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AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

health.aws.amazon.com

121–130 of 168 posts

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Strict adherence to the "hiring bar" means we fail to bring in good people who aren't desperate enough to act out the cultish LP dance during their interview." What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out? >"My team is hiring for 2-3 people and we are being buried alive without that growth happening sooner - but I can't in good conscience recommend this place to anyone I respect or like." I a…

> What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out? The "culture fit" interview process focuses on leadership principles, so lots of questions like " tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer". Being yourself will get you nowhere, you need to research the questions and the script that is expected of you. > What service does your team work on? I'm a partner-focused SA, so no…

Wow, that just seems completely performative.

Is "SA" systems admin here?

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking to see such a statement so far into the pandemic. This is solved and known already, and while complicated, we've figured it out for some time. We can easily see the massive amount of deaths when we look at excess death numbers. Covid deaths are, if anything, undercounted. To believe anything else at this point is to bury your head in the sand and avoid all scientific evidence and medical consensus. http…

Excess deaths is a perfectly valid statistic to base policy off... if policy makers maintained a hands-off approach and didn't radically change society through out the pandemic. Can you in good conscience say that the typical rate of death remained steady while the following happened: * a majority of given populations remained at home (lock downs - meaning no travelling to work in multi-tonne death traps) * practised…

> Anyone claiming to be able to work out the actual number of people who died from COVID-19 from excess deaths is being disingenous at best.

I think you have that backwards: disingenuous at worst, a scientist at best.

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#123
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be totally fine just having alerts and metrics driving the status page. Why involve a human at all? They just get emotional. (I have a data-driven status page for my personal website. If Oh Dear decides my website is down, the status page gets automatically updated. Obviously nobody is ever going to visit status.jrock.us if they are trying to read an article on my blog and it doesn't load, but hey at least I can…

> Why involve a human at all? To make a judgement call on whether the issue is severe enough to warrant the legal/financial risk of admitting your service is broken, potentially breaking customer SLAs.

Also prevents monitoring flukes and planned/transient-but-no-impact issues from showing up in dashboards.

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably increased salary and switch to permanent remote. Amazon is notorious for their frugality and they recently doubled their maximum salary cap to 350k. They would only have done this to stay competitive in the current job market. This implies that many of their existing employees are underpaid relative to their peers at comparable companies and they've likely seen a large uptick in attrition. Not to mention att…

> Amazon is notorious for their frugality and they recently doubled their maximum salary cap to 350k Does that salary cap apply to regular enterprise developers working for HR, Accounting, etc., too? If so, kudos to Amazon.

Why wouldn’t the cap apply to those devs as well?

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#125

I can't help but wonder, with the increases in attrition across the industry, are we hitting some kind of tipping point where the institutional knowledge in these massive tech corporations is disappearing? Mistakes happen all the time but when all the people who intimately know how these systems work leave for other opportunities, disasters are bound to happen more and more.

Yep. They literally need to start doubling pay to retain people. The attrition this year is going to be devastating.

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out? The "culture fit" interview process focuses on leadership principles, so lots of questions like " tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer". Being yourself will get you nowhere, you need to research the questions and the script that is expected of you. > What service does your team work on? I'm a partner-focused SA, so no…

There is nothing cultish about the way Amazon interviews. If you are a good engineer with a relevant background who can speak english you will have no problem passing these interviews. I'm not sure why you are framing it as cultish.

Native English speaker here. I was denied for unspecified reasons a couple years ago. At the time it was perplexing, as I had pretty good answers for all their questions.

Now I work at one of the slightly more sane FANMAG (to include $ms) companies.

Pretty sure I dodged a bullet, maybe the engineering manager spared me because he liked me more than I realized.

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#128

I can't help but wonder, with the increases in attrition across the industry, are we hitting some kind of tipping point where the institutional knowledge in these massive tech corporations is disappearing? Mistakes happen all the time but when all the people who intimately know how these systems work leave for other opportunities, disasters are bound to happen more and more.

Yes, absolutely. Within my own org of ~50 people, 15% have resigned/contracts ending during Q1 (after 15% in Q4). Of the remaining 85%.. 20% have been around since before COVID / 65% joined during COVID.

Of our senior engineers & team leads, 70% have joined in last 6-9 months.

Only 3 full time senior engineers with 2 years or more tenure.

We've grown during COVID but we've also just burned through people.

Turnover has hit the point where we stopped doing going away zoom toasts.. people just sort of disappeared.

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#129
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be honest. My external impression of Amazon and Google could not be more distant in this regard. Google doesn’t have nearly as hard a time retaining good people as Amazon does.

From within AWS, it just feels like we push people too hard. Service teams are too small relative to their goals, sales teams have unrealistic growth targets and also double as support for needy/incompetent customers, and professional services have billable hour requirements which are as high as any major consultancy and with additional pre-sales support expectations. Strict adherence to the "hiring bar" means we fai…

https://goomics.net/329/

Re: AWS's us-east-1 region is experiencing issues

#130

I can't help but wonder, with the increases in attrition across the industry, are we hitting some kind of tipping point where the institutional knowledge in these massive tech corporations is disappearing? Mistakes happen all the time but when all the people who intimately know how these systems work leave for other opportunities, disasters are bound to happen more and more.

Resolved in 7 mins. Can you do better?

Nice work, keep it up. It’s surely not easy managing that many companies computer systems.
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