 5mo ago[dead]