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Comment by jcrites | Hacker News Reader

Based on my experience, the article contains a lot of misinformation. Some of the statements might have been true at one point in the past, but are now out of date by years, while others have never been true in the time I've been around.

Without getting into a point-by-point rebuttal, my reaction to each section/Exhibit is "that's wrong/misleading".

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Isn't that a bit disingenuous? Your role at Amazon is nothing like the typical engineer at Amazon. You live in the shiny new world while the majority of engineers are stuck on something that's not too far from the article.

The median tenure of engineers at Amazon is 1 year. That means that the new engineers need senior and principle engineers to guide them on what tools exist. If an engineering organization happens to have strong senior Amazon engineers then they can guide their teams/org to use the tools that exist, because they do exist.

However, everything (and I mean everything) at Amazon depends on the team (and organization) that you land in. Some organizations do not have senior technical leadership; service ownership is handed off to teams without long tenured Amazon engineers so they do not get exposed to the types of tools to use (nor do these teams get time to discover, learn, and on-board to the tools that do exist). This is how an engineer can have the experience written about in the article.

The article is anecdotal, and definitely not the norm for the "majority of engineers"

1 Year median wow - they must lose lot of institutional knowledge that way.

I was an intern at AWS this past summer(and will be returning as a new grad in May) and this article is not accurate based on my experience. My code (which was part of our team's actual production system, not a toy project) ran on EC2 instances in an autoscaling group. There was no manually provisioning servers. I worked with a Kinesis Stream and several other resources and there was a way for us to programmatically retrieve the names of the resources. My impression was the system we used to find a resource name works for all AWS resources so I imagine you could get the name of a load balancer this way as well. Finally, I'll just say my team worked entirely in Python. Maybe that was an exception, but it is certainly sufficient to directly falsify the statement that "internally, at Amazon, you can't even use a language other than Java." (How would the author even know this? Was he in on the S-team meeting where it was declared that all non java users get a pip?)

The Java claim is just factually false.

Java/C++/Python/Ruby/Go/Perl/Scala, even Rust, are used in Amazon for various projects. What might be true is that, consider how critical your service would be, the more it is, people will lean towards to more conservative/mature/enterprise-ish languages, not exotic ones, because that inherently means risk. And Java is the go-to option under that consideration, just because, it is Java, the least controversial choice if you had asked me.

But Amazon comparing with other companies I worked with, except extremely small startup, where tech guidance is like non-existent, the least restrictive when it comes to languages. It fits the Amazon's self perception, it is pragmatic, non opinionated, moral-agnostic. It cares about customer, because customer means potential of eventual profit. However you achieved that, is not Amazon's concern.

The L8 manager of our org declared that all projects must be on the JVM, and if the language wasn't Java, then we would need to submit a six pager explaining why. Perhaps he was just being conservative, but to me there's something off-putting when those types of decisions come from managers rather than from the engineers.

That said, our org did manage to have a few projects that aren't Java, so I guess I would have to concede that the Java claim is factually false as well. But it sure doesn't feel like I am empowered to choose something other than Java.

Plus, you know, https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

We do actually vend a JDK. Yes, it's conservative. It's also necessary.

I can confirm that the claim "you can't even use a language other than Java" is completely false. Java is often the best tool for the job because of how much institutional inertia there is behind it, but certainly nobody will stop a team from using a better tool.

PHP is banned at Amazon, and that's the exception that proves the rule: a language being banned is so unusual that I'm aware specifically of the example of PHP.

And, yet, there are some places where PHP is used (under explicit conditions and exceptions).

I left Amazon a little over 3 years ago, having worked there for over 3 years. I would agree that this article seems misleading. Some of the things the article complains about were fixed while I was working there. The article compares Apollo to Kubernetes/Docker but Apollo predates Docker by years.

The article complains about CloudWatch and log aggregation, but when I started Amazon internally had a mature log aggregation and monitoring solution that I would say is still unquestionably superior to the public version of CloudWatch.

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