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Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

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Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#441

Post by VRay »

a_imho wrote: post #408
whack wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors... the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy... The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-m…

I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-million in yearly income What do these people do?

I can confirm that Amazon is a stressful place so far as tech jobs go, and I saw a lot of the abusive bullshit people are talking about in this thread.

BUT I can also say that it rolled right off my back and had little effect on my friends who are still there after 5+ years

The key is to have enough savings that you don't feel like you're trapped there, IMO. And to have some real world perspective. If you've ever experienced real deal poverty then you'll laugh off anything a toxic management chain can throw at you.

I'd definitely recommend leaving Amazon ASAP in any case though, unless you're some sort of hardcore ladder-climbing business shark. I got super screwed by a lack of bonuses and raises despite being a "top performer", and it sounds like that's the norm rather than the exception.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#442

Post by throwaway981211 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #390
thefreeman wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are using the console to manage your infrastructure you're doing it wrong

You answered the questions on exactly what is wrong with the console...

How so? Op is correct - you shouldn’t be using the console to actively manage your infrastructure. The consoles primary purpose is to let you quickly spin up resources while you explore. If you have a real business use case, all your infrastructure should be defined in configuration and deployed out to AWS. That way, you always know what you need to spin up and it’s exact, specific configuration, all stored in source control.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#443

Post by throwaway981211 »

deegles wrote: post #438
throwaway981211 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT. Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It…

Is the AMZN 401k match still garbage? I remember it was a max of 2% paid out in stock with a 2 year vest.

401K match is garbage but salaries are decent. I’d say we’ve gotten far more competitive in pay, and that’s not even counting the crazy stock appreciation over the past several years. In terms of overall benefits, we aren’t competitive - which makes sense considering Amazon isn’t a cash printing machine like FB or Google. We genuinely don’t have the money to spend unless Bezos was to deliberately sell $1 billion each year for Amazon corporate benefits. That itself is a fuzzy proposition - how do you give benefits to these corporate badges while squeezing warehouse workers? If you do something, it should benefit everyone.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#444

Post by throwaway981211 »

haltingproblem wrote: post #392
throwaway981211 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT. Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It…

You (and other Amazon) employees keep saying orgs/organizations while talking about Amazon vs. Google vs. FB vs. .... I was confused and after reading for a bit I realized you mean divisions within Amazon. That might appear to be a valid distinction, to an outsider it appears less material. Perhaps you can start by describing how the culture varies within Amazon.

Amazons internal organizations all have slightly different culture, although there’s a core set of company values (Leadership Principles) that keep us bounded together.

Within Amazon, some places will absolutely grind engineers with nightmare on call rotations, untenable deadlines or deliverable dates, etc. but these things are part of any job depending on your company. What really sets Amazon apart is the brutal honesty - if you’re not performing or meeting someone’s expectation, regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable it is - you will get called out, sometimes in front of colleagues.

Over time, you learn there’s ways of influencing people or motivating them to be at their best. One such way is running a cut throat organization where people end up blaming others to save themselves - sometimes because it is the other person who dropped the ball - other times because that’s how you preserve yourself.

As a business model, this actually works. Running a cut throat organization where people are terrified to go out of line out of fear of losing their jobs - it has worked at Amazon at scale.

But to be clear - not all of Amazon is like this. I’ve been lucky to bounce between really great teams during my 7 years at this company. I’ve had one bad manager who didn’t know how to manage and honestly wasn’t qualified for his role. I’ve met people who legitimately helped me grow and become a better engineer and mentor to others. I’ve gone through two promotions. I’m paid really well.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#445

Post by zer00eyz »

throwaway981211 wrote: post #442
zer00eyz wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered the questions on exactly what is wrong with the console...

How so? Op is correct - you shouldn’t be using the console to actively manage your infrastructure. The consoles primary purpose is to let you quickly spin up resources while you explore. If you have a real business use case, all your infrastructure should be defined in configuration and deployed out to AWS. That way, you always know what you need to spin up and it’s exact, specific configuration, all stored in source…

Because when you do that nothing ever needs tweaked on the fly? Because issues of load and scale aren't often times emergent?

I am not making an argument against what you are saying. I am saying that a common interface between the two would be the sane and rational decision. It should be trivial to use the console and turn that back into your new behavior for committing back to your repository.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#446

Post by irrational »

mulander wrote: post #413
irrational wrote: post #89

We've been working on migrating from Oracle to Postgres for a few years now. We are about 2 weeks from being finished. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is totally worth it. The documentation is much much better, performance is equivalent or better, the sql dialect is saner, etc. Other than moving the data itself (ora2pg was invaluable for this), rewriting the queries is what has taken the most amount of time.…

> replace rownum rownum is a pseudocolumn numbering entries, sorting the results will give you records in non increment rownum. On such queries rownum LIMIT will give you the first record after sorting. So rownum != LIMIT and if you really want to implement the same logic you would need to use select row_number() over () as rownum in the ported query, put that into a subquery and filter with where rownum Example: sel…

Our Oracle queries are written like:

select * from ( select * from pg_class order by relname ) where rownum So select * from pg_class order by relname limit 1

works for us.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#447

Post by whack »

kbenson wrote: post #360
whack wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors... the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy... The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-m…

> However, there is a severe disconnect between the median Amazon employee's experience, and public perception. Not to get into whether Amazon employees have it good or bad, but using the software engineers to explain the median Amazon employee's experience seems a bit odd. Given that Amazon is widely reported to have well over half a million employees now, and I doubt the software engineers are anywhere near the maj…

To be precise, I meant to say the median software engineer at Amazon. My parent comment had called out "crying software engineers" and anyone who draws a paycheck from Amazon, and I was responding in that context.

I'll be honest and admit that I'm not sure what working experiences are like for the warehouse/delivery guys. However, neither does the person I'm responding to. Given how completely wrong they are in describing the median tech worker's experience, they have no credibility when it comes to warehouse workers either.

With 500,000+ employees, you can write an entire book of horror stories at Amazon, and you could still be describing only the outliers. You really can't form any judgements without using random-sampling techniques or mass-employee surveys.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#448

Post by jjoonathan »

throwaway981211 wrote: post #378
jjoonathan wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we know you've got us locked in. The steaming piles served up in the console still taste like shit.

What’s your problem domain? You shouldn’t be locked into AWS. No offense, but sounds like bad design or more generally, you or your engineers don’t know what they’re doing.

As a percentage of offerings, how much of the AWS portfolio is portable between clouds? 5%? 1%?

Of course we could re-write on a different cloud, just like Amazon can move off Oracle, but it would take time and we would put up with a lot of abuse before it happened, just like Amazon no doubt did with Oracle.

Which is what you were just bragging about: your numbers show that your customers are locked in enough that you can abuse them plenty before they can effectively retaliate.

Congrats.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#449

Post by GetOutOfBed »

grumpydba wrote: post #173
GetOutOfBed wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Postgres Yes, maybe there will be built in automatic fail over in a few years so you don't have to hack it together using a bunch of scripts. Of course there's overlap in functionality and most companies should probably chose PG over Oracle. But PG is a joke in some areas like the above mentioned.

> Yes, maybe there will be built in automatic fail over in a few years so you don't have to hack it together using a bunch of scripts. thanks microsoft !! https://github.com/citusdata/pg_auto_failover

> curl https://install.citusdata.com/community/rpm.sh | sudo bash

Yeahh I guess not. Let me know when I don't have to hack it together with a bunch of scripts and the PG team takes availability seriously.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#450

Post by WorldMaker »

philliphaydon wrote: post #396
WorldMaker wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't argue that debugging MERGE statements is easy, and that there aren't pitfalls, but it's a very declarative relational model reduce pattern so calling it "less functional" doesn't seem accurate to me, if you mean functional as in functional programming. (If you mean functional as in the raw number of features supported, I also heavily disagree because I know from past experience there are reductions you can do…

Merge in SQLServer is horrible imo. It’s horrifically slow. And causes more problems than it solves. After learning about upsert in PostgreSQL. Ah I wish we had it in sqlserver. The PostgreSQL code is so much cleaner and more efficient.

We've all got our anecdotes, of course, but I every time I replaced a CTE, cursor, or temp table sproc with an easier to read Merge statement performance skyrocketed. It wasn't even a fair challenge because all the CTEs and cursors were written WITH (NO LOCK) because who needs consistency or transactions, but yet Merge was faster with locks and transactions than CTEs avoiding them (and kowtowing to the local "we use NO LOCK in these parts" culture left them nearly "instantaneous").

Obviously, you have to watch your execution plans and make sure everything is indexed accordingly, because the guts of almost every Merge are a JOIN and if your database isn't set up for performant joins then of course you will hate Merge's performance.

And again, certainly anecdotal and a relatively long time ago in this industry's terms that I did any of that. But still something I'm fascinated by.

[ETA: Also, yes Merge is overpowered and underperformant for single row upsert, but as soon as you need bulk upsert, chef's kiss.]

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