Not that I disagree with the points in the article, but 2022 is hardly the high point of Amazon. That ship sailed decades ago.
[flagged]
Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
11–20 of 151 posts
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#12I think a key goal of senior management at any big company in the last 6 months is to make rank and file fungible or obsolete. It’s one big experiment. There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
> There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue.
There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value.
I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (and possibly violent) transition to whatever comes next.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#13I used to see AI generated images with lots of unintelligible writing or misspelled words in slides, but the speaker left them in anyway. “Good enough” is not customer obsession. This enforced adoption of immature GenAI reminds me of Milo Minderbinder trying to make people eat cotton in Catch 22 , because he had inadvertently obtained a huge amount of it.
I don't know if there is another industry that behaves this childishly. There might be. But good grief, how much more juvenile can ours possibly get? AI-generated images with obviously nonsensical text is something I never thought I'd see in professional meetings. But it is becoming more and more common.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#14Not that I disagree with the points in the article, but 2022 is hardly the high point of Amazon. That ship sailed decades ago.
[deleted]
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#15The account recovery story says a lot. At some size, companies start handling people as tickets. Sometimes it only gets fixed because one person inside still cares.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#16I’ve been hearing Amazon is going to run out of bodies for years now and yet they keep chugging along.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#17This genai is going to bring about huge quality drop in software across the stack and across the domains. I already see orgs that had reasonable software processes transform into orgs where the only metric is how much generated code you can slap and slop together and how fast. There's no success here for anyone.
And this is not a dink on the ai tooling itself but on the organizationan processes that provide the context in which the AI code generation is being used.
Bad processes will always produce bad low quality outcomes regardless of tbe technology.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#18Being fired for calling out Corruption. That's how I read this.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#19I think a key goal of senior management at any big company in the last 6 months is to make rank and file fungible or obsolete. It’s one big experiment. There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so.
> There are precedents like the Industrial Revolution. Things get worse for the workers for a generation or so. And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue. There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value. I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (…
The actual Industrial Revolution labor wars happened because workers were being maimed, killed, and disposed of with zero legal recourse. The Ludlow Massacre in 1914 ended with the Colorado National Guard machine-gunning a tent colony and burning women and children alive. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 had the United States Army bombing American coal miners from biplanes. Pinkertons routinely shot organizers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed 146 garment workers because management locked the exit doors to prevent unauthorized breaks. Coal miners were paid in company scrip redeemable only at company stores in towns the company also owned and policed. Black workers attempting to organize in the South were lynched. Children were maimed in textile mills.
A software engineer getting four months severance after a layoff exists in a different universe from this so no. There is no precedent. Don't you dare talk about the industrial revolution because its not even in the parking lot of the ballpark.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#20The "fungible" point sounds as though the "cattle, not pets" ethos of the infrastructure management has leaked into the management of the staff.