Being fired for calling out Corruption. That's how I read this.
Meh you always read one side of the story. I have seen a lot of people getting PIPed out of Amazon and only one or two didn't deserve it, yet all claimed they didn't.
Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
71–80 of 151 posts
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#72Being fired for calling out Corruption. That's how I read this.
He doesn't think that was the cause, and I don't think it was either. Much spicier material has been posted before. Also the meme is still up fwiw.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#73All 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…
There are definitely admired companies in the world. Costco comes to mind.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#74Over 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…
Even more annoying, is when the integrated "chat with AI" boxes don't actually have full knowledge about the website. Tried a couple of different such boxes, and in the end I still had to crawl the website on my own to find the information.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#75I 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 (…
Also nobody talks enough about the fact that workforce is effectively cut out from the means of productions. Even with the capital at hand blackwell cabinets are all sold out, contracted to the big providers.
There are paralles to the industrial revolution, but it seems the working class is cut out from being able to deny labor in exchange for better conditions.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#76I’ve been hearing Amazon is going to run out of bodies for years now and yet they keep chugging along.
I have worked there for 8 years now and we ARE running out of bodies. It has become extremely difficult to hire at any level, we have had an open position on my team for a senior data scientist for a year and a half now, with barely any candidate applying, and none of them being competent. Similarly the average level of new employees has dropped dramatically. The famous "hiring bar" is now below ground.
Amazon has been on my Would Never Work For list for over a decade now. Even the “golden years” being referenced by OP and some commenters in this thread were plagued by Amazon overworking people and doing sketchy things like weighting RSU all till the last few years and then laying people off before their mountain of cash landed
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#77I'm also an AWS alumni from many years back now, and truthfully, the organizational problems really took off when Jassy moved to being CEO of amazon as a whole and major leaders left the company (Charlie Bell, et al.). There were always other problems too, pressure on the company in both directions across many different product lines on both cost (any number of cheaper baremetal providers who are much faster at provi…
I find it hard to call Amazon robotics a failure. All of the small/binnable item FCs make extensive (and, as an outsider, apparently very productive) use of robotics.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#78I 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.
we’re witnessing how advanced civilizations actually die
there’s no heroic clash with other civilizations, they simply rot away
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#79> Amazon has a really odd viewpoint when it comes to the people who work there. They view almost all employees as “fungible”. Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die. With that said, due to its late-stage capitalistic ethos, Amazon is just too overly gleeful about this tasteless reality of life. It's the equivalent of a nephew coming…
> Hardly an Amazon-only thing. In fact, enterprises need this mindset, because people moves on, retires, or just suddenly die.
Enterprises typically have this mindset. Most corporations I worked for in fact treated employees exactly like this.
As for needing this mindset, I am not so sure. There is a spectrum in between going under because a storied employee retired and treating employees as meaningless numbers in a spreadsheet.
But ultimately I fully agree with the whole of your post. I just had to nitpick about this.
Re: Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
#80Over 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'…
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 inaccurate the response was based on the questions asked.