> They view almost all employees as “fungible”
I'm glad to see that one core amazon principle has endured the 10 years since I worked there, even if none of the actual leadership principles have survived /s
Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
31–40 of 151 posts
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#32I’ve been hearing Amazon is going to run out of bodies for years now and yet they keep chugging along.
There are now more highly competent devs ready to work for cheap available now than ever before and all of them are boosted with state of the art coding agents…
It‘s the golden age for software engineer employers.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#33> Amazon has a really odd viewpoint when it comes to the people who work there. They view almost all employees as “fungible”.
Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die. With that said, due to its late-stage capitalistic ethos, Amazon is just too overly gleeful about this tasteless reality of life. It's the equivalent of a nephew coming to an aunt's funeral and shouting "A week ago, I told her everybody dies! And now she did! Wasn't I right??? Everybody dies!"
> Also, last year the focus at AWS turned fully and almost desperately toward GenAI.
I wonder if I'm being too cynical, but late-stage capitalism companies also love profiteering, and the mere prospect of firing all those pesky workers and not having to pay their salaries is like cocaine to those organizations. Which is why I think Amazon fulfillment centers will at some point rent robots at a price point between 2x and 3x their current human labor costs, in the hope that it will eventually make economic sense.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#34I’ve been hearing Amazon is going to run out of bodies for years now and yet they keep chugging along.
The economy sucks, and they do pay decently for software engineers. Especially now that the rest of FAANG aren't massively over-paying for college hires, I doubt the supply of bright young minds will ever entirely dry up.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#35I'm also an AWS alumni from many years back now, and truthfully, the organizational problems really took off when Jassy moved to being CEO of amazon as a whole and major leaders left the company (Charlie Bell, et al.).
There were always other problems too, pressure on the company in both directions across many different product lines on both cost (any number of cheaper baremetal providers who are much faster at providing customers instances than they were a decade ago), and product quality (any number of startups to now bigger companies, databricks probably being the biggest success) along with a number of expensive bets that were made that didn't work out especially as interest rates began to rise (there were numbers of of different services ranging from IoT, AI, business support, robotics, groundstation, that essentially all failed).
AI infra being their latest bet, along with doubling down on custom hardware is smart, but these roles don't require the same number of SWEs and instead require a different type of high skilled professional.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#36Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#37“I have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company.” Many storied companies can be described this way. It’s a shame. Have any companies hit such scale and kept the ethos and magic of before? Is it inevitable for companies to enshitify themselves in the pursuit of their shar…
Not possible once big parts of the company start not knowing other big parts of the company and the company also has a board of directors that must increase shareholder value at all costs.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#38I thought Amazon only did memos, not slide decks. Has that changed, or is it the non-AWS part of Amazon?
They have always done slide decks for external communications. Internally the 1/6 pager were king across the engineering teams at least
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#39I was enjoying the article and then he makes some of the most bizarre claims about what cloud did and how we had to provision servers If any of you young'uns read this, that is not how we had to do provisioning before cloud. VMs already existed before AWS came out. You could already provision a new server usually in minutes and rent it month to month. In fact, all the existing VM server companies had to start calling…
AWS was launched around 2006 (2002 internally at Amazon I think).
Where could you rent VMs in 2006?
IIRC there were two ways to run stuff, get your own server or get an account on a big shared computer.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#40Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years.
This was for a question about how billing works.
It went like this;
1. Case created.
2. Unassigned for seven days.
3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn't find an answer, he couldn't - which is good, he didn't try to give me the wrong answer - he escalates. That's fine - a lot of questions are simple and even silly, and first line support is there to handle them - but they could have done all this without me, if they'd opened the ticket themselves rather than me having to chase.
4. Eleven days later, comes back with exactly the wrong answer. In the meantime, I had figured out the correct answer, and reply, explaining it to him.
5. Next day, I get a wall of plainly AI generated text telling me my answer is correct.
It seems to me a key issue here relating to AI generated text, is a misunderstanding on the part of AWS that I as a consumer will value that answer exactly (or indeed, even remotely) as I would value the answer from a human.
I do not. I almost ignore AI generated text, as I think it as unvalidated response.