101–110 of 151 posts
AWS services still are generally reliable and available. I’d think we’d be seeing cracks here if the organization were in shambles. AWS seems to keep humming along.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't feel too bad. I've been at places where the AWS annual spend was a real lot of money, let's say way over 100k but not 1 million USD. Support tickets went unanswered for months, assigned account reps left us hanging for months with multiple follow ups, etc.. All tickets opened within the last 6 months got AI generated responses with massive delays that indicate the ticket wasn't read by a human due to how inaccu…
This where I don’t get the HN flame at Google. I had an obscure KMS issue a few months ago, I reproduced it and opened a ticket. It was a low severity. A guy emailed me back in about 4 hours, acknowledged it and thought I was doing it right. Came back 2-3 days later noting that it was a bug, and would be fixed in a few weeks. As a workaround he updated my script with a less obvious/efficient solution to get me throug…
Two things can be true.
I’ve been hearing Amazon is going to run out of bodies for years now and yet they keep chugging along.
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).
Anecdotally, this seems to be the new "mission statement" of many companies.
All the AI hype aside, I wonder if there is a way to avoid becoming one of these faceless corporations where customers are just numbers. For years Amazon has been fantastically customer centered, but at some point they just lost it. I could compile a list where Amazon is actually way more customer unfriendly than in the past now, but I guess everybody already got their own anecdotes about that. So what exactly went w…
Limit scale. Enjoy your craft. Become immune to hype and "what's popular," instead focusing on "what otherwise inaccessible experience can we make possible for our customers?"
When you let the money guys take the wheel (not the "passionate nerd" types), it inevitably (and I would argue necessarily to keep the lights on for such a big org) results in a shift to spreadsheet brain.
If you haven't seen it, watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi and see if that way of life resonates. Also check out his interview with René Redzepi from Noma. Lots of great insight into how focusing on your craft implicitly creates the opportunity for creating and delivering great things to others.
"Fungible" implies they are a commodity, easily swapped for someone else. In other words, they are so low-value that they are interchangeable.
"Flexible" or "generalist" instead connotes that they are so high-value that they can operate well in multiple domains, easily shifting to where they are needed most.
I have been advocating within my org to replace "fungible" with "flexible" or "generalist." "Fungible" implies they are a commodity, easily swapped for someone else. In other words, they are so low-value that they are interchangeable. "Flexible" or "generalist" instead connotes that they are so high-value that they can operate well in multiple domains, easily shifting to where they are needed most.
You can easily call the typical Japanese life-long employees as “flexible” or “generalist” but not an employee of a company with median tenure rate of 1-2 years. That’s fungible.
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…
Instead, you (company / support agent) have decided that I should instead have a conversation with an LLM through a worse, more opaque harness to the detriment of all of us.
All the AI hype aside, I wonder if there is a way to avoid becoming one of these faceless corporations where customers are just numbers. For years Amazon has been fantastically customer centered, but at some point they just lost it. I could compile a list where Amazon is actually way more customer unfriendly than in the past now, but I guess everybody already got their own anecdotes about that. So what exactly went w…
Not sure how to address it though. I suspect keeping companies small and focused on quality, sustainability, and free of VC influence would be a solution. It'd take continual work though, like tending to a bonsai.