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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

well the good news (for amazon) is that I used to work at a place where I was trying to build a cloud. And management suffered from EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEMS (though for different structural reasons, there was no "build a feature" incentive). And then we hired someone who used to work on amazon cloud who came with rave reviews, even though he completely failed my interview, which basically tested "do you read the spec?". Then I told him to take notes while I was onboarding him, which he didn't do, and then I quit, because of the management problems.

> the engineering quality is so shoddy

What stuns me is just how well AWS works. I mean, did you ever try to use Azure in 2015? Hell, even GCP was worse in that era. Now, it's on-par, but IMO "more confusing" which beggars belief considering how confusing AWS is.

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Yeah it’s surprising that despite the negative comments in this thread, AWS works almost flawlessly for stuff that matters (uptime, reliability etc.). Of course it’s painful to work with sometimes, but so are other cloud vendors. There’s literally zero incentive to change things internally until external KPIs start turning red.

IMHO that's the down side of Amazon's customer obsession. As long as it works for the customer, nothing will change. Regardless of internal benefits. And that system quite obviously works.

Disclaimer: Former logistics Amazonian.

I feel for all of you in this thread that work at Amazon and complain of the poor conditions. There are no shortage of stories that point to a very large problem in that company, for certain. However, I believe the underlying theme, if there is one, is incompetent Management and Leadership.

This is systemic in Technology companies because, to me, the “bean counters” try to run the companies like a basic Manufacturing organization of commodities where line items and people are substitutable things and can be dialed and tweaked at the planning stage.

You nailed it. At the foundation of the dysfunction at most technology companies is the inability of the leaders to understand that software heavy products just can’t be estimated accurately by traditional “bean counting” methods.

Not just 2015. A lot of people, including me, would love for azure to be on par. Unfortunately it isn’t. Not in reliability, features, or even documentation. Hopefully it’ll get there.

GCP is an odd duck. It really wants you to do things its way. But if you are doing a multi-cloud strategy the last thing you want is to go all in on the GCP way. Also they just don’t seem to treat customers as seriously as Amazon and Azure. It isn’t life or death for Google and it shows.

Oh yeah, gcp customer service was atrocious. Took several months to find out that we couldn't do something undocumented but not obviously impossible.

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