I wonder how AWS compare with their competitor
AWS Tools Suck
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#62Re: AWS Tools Suck
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I can only talk for Software Engineers. Amazon pay for engineers is by no means low, definitely above the median. But it doesn't pay top dollar either. We are constantly losing good candidates to other companies for a higher pay. That's not counting those that don't even bother applying, for which we don't have visibility.
Come on mate. If you compare every other employer on earth yes Amazon comp looks great but limit it to say FAANGs and it gets interesting. Even more when you look at vesting structures (even worse that even your 401k match vests after three years. Or that your refreshers are tied to what the current value of your past grants are etc!
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#64Does this article not need to say more than the and a picture of tools? Because that's all I see
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#65I don’t know, maybe I’m In the minority, but I quite like the tool chain around AWS. AWS CDK is a breakthrough in infra as code. It will be the standard in a few years to come. AWS SDK v3 is quite ok and will get better soon. AWS CLI is maintained and has everything well documented. Most popular services work well together. IAM is very powerful and a well thought out solution.
A big issue is lock-in, which things like k8s help mitigate. Another is price opacity, they’re the most expensive and the hardest to budget for. There is a cottage industry around helping large corps understand and plan for AWS charges.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#66I agree with points 1 and 2, but not with 3.
AWS isn't a developer tools company. It is ops tools company. In particular enterprise ops tools company. Their customers are IT managers and system administrators from large companies. That explains 1 and 2.
Famously, AWS is organized as huge bunch of two pizza teams. Essentially, it's a huge incubator for internal startups. That's how they manage to churn out new features so frequently and try out and discard unsuccessful products. Also, that is why their tools looks so damn inconsistent and why you never know what's working with what.
Regardless of money, they can't make the tools better without sacrificing something. And that is a space for competitors. Work on developer centric tools for small and medium sized companies.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#67I agree with points 1 and 2, but not with 3. AWS isn't a developer tools company. It is ops tools company. In particular enterprise ops tools company. Their customers are IT managers and system administrators from large companies. That explains 1 and 2. Famously, AWS is organized as huge bunch of two pizza teams. Essentially, it's a huge incubator for internal startups. That's how they manage to churn out new feature…
As I harped on in the AWS outage, when you combine this fact with the disruption of Stack Ranking/forced attrition, how does this lend itself to long term stability for something that is approaching utility-level importance for the economy?
Utility companies are staid and boring. That's a GOOD thing.
If AWS doesn't restructure, then what does it do? Re-re-reimplement all the internal bespoke systems that run AWS? Doesn't matter, their employees will turn over and the bitrot in those systems is about, what, four years?
Man I hope they are good at microservices!
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. It was a matter of time for that to happen. Amazon is infamous for having a firing quota, and infamous for Hiring managers to hire people, to fulfill said quota. As long as these practices remain, the situation will only worsen for Amazon
There is no firing quota.
to make this clear: as a SDM at Amazon who is probably not really authorized to speak about this - there are goals but there is no quota that says "you must fire your bottom 6%". At least, no one has said to me you must fire someone. That's just nuts. At any organization there tends to be some under performers so if you are doing your job the problem sorts it self out.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#69> 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…
Why would anyone work at Amazon except for desperation?
The hilarious thing about your "raising the bar" hiring is that the abusive hiring process, abusive work culture, abusive HR policies, and the rapidly declining reputation cap the bar. Why would good people work at fucking Amazon? They won't. So you'll end up with a bunch of backstabbing Machiavelli wannabes.
And those people that shake out of Amazon? They don't have tech talent to rise above the machiavellis, so that means they are the FAILED machiavellian backstabbers. What could be worse? That means they will be ULTRA machiavellian out of paranoia in the next workplace.
Sure, tell yourself "this happens everywhere". "It depends on the team". I have never met an amazon employee that didn't admit the place was a terrible workplace and they only worked there for the resume checkmark.
Usually this pathetic machiavellian game theory plays out in middle management. Amazon however has trickled this down to the tech workers, which is not good.
All that for "ok" pay? Your vesting is a three year carrot that the HR policies try to ensure that you won't be able to cash? What a crap company.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#70I don’t know, maybe I’m In the minority, but I quite like the tool chain around AWS. AWS CDK is a breakthrough in infra as code. It will be the standard in a few years to come. AWS SDK v3 is quite ok and will get better soon. AWS CLI is maintained and has everything well documented. Most popular services work well together. IAM is very powerful and a well thought out solution.
Same. They need a lot better tooling around lambdas etc, but CDK is really nice, especially when compared with terraform