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AWS Tools Suck

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41–50 of 73 posts

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#41
post #35

> Reason 2: AWS doesn't sell based on Dev Ex AWS's core is developer experience. AWS is an API. Anybody who does not realize or can not exploit this fact this pays massive premiums for using it (probably a lot of businesses which should have no business using AWS directly). The application tooling is extra. And as far as I can tell, AWS is the only major public cloud that has decent coverage by tools of any flavour a…

GCP is pretty pleasant overall. The API, command line, and UI are all pretty good. Vast majority of functionality is supported in all three places too. Like all providers, they have a few services that suck but overall Google has done a great job at developer experience.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#42
post #6

> This is not a case of “not enough resources'', this is a case of the project not getting the internal priority to invest in improvement. This is only partly true. Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. So yes, parts of Amazon have prioritised new/more features over improving existing ones, and some are drowning in a sea of legacy. But also parts simply don't…

I guess some people work for shitty companies because it makes their cv look "good"? And the pay is probably decent too. But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul.

If Amazon engineers said they never work more than 40 hours a week and shut off their work phones at 5, I’d consider their pay decent.

And maybe it’s true. But I’m not sure.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#43
I'm quite surprised at this blog post, since AWS has popular tools like CDK that make creating cloud resources developer friendly, while leveraging familiar programming languages and high level constructs. A lot of the partner and 3rd party options are more targeted (imo) for supporting multi-cloud use case with a unified tool and to provide an alternative to AWS native tooling.

Disclaimer: I work at Amazon.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#44
post #39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no firing quota.

According to multiple sources, Amazon has a policy to have 6% UnRegrettedAtiration. which in normal speak is 6% of employees to be fired per year. and managers are expected to fullfil this quota, and backfil it if they failed to meet it previously. Here is a recent news mentioning it: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unre...

Nuance, but you can have someone leave you don’t regret without firing someone.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#45
post #40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul. Bell Laboratory's was a thing....

That's because T.N. Vail was a visionary leader. They are in short supply nowadays.

Hot take

If that's what your interested in go work at Tesla or SpaceX.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#46
Comparing Aws tools to Terraform and Pulumi doesn’t feel fair. Compare against Azure and Gcloud. IMHO all cloud devops tools kind of suck, third parties included, but man do they cover a lot of complexity

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#47
post #4

Long ago AWS reached the point where feature prioritization was discussed in terms of millions of $$ in revenue. When you have CTOs at Fortune 500 companies waving 10s of millions of dollars in front of your face to build a feature, it's much much easier to prioritize building that over one that is requested by smaller developers with uncertain revenue impact. > The only conclusion is: bad tooling isn't affecting the…

Shouldn't a company of that size and revenue be able to do both at the same time? I have absolutely no evidence to back this but I think they are actually making money of the bad tooling. Firstly, because it requires and also creates an army of cloud AWS consultants that works as free sales persons for AWS. Secondly, this army creates overly complicated and expensive solutions which then only they can change, and the…

> Shouldn't a company of that size and revenue be able to do both at the same time?

On its own, probably, but holistically it’s always more complicated than that. They don’t have infinite resources and zero coordination costs, so they still have to make product development tradeoffs.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#48
post #6

> This is not a case of “not enough resources'', this is a case of the project not getting the internal priority to invest in improvement. This is only partly true. Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. So yes, parts of Amazon have prioritised new/more features over improving existing ones, and some are drowning in a sea of legacy. But also parts simply don't…

> Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck.

This is only true because Amazon refuses to pay market rates for talent. E.g. for the folks who write their technical documentation, they require that they have the technical skills of senior engineers, but pay them closer to what you would pay a recent college grad to churn out SEO blogspam. If they actually payed their technical writers the same amount (or more) as their engineers, their documentation would be great. They have the money to do so, they just refuse to actually do it, because they're big enough that they can externalize the costs of bad documentation onto their customers.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#49
> If the decision maker cared about developer experience why do they keep choosing AWS?

If you have to go to the cloud what else is better. Google, MS? If you press hard enough the same amount of shit drops on your feets.

Re: AWS Tools Suck

#50
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to multiple sources, Amazon has a policy to have 6% UnRegrettedAtiration. which in normal speak is 6% of employees to be fired per year. and managers are expected to fullfil this quota, and backfil it if they failed to meet it previously. Here is a recent news mentioning it: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unre...

Nuance, but you can have someone leave you don’t regret without firing someone.

Sure, but let's say that the quota is not met organically and only 3% leave voluntarily. Then to achieve the target 6% unregretted attrition for an org, you'd necessarily need to pick a different 3% to fire/push out.
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