This is like interviewing a dog about the inter workings of the household that owns him.
Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
21–30 of 71 posts
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#22[deleted]
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is verging on irresponsible journalism to give this person anonymity without providing any details on their knowledge or credentials and seemingly spending no effort challenging or fact checking any of these answers. That isn't how these pieces are supposed to be written.
There's a massive off vibe for me in things like > So if you have cancer and you might die from your cancer, we won't help you get treatment It just feels.. off. I wouldn't go as far to say the person doesn't work at Amazon at all and instead wants to jab at them but I'm definitely thinking it loudly
To me it feels like someone was kind of bullshitting with their friends and maybe making themselves seem more knowledgeable and important than they really are. It's totally irresponsible to put it in print.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#24This person is very clearly mixing things that he knows directly, things that he's read about in books (e.g. Amazon's strategy in the early days), and rumors that he's heard (e.g. Jeff Bezos' personal life). There's no way that a cybersecurity engineer at a company as sprawling as Amazon has reliable firsthand knowledge on so many different unrelated topics. The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Cent…
It is verging on irresponsible journalism to give this person anonymity without providing any details on their knowledge or credentials and seemingly spending no effort challenging or fact checking any of these answers. That isn't how these pieces are supposed to be written.
It is verging on irresponsible journalism
No names. No contact information. No accountability.
This isn't journalism. It's a random blog that claims to put out a print edition three times a year.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#25This person is very clearly mixing things that he knows directly, things that he's read about in books (e.g. Amazon's strategy in the early days), and rumors that he's heard (e.g. Jeff Bezos' personal life). There's no way that a cybersecurity engineer at a company as sprawling as Amazon has reliable firsthand knowledge on so many different unrelated topics. The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Cent…
Giving the benefit of the doubt, he sounds like an experienced senior guy so he's surely plugged in to internal communications, discussions, and rumors. And a lot of times in security there are opportunities to work with a large cross-section of teams.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
This person is almost certainly not that intimately familiar with Jeff's private life. Take this with a grain of salt.
Look man if HN isn’t the place for wildly overconfident, wholly unsubstantiated speculation then idk what it is for
Let's not kid ourselves - HN is Valleywag with a lower kill count
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#27In light of shake-ups at the US Post Office in 2020, this ... smells funny. "The rumors that I hear, both internal and external, are that we're very seriously interested in acquiring post office real estate. The reason why the post office is valuable to privatize is because of their real estate holdings. They have great real estate in every downtown of every city in the United States. Amazon may be interested in buyi…
Actually, it's common knowledge in commercial real estate circles that the USPS is trying to unload prime downtown properties.
Chicago's Old Main Post Office (so massive that it has an interstate highway running through it and 18 train tracks under it) was recently redeveloped for a bunch of tech companies.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#28This person is very clearly mixing things that he knows directly, things that he's read about in books (e.g. Amazon's strategy in the early days), and rumors that he's heard (e.g. Jeff Bezos' personal life). There's no way that a cybersecurity engineer at a company as sprawling as Amazon has reliable firsthand knowledge on so many different unrelated topics. The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Cent…
Giving the benefit of the doubt, he sounds like an experienced senior guy so he's surely plugged in to internal communications, discussions, and rumors. And a lot of times in security there are opportunities to work with a large cross-section of teams.
I've worked with engineers at Amazon up to the senior principal level. Even if you grant that people in cybersecurity see a broader swath of the company, there's just no way that he can talk authoritatively about everything from AWS sales tactics, to hiring practices for former DoD procurement people, to real estate strategy to Amazon's own supply chain, to Jeff B.'s personal life. It would be like a mid-level employee at State Department talking about how the Trump administration views farm policy, and what the National Park Service is planning, and what types of cool things the US Mint is cooking up. That State Department guy might have heard about a lot of those things either from reading the news or from talking to buddies, but he wouldn't come within a mile of it as part of his job.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#29Kind of tangential, but > If you're working in Seattle for Amazon and you're good at your job and you want to leave your job tomorrow, you have far fewer opportunities. Where are you going to go, Microsoft? There's not nearly as much mobility. So I think a big part of the reason we have less organizing [than Google] is that people are more afraid to jeopardize their jobs. If you want to stay in the Northwest, you kee…
It’s a very strange take.
There’s the obvious big ones — Amazon and Microsoft. Then second tier places — Boeing, Starbucks, Nintendo, etc.
Then there’s the tech satellites — Google and FB both have large offices. IBM and Oracle both have cloud teams.
Then there’s traditional companies opening satellites for tech talent — eg Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, and WarnerMedia.
And then everyone at the bar does a startup.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#30As someone who pays for and reads Logic Mag, I would caution others to take what is said here with a grain of salt, and also not to be surprised by the low quality interviews they feature, often with a rambling lack of focus. I started purchasing issues of Logic after reading one promising excerpt at a bookstore. However the overt biases of what topics they cover/how they cover them, the frequent reliance on vague anonymous sources of dubious quality, clear political biases, and low signal to noise ratio mean the current issue may be my last.