at $1.7 billion, that unit conversion error is now the most expensive TODO comment in software history
AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
491–500 of 793 posts
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even tests but just some basic anomaly detection lol. Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
You overestimate how much people give shits at big techs like Amazon. When literally everything is driven with sticks instead of carrots, the work culture does not invite employees to proactively care about product quality. You'd be better off letting the heart attacks happen and take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead. It would be good promo doc material, and being a hero is extremely good insurance against get…
Are you speaking from experience or simply making things up? I know a fair number of former AWS engineers and managers. None of them think like this.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#493It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon. Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to…
> After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. $7,000 of credits is no problem. At that time a friendly neighborhood PM or director could issue the credit without much oversight. Your problem is the time period. Amending a bill in the same cycle is EZ. Fixing the previous cycle is a PITA but pretty common. Issuing amendments for the previous financial _years_ would be a…
Reminds me of working for a cable company and being told that even if we screwed up and stole from the customer the look back period was only a few months and if we found an error from before that we weren't supposed to correct it.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#494Vibe coded fix, resulted in many having multi billion bills. Claude really did it this time.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#495$1.7 billion is small potatoes. My bill is over $155 billion and growing. I'm worried if the trend continues I'll have depleted my rainy day fund.
I was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion!
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#496Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just today I gave my local agent a CSV which listed a bunch files with of human readable size units and asked it to count rows in each GB range. Sounds simple enough but it completely miscalculated, because it parsed MB as GB for some reason. In hindsight it would've be quicker just to do it in Excel or something.
That is literally what Excel is for. Why didn't you use that first of all?
Because I was already doing categorising and analysing same data with agent and I had my session open already. It should've been an easy task for an agent, right?
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#498Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even tests but just some basic anomaly detection lol. Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
You overestimate how much people give shits at big techs like Amazon. When literally everything is driven with sticks instead of carrots, the work culture does not invite employees to proactively care about product quality. You'd be better off letting the heart attacks happen and take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead. It would be good promo doc material, and being a hero is extremely good insurance against get…
This ^^^ amplified by indifference and not giving a shit caused by "AI Adoption".
There is literally no fucking reason to try to improve your skill. Any IDIOT with AI will do an OK job.
And no one is shooting for better than OK.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just today I gave my local agent a CSV which listed a bunch files with of human readable size units and asked it to count rows in each GB range. Sounds simple enough but it completely miscalculated, because it parsed MB as GB for some reason. In hindsight it would've be quicker just to do it in Excel or something.
I've found personally it's better to use AI to build a deterministic script for calculations like that. (anything that manipulates data should be a script not an AI).
It was just one off task and I already had agent doing categorising with the same data so I just asked it. Otherwise I agree.