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Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

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Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#111

Post by lokar »

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…

It would be interesting to hear the other side, the people running support. I wonder what fraction of requests are answered by basic knowledge and stuff clearly in the docs. At some very high fraction I could see a lot of pressure/incentive to optimize for these cases.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#112

Post by slumberlust »

cmiles8 wrote: post #84

AWS has lost its way. It’s well into the IBM phase now. Primarily providing important but boring commodity infrastructure, but the top talent that can drive real innovation has long since left the building. It’s race to stay relevant in AI but always seeming 2-3 steps behind everyone else is one such example of the current sad state of affairs.

Day 2 (maybe even 3 or 4) for sure.

https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon...

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#113

Post by freeopinion »

Spooky23 wrote: post #98
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It remains to be seen whether GenAI only acts as an accelerant of organizational decline, by amplifying the laziness inherent in people.

It’s worse. Remember the “Prussian general 2x2”? https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/ AI enables the stupid and diligent. When I get long form emails from people I don’t know well, I assume that 80% of the time it’s AI bullshit. People are having AI respond with bullshit to other people’s bullshit. I’m actually deliberately adding bad grammar to communications as a hook that you should read it. It hu…

During a recent semester final exam with fill in the blank questions, a student raised their hand to ask the teacher, "Do we get marked off for spelling?" The class was bewildered when the teacher answered, "Of course." Some students immediately turned in their exam assuming it would be impossible to pass.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#114

Post by eranation »

Sad to hear. I was at AWS between 2016 and 2021 and had a much different experience.

Side note, and unpopular opinion ahead: while it takes a lot of courage to write things like this and I respect it, but being fired and writing negatively (no matter how justly) about your former employer is considered by many employers as a red flag and can hurt you going forward (even if you are 100% right).

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#115

Post by kibwen »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #32
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.

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.

Correction: it's the golden age for code monkey employers. We as an industry have never deserved to use the term "engineering" to describe ourselves, and we are further from that ideal than ever.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#116

Post by mschuster91 »

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.

Meh. It's no big change to before, where you had first-level support search for something vaguely related and just dumping a template to the user.

The thing is... it actually works better than I'd like, because in a lot of cases it turns out that you (as the user) forgot to follow one tiny step in the documentation.

What I'd actually like to see as the user is the AI actually going over my AWS account, looking up the resources and their state on its own, and figuring out what exactly I missed, but (un?)fortunately that cannot be easily done for IAM permission reasons...

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#117

Post by milch »

fhub wrote: post #8

I 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.

I've worked at Amazon since 2018 and they've always talked about the software engineers being fungible during my tenure there. Technically everyone is supposed to be able to do everything, but in practice it's a huge headache if you want to hire for a more specialized role. They started creating some, like Frontend Engineer and Embedded Systems Engineer, but in practice these are still extremely broad

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#118

Post by [deleted] »

jawns wrote: post #106

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.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#119

Post by Silhouette »

mschuster91 wrote: post #116
Silhouette wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Meh. It's no big change to before, where you had first-level support search for something vaguely related and just dumping a template to the user. The thing is... it actually works better than I'd like, because in a lot of cases it turns out that you (as the…

The big difference IME is that first-tier support at decent companies at least had the grace to recognise when they couldn't help and needed to escalate. I can count the number of times I've seen an AI bot automatically escalate when it was unable to find the solution on zero hands.

Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out

#120

Post by lokar »

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.

And that started when we hired a couple people who were into competitive programming an started an event/contest
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