Amazon Wants to Train 29M People to Work in the Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Wants to Train 29M People to Work in the Cloud

wsj.com

73 pointslxm37 comments

I used to work at AWS. They weren't really interested in "education".

Then I co-founded Cloud Academy with three other friends, to teach people about AWS (and later, Azure and GCP). A few years later in 2019, QA Learning bought it for a good sum. I was heavily involved since the beginning and right until the end, but never got to a proper full-time status. The full-time founders deserve most of the credit.

And now, finally, AWS seems to recognize the true value of education. The best hook ever for a cloud product.

If you are high up at GCP or Azure and want to compete against AWS on education, message me. I have plenty of ways to help you.

This is the Amazon business model. If a third party seller starts making money selling something, they offer their own version and put it at the top of the results/attention.

Not sure if AWS wasn't aware (free-tier exists for a reason). Though, AWS did (?) have some form of partnership with Qwiklabs, but then; Google swooped in and acquired them.

https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/welcome-qwiklabs-g...

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Let me correct the title...

> Amazon wants to train 29m people to work on AWS.

Unsurprising that a company wants to train people on their own product in order to ultimately sell more of it.

The corporate PR-speak is strong in this article. They should have went full job-creator and just say their docs can help all humanity to get the 21st century skills necessary to thrive on the American Dream.

Exactly, is this even journalism? If the author published whatever the Amazon PR rep sends them they should work for Amazon, not a “supposed” objective newspaper. What a fluff piece.

corporate culture is all built on this attitude. Amazon leadership principles are akin to NLP on a corporate mission statement level. they're good, too, if you just take them as simple pieces of advice, but you should also consider the value in doing the exact opposite of a lot of these things in equal measure.

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

Reminds me of when Facebook explored building out new internet infrastructure in third-world countries, because they were literally running out of internet users to capture

Uhhh, that's still an area of major investment for them. Look up Facebook Connectivity.

Yeah thought it might be, wasn't sure

I find this interesting with 2Africa(Facebook) and Equiano project(Google), using Free Space Optical Communication. To me it seems as a way to have ownership of the physical infrastructure of the internet and also have sway on how the digital infrastructure can become a monopoly separated from the Telecom companies around Africa.

I guess that’d devalue my certifications. Time to fuck off and do something else which isn’t being commoditised!

I don't know. I feel like my AWS certs are already next to worthless. The companies just want people with certs as part of their AWS contract constraints.

In my experience most certs are only valuable to check the box on contract requirements.

It is possible to add a lot of value on top of whatever certifications you have. I see certifications as some indicator of minimum competence, but minimum competence is not the skillset I'm aiming for when expanding my team :)

For some reason this makes me think of Sorry to Bother You

> Sorry to Bother You is a 2018 American dark comedy film ... The film follows a young black telemarketer who adopts a white accent to succeed at his job. Swept into a corporate conspiracy, he must choose between profit and joining his activist friends to organize labor.

And I'll just say outright the parent is accurate about the movie's premise but he undersells it a lot. Its one of my favorite movies.

I get that this is smothered in PR. But isn’t this one of those “win/win” situations? Providing people with a path into the profitable tech industry that otherwise wouldn’t have one is likely a net positive for their future prospects. The fact that AWS stands to gain from this in the long term doesn’t take away from that. Is it only nice if someone suffers?

Eh not really a fan. Seems too close to outsourcing, but who knows. Also seems like it will lead to way more security issues.

On a positive note, I can see a bunch of work coming out of this to fix things done poorly.

Sorry I think it will actually lead to companies leaving AWS.

In any corporates network you see job requiring Cisco certificates. Those employees then choose to buy Cisco rather than something else, and the support deals require the companies to maintain the employees Cisco papers and training, often with free trips to conferences in luxury locations.

The engineers wouldn’t recommend another brand of router which may be better because they’d lose their perks and face difficulty moving to another job.

It’s a self sustaining industry.

No surprise Amazon want the same thing.

The engineers wouldn’t recommend another brand of router which may be better because they’d lose their perks and face difficulty moving to another job.

In theory yes but in practice Juniper ate 30% of Cisco's market overnight when they showed up with better core routers for ISPs, and all the CCNx's happily got Juniper certified too.

Core routers are really expensive and probably strategic to the business. That decision is weighted heavily.

This is not true in my experience. It's a valuable and recognized certificate, but most large cloud and enterprise are multivendor and the Cisco certs are interchangeable with the Juniper certs and others. It's just helpful as a measuring stick "You have a CCIE? Please explain the states of BGP and give some examples of issues that can occur to make the peering stuck in opensent." The Cisco certs are a good way to get your foot in the door if you don't have extensive work experience as a network engineer.

I think you mistake the VARs with enterprises. Otherwise, as a holder of several cisco certs, I've clearly been missing out on these perks and free training. Not to mention the free trips to luxury locations.

I rarely see Cisco hardware in the SMB space. They’ve price themselves out.

When I do come across it, it’s either telecom vendor owned, or the small business stuff which is re-branded Linksys or some other garbage.

Even the re-branded small business lines are almost double what the competition costs. But, it sells because “it’s Cisco” and it’s not $3,000 a switch.

No one ever got fired for recommending Cisco routers or switches.

> In any corporates network you see job requiring Cisco certificates

This is not always true and people are downvoting you...

> No surprise Amazon want the same thing.

...but this is the important point: lock-in

That's because in a few years the AWS Console will require 29M people just to figure out how to do anything.

But will the jobs be in those places (Montana or whatever)?

I don't really think so. Sure, we are seeing a movement towards remote work. But why not outsource to India and save money?

If we are talking about freelancing or individuals doing remote work, than why outsource exclusively to India? If it is indeed remote work than let the cheapest bidder win -- whether its Afghanistan or Zimbabwe. If folks are competent enough and electricity + internet is stable. Then why India only?

I was using India as an example since they already have a large number of English speakers.

The only cloud computing role I can think of that would benefit from 29 million human beings would be interacting with AI to train it.

Imagine that many people thinking of the cloud first when imagining any project. I'm a data scientist and I run most of my projects on my workstation laptop. There are plenty of data scientists who immediately go to a cloud provider for any analysis (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a different approach). Extend that to other fields and there's lots of ways to profit from tens of millions of AWS users.

Bypass paywall: https://archive.is/Lpz4N

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