Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

adventuresinoss.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 151 posts

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#121

Post by smitty1e »

baq wrote: post #95
smitty1e wrote: post #20

The "fungible" point sounds as though the "cattle, not pets" ethos of the infrastructure management has leaked into the management of the staff.

Always has been, IT has been resisting due to (as pointed out in the article) institutional knowledge required, but this is now going away as LLMs can efficiently and accurately write it down and search it. Meta turning ICs into data labelers is trying to make knowledge workers fungible; expect others to follow.

"Trying" being the operator.

Meta can get its Sysiphus on all it likes; whether or not genius pours forth remains to be seen.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#122

Post by thin_carapace »

Barbing wrote: post #68
thin_carapace wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

westerners are loaded with the context that much work is outsourced to india for profit purposes. is indian a race? if it isnt a race, why are you making this about race?

What are the chances of someone winning the “(whatever) is not a race“

turnabout is fair play

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#123

Post by peatmoss »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #70
bix6 wrote: post #16

I’ve been hearing Amazon is going to run out of bodies for years now and yet they keep chugging along.

I have worked there for 8 years now and we ARE running out of bodies. It has become extremely difficult to hire at any level, we have had an open position on my team for a senior data scientist for a year and a half now, with barely any candidate applying, and none of them being competent. Similarly the average level of new employees has dropped dramatically. The famous "hiring bar" is now below ground.

Curious what you're looking for in that position as the aperture for what DS do at AWS is quite broad (my current role). DM me if you want to chat—contact info in profile.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#124

Post by baq »

smitty1e wrote: post #121
baq wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always has been, IT has been resisting due to (as pointed out in the article) institutional knowledge required, but this is now going away as LLMs can efficiently and accurately write it down and search it. Meta turning ICs into data labelers is trying to make knowledge workers fungible; expect others to follow.

"Trying" being the operator. Meta can get its Sysiphus on all it likes; whether or not genius pours forth remains to be seen.

I hope they fail obviously, but I have to respect the exponential they’re betting on.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#125

Post by [deleted] »

fooker wrote: post #39
mattmanser wrote: post #28

I 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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#126

Post by x0x0 »

fooker wrote: post #39
mattmanser wrote: post #28

I 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.

In 2008, Softlayer did monthly rental with provisioning of baremetal servers in hours. They quite likely did it earlier, but I used them in 2008.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#127

Post by _DeadFred_ »

anal_reactor wrote: post #85
fweimer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long before GenAI, I saw people using meme generators a lot in corporate presentations. I found that equally jarring. Replacing that with GenAI stuff is probably an improvement. At least it's reducing legal risk. It seems more understandable to a global audience, too. I still don't have an explanation why people are doing this. Is it part of leadership training? Or do presenters have their own theory that including t…

People have a thing that they mimic the behavior of those above them in the hierarchy. CEO used a meme once because they thought it's funny, then everyone did this in order to mimic CEO. Why was leetcode so popular? Because Google did it and they were the cool kids at the time.

Being a grey beard, white board tests were popular because we didn't have an applicant pool experienced in software development. So we gave people logic and problem solving tests to see if they had the right type of thinking/temperament to train them up to be software devs. They didn't evolve into the trash they are now until later.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#128

Post by _DeadFred_ »

Silhouette wrote: post #103
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd work there (if they hired here lmao), they pay good and it looks good on a CV. Or well, it would where I live (europe).

I'm not sure FAANG does look good on a CV any more. The skill set to be effective in those environments is quite specialised and crucially it's very different to what you need in a lot of other software development organisations. There appeared to be a happy cycle for a while where very well paid devs working in one of the few FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies could jump to one of the others because they were "in the…

When I worked in aerospace one of the surprising things to learn was we had an unwritten 'max allowed' percentage of people hired from Boeing overall and applied to each team because we did not want to incorporate Boeing's culture. If I was still in management at a software company I'd probably apply that as a consideration with regards to FAANG. Even for those hired ex-Boeing had a much stricter vetting not on skills but personality/approach/vibe(?).

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#129

Post by newaccountman2 »

Silhouette wrote: post #62
Max-Ganz-II wrote: post #40

Over 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'…

AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague. Even Stripe - once legendary for the quality of its support - has apparently given up now. I had to deal with it recently over a case where the merchant was seeing an unexpected change in the way it was collecting payments and the AI bot was worse than useless…

> AI "support" bots that just attempt to read the published documentation for you are possibly the most annoying thing to have come out of the current AI plague.

I disagree, personally. The way they were employed in GP's example, yeah, that's annoying and hostile.

But almost every time I go to some documentation page for a commercial product now and it doesn't have that, I find it pretty annoying (I don't expect an open source library to wire this up and pay for it, ofc).

It means I have to convey these docs to my own LLM, I will waste cycles and tokens fetching them, etc.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#130

Post by OrangeDelonge »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #128
Silhouette wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure FAANG does look good on a CV any more. The skill set to be effective in those environments is quite specialised and crucially it's very different to what you need in a lot of other software development organisations. There appeared to be a happy cycle for a while where very well paid devs working in one of the few FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies could jump to one of the others because they were "in the…

When I worked in aerospace one of the surprising things to learn was we had an unwritten 'max allowed' percentage of people hired from Boeing overall and applied to each team because we did not want to incorporate Boeing's culture. If I was still in management at a software company I'd probably apply that as a consideration with regards to FAANG. Even for those hired ex-Boeing had a much stricter vetting not on skill…

What is the Boeing culuture like?
Post reply on HN