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Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#32This 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…
> Jeff Bezos studies other “great men” in history and imagines himself to be a kind of Alexander the Great. There's even a building on the Amazon campus called Alexandria, which was the name of one of the company’s early projects to get every single book that had ever been published to be listed on Amazon.
I'd guess the building is named after the Library of Alexandria – one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world – and not because of a god complex as the story implies.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#33> Interview with someone who got an internship at aws and is now parroting things they read online.
FTFY
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#34Earlier 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.
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.
I didn't even notice the total lack of bylines or masthead. I shouldn't have thrown in the "verging on" qualifier. It is just flat irresponsible to publish this in this manner.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#35This 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…
> The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, which is an organization I have tremendous respect for, so it's really a shame that they were naive enough to publish this.
I don't see a writer listed. What am I missing?
(Disclosure -- I'm a BKC fellow this year)
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#36This 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…
> The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, which is an organization I have tremendous respect for, so it's really a shame that they were naive enough to publish this. I don't see a writer listed. What am I missing? (Disclosure -- I'm a BKC fellow this year)
I initially saw the link on her twitter feed: https://twitter.com/moiragweigel/status/1341414901143777280
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 employ…
Which is fair. I don't think the interview is meant to be read as an authoritative source of truth on Amazon culture and sales and so forth, but rather just relaying what they've heard. They're more plugged into the Amazon rumor mill than I am and I think rumors often contain kernels of truth.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#38This reads a lot like a PR piece for Amazon, with most "answers" promoting Amazon nearly like a press release and very little negative points.
A few sentences that stand out:
> If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don't want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data.
> Q: I know there have been a number of collective actions among Amazon warehouse workers around the issue of safety during the pandemic. > A: (a series of measures implemented at Amazon)
> Internally, people say, “Oh, we’re probably better than our competitions, or other warehousing and logistics companies.”
> Q: Has Ring brought Amazon into much closer relationships with law enforcement? > A: it would really surprise me if any of those relationships were the result of the Ring acquisition [...] I think Amazon also kind of backed into that situation. We only realized after the fact that we had all this data about who was coming to people’s front doors.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#39What’s an example of a division that AWS subsidizes particularly heavily? Prime Video, for one. Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life errm... That should be on their SEC risk report
I find it hard to believe that "subsidizing Prime Video" is the only way for Jeff Bezos to gain entry to the LA/NYC social scenes.
Re: Interview with an anonymous AWS cybersecurity engineer
#40This reads a lot like a PR piece for Amazon, with most "answers" promoting Amazon nearly like a press release and very little negative points. A few sentences that stand out: > If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don't want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable…
This absolutely has to be a PR piece, or one filtered through a marketing layer of some sort. The only thing that threw me for a loop are the negative points, but this could just be a clever ploy to further the deception. The company we pay to do marketing has all kinds of ridiculous tricks they propose, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is a thing.