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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#301

Post by HelloNurse »

BurningFrog wrote: post #232
Patrol8394 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all look shining from the outside, problems start when you join the new team and realize the pile of s t you will be dealing with. Btw this happens in most companies, tons of tech debt. And those who created that s t are off onto new projects recreating the exact same mess all over again. It is a cycle that never ends. Only chance is to join early and be in for the long run.

If you're good at cleaning up "pile of shit" code, you will always have work! It's s lot of fun with the right attitude.

Work? Almost certainly. Career? Not very likely.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#302

Post by lloydatkinson »

gw98 wrote: post #69
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #3

Worked for AWS for just under a year and a half; this mirrors my experience exactly. Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink to the point where even the most trivial deployment change was a nail-biter. Automated tooling and tests that were ostensibly created to make life easier were the number one pain point and constantly failed in obscure ways that required cutting ticket…

This is the general feeling of what I see from AWS support as well as a consumer of the platform. I'm battling something for weeks now which is a completely broken ass piece of shit inside AWS. I spent the first 3 weeks trying to get attention for this via support tickets and someone to take it seriously, resulting in escalating to account management. I've been on calls with the programme managers, been apologised to…

This is my experience of using AWS too at work. It’s why I strongly prefer Azure. You can tell AWS is totally drowning in poor management.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#303

Post by lloydatkinson »

Aeolun wrote: post #239
gruffle wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. Interesting how the internal dev satisfaction polling always shows that the vast majority of devs just absolutely love the internal tooling and processes. Might have something to do with the polls not actually being anonymous. When hr/polling teams are asked about anonymity they generally skirt or ignore the question, but I've learned that enough metadata is collected to identify any responder in pr…

Why would you respond positively even on non-anonymous polls? The goal is to determine the state of the internal tools, not to purge any dissenters…

I’ve never seen non-anonymous polls not used to weaponise, single out, and then fire someone.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#304

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

dimmke wrote: post #162
matai_kolila wrote: post #104

Sigh... another loss at the hands of, "Code is Art!" It's not art. Art requires no function, it exists as a representation. (Professional) code, and software engineering generally, must produce valuable things, and sometimes the process of making those valuable things isn't "fun", but that's never been part of the equation. Aligning "fun" with "valuable" is nearly impossible, and when you try you're dooming yourself…

A few years ago I visited New York City and went to the MoMA. At the time, they had an entire floor dedicated to mid century design. I was always particularly taken with the Kennedy Armchair and the Eames lounge chair. Those pieces to me are undoubtedly art. But they also serve a function. They're chairs. A business analyst once told me - "you programmers have it so easy. It either works or it doesn't!" as if the vag…

> as if the vague 2 sentence requirement from their spreadsheet that I have to turn in reality doesn't require any creativity to implement

Do you really need creativity, though? Unless you’re working in uncharted territory and you’re just building some CRUD app like 90%+ of software in the world, you don’t. Software engineering patterns exist, and even so much of the innovation that supposedly came out in the last 5 years are mere iterations of the same patterns.

And the purpose of being creative with a solution is not creativity for creativity’s sake. Clarity, maintainability, scalability, should strictly be the primary goal of every line of code that you are writing. I wouldn’t debate that a code that is so clear and intuitive and easy to scale for so many people has achieved some degree of art, but that should be a side-effect, not the goal in itself.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#305

Post by w23j »

dimmke wrote: post #211
dmurdoch wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you've listed houses, cars, watches, food. All these things indeed serve a purpose as well as allow for creativity and expression. But the difference is, all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not. My customer does not care if my backend code is beautiful, and neither does my CEO because it won't make more money. > Is a dish or menu designed by a chef not art?…

>all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not. I wouldn't be so sure about that. I certainly prefer to use software that has a nice interface, is fast and responsive and has thoughtful features. I remember the first time my iPhone opened a pop up at just the right time asking if I wanted to share a wifi password with my Mac. Wow! Delightful. And I am willing to pay…

Your writing reminds me a lot of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

'The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.'

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#306

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

nickd2001 wrote: post #298
throwawaylinux wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I found, is that us older folks are quite unpopular, and got tired of slamming doors and passive-aggressive insults. Some of the older engineers I've worked with are among the most brilliant and productive people in the groups. In those cases I have seen bar none, they have been revered and respected among the other members. Age discrimination is definitely a thing, but not everywhere. Maybe that rotted mindse…

As a slightly older engineer, I believe there are 2 sides to the coin. Age discrimination can happen. On the other hand , older engineers don't always help themselves. In my last job, a colleague who was early 50s kept talking about 1980s TV sitcoms (which included various racist, sexist content that would at least come with a warning nowadays). This made him look like a dinosaur to younger colleagues. I generally fi…

> This made him look like a dinosaur to younger colleagues.

Can't be helped. We will always look like that, no matter how hard we try to "fit in."[0]

Tension between younger and older folks is as old as humankind.

I think that a team is best served, with a combination of youthful enthusiasm and creativity, and experienced caution and completionism. I think that the whole from these teams, is greater than the sum of the parts.

If we have just older folks, stuff gets done, but it may not be that interesting.

If we have nothing but younger folks, we have ... FTX.

The difference, this time around, seems to be extremely young C-suite execs.

In "the old days," when we watched Archie Bunker rag The Meathead, companies were generally run by folks in their fifties (there were plenty of problems -not exactly the Halcyon days). These folks didn't have anything against older folks, except, maybe, that we were relatively expensive (but not, compared to these days). If they discriminated against older folks, it wasn't personal.

These days, we have people in their twenties and thirties, at the top, and their discrimination is personal. They also make it OK for their employees to have the same attitude.

What's that saying that the "olds" have? "The fish rots from the head down."?

[0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/e5/30/48e53007e190cab89608...

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#307

Post by yodsanklai »

jstx1 wrote: post #281
yodsanklai wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). I would expect Google to have better engineering discipline than Amazon or Meta.

Why better than Meta? My impression was that Meta have outstanding engineering (regardless of what else is happening with their products and company direction).

Meta has a more a hacker culture "move fast and break things". On the other hand, Google is well-known for its engineering culture (they wrote numerous articles and books about it).

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#308

Post by yathaid »

dimmke wrote: post #162
matai_kolila wrote: post #104

Sigh... another loss at the hands of, "Code is Art!" It's not art. Art requires no function, it exists as a representation. (Professional) code, and software engineering generally, must produce valuable things, and sometimes the process of making those valuable things isn't "fun", but that's never been part of the equation. Aligning "fun" with "valuable" is nearly impossible, and when you try you're dooming yourself…

A few years ago I visited New York City and went to the MoMA. At the time, they had an entire floor dedicated to mid century design. I was always particularly taken with the Kennedy Armchair and the Eames lounge chair. Those pieces to me are undoubtedly art. But they also serve a function. They're chairs. A business analyst once told me - "you programmers have it so easy. It either works or it doesn't!" as if the vag…

Would you pay more for a house where the internal plumbing is beautifully laid out? Not functionally better, just more beautiful (in some abstract sense).

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#309

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

closeparen wrote: post #155
epolanski wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this whole idea that coding is a creative (in the artistic sense) activity. There's a limited number of solutions to a programming task, it's about finding the one that meets most constraints, it's about cost, effort, trade offs analysis and finally implementation.

Getting code to do the right thing is an engineering activity. Getting code to make sense, to communicate an accurate and useful sense of the problem and solution space to yourself and others across time and change, is a humanities activity.

It stops being a humanities activity when you shape your comms strategy around the science behind how the human mind learns, as you should with code documentation and even with the way that your code reads.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#310

Post by banana-19 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #65
dimmke wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of internal teams don't use the AWS software for various reasons. So like, CodePipeline might be great, but there's an internal analogue (I'm not sure the detail I can go into here) that is awful that a lot of teams use. There's been an internal movement to try to get all teams onto AWS services, but it's incredibly slow moving and there's no timeline that I know of.

> So like, CodePipeline might be great The entire CodeBuild suite kind of sucks when you stack it up to options available on the market including GitHub Actions, GitLab Runners, Azure DevOps, literally almost anything. If the internal analogue is worse than the CodeStar suite, then yikes.

Codestar is simpler than and has too many feature gaps compared to the internal offerings, which makes building and deploying Amazon scale multi-tier, multi-environment services difficult.
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