Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout
theregister.com
theregister.com
Even with candidate pools of hundreds of thousands of H1-B engineers and tens of millions of illegal immigrant warehouse workers, there still comes a point where such a big company firing so many people so quickly exhausts all their options.
It reminds me of the Robot Chicken Sketch where Imperial Officers aboard the Death Star all pretend to be force choked to death by Darth Vader so they can avoid getting killed by lightsaber, then come back in under different names in different jobs. It's worse though for Amazon: nobody wants to come back.
I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams, and his arrogance really showed when not only did he refuse, but then insisted my exams are not don't even register on the same scale of importance as the opportunity to work for Amazon.
Somewhat related: a recruiter at Google cold-called me a couple months into my first job out of undergrad back in 2016 and was similarly condescending about "the chance" to work for Google compared to everything else. I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview.
I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs.
That job was great until I got put on a team with a guy who was a former middle manager at some IBM-like company and went from being surrounded by people lightyears ahead of me to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. The messed-up part was that it wasn't even punishment. I was rewarded after completing a project with my choice of which team I joined next, and I joined the wrong one. I assumed that joining a new team to utilize this newfangled "cloud computing" thing would be trailblazing, and I didn't do any diligence on who I would work with.
To this day, I still regret not rejoining the first team I worked for, otherwise I would still be at that company and happy about it. Then again, the boredom and discontent while being on that sucky team is the reason I started investing, and now I can buy a house in cash and fund myself to do whatever I want for at least a decade. Hard to complain about the way things turned out.
As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.
I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.
The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.
I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.
It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
I’m lucky in that before I got the job I was in talks to do a PhD but negotiated saying I’d only do it remote.
Now I do whatever is required to keep my day job happy and then spend the rest of my time working on my PhD. My plan was to go to FAANG after I got my degree but who knows… a comfy, unionized tech job that gives me ample time to do side projects is also not something I’d give up too easily.
I’d say do whatever is necessary to keep your job and then devote any extra hours 9-5 to some project. If I wasn’t doing my PhD I’d be making an app or a game probably, or maybe still moonlighting as a researcher. I think most office/tech jobs don’t require your full 40 hours and I can tell you I have a bunch of friends who have even less work responsibilities than me but they just use that spare time to play video games. Just do something productive 9-5 and you will outpace 99% of people is what I’ve found.
I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.
Yeah, man, good times.
My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester.
I still giggle when I tell that story.
Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.
I don't know; I'm not young enough to remember.
When I was in the minicomputer business, it was maybe 50/50 hardware and software (and that mostly assumes you considered software to include low-level things like microcode). And software people weren't mostly paid more than those in hardware--which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
Working with Suns and other workstations as a teen (so my perspective was limited), I caught the very tail end of software as a modest middle class professional wage for everyone doing it (right before the dotcom boom hit).
The people I worked with were really good at what they do, but not strutting like newcomers started doing pretty much the instant the dotcom boom started, and not rich. (Well, one guy did buy a used MR2, and get his private pilot license, but he also lived with his wife in a trailer on an undeveloped parcel. He was a very solid software engineer, working on important stuff.)
I might have inadvertently tried to preserve some of that modestly-paid excellence of the generation before me, but I don't recommend that. Cost-of-living in my area is determined by people making FAANG-like money (well, and real estate investors, and price-fixing), and you have to either play along with that, or move away.
But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary.
Some people made a lot of money when dot-com hit. A lot also got wiped out and ended up leaving the industry.
I never had the highs or lows. I was probably making something south of $100K in the late 90s.
I've been given second hand accounts of similar situations. One was team consolidation, and the business was offering Boston-area engineers positions in San Jose. One of the folks who moved with his family was back in MA within 5 years. His salary was not adjusted as much as it should have been for the cost of living difference.
A question, though. Was software designed at Sun closely with hardware teams and vice versa, or were they mostly disjoint? Presumably many hardware companies that have succeeded have built good tooling around said hardware (like NVIDIA).
The low-level software work at Data General where I was prior to the analyst biz was certainly integrated to a certain degree--read Soul of a New Machine if you haven't. The software folks for the minis were also mostly in the same same location. As things migrated to Unix, most of that team was in RTP and it's probably fair to say that there was less integration though probably wasn't something I thought about a lot of the time. Hardware stayed in Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.
Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.
But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.
Sun did waste a lot of money in buying MySQL, $800 million in cash and $200 million in stock. Certainly a distraction, as well.
Sun never offered any way to inexpensively get onto the on-ramp of Sun hardware and software as they thought they could continue selling high-margin hardware forever; they had their $995 V100 which even included their much-loved LOM which was a remote-management device like iLO/DRAC/IPMI , then followed it up with: nothing.
info about the V100: https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...
I surely would have liked to get one of those laptops, though.
- MySQL AB — $1.0B
- SeeBeyond Technology — $387M
Some more companies undisclosed and of course in 2000 Cobalt Networks for $2.0B.
But in general, just hanging around on SPARC far to long. Unfortunately the person put in charger of SPARC told Scott that he thought SPARC could be saved but it would need 4-5 years. And that's when they went into mulit-core, selling everybody on the whole 'threw-put computing' nonsense.
Was that before or after you realised the Linux kernel devs were better at squeezing performance efficiencies out of x86 than you guys were?
That's the sort of behaviour I'd sack the guy for if he worked for me.
The first thing is a regrettable quip of mine on Usenet (RIP) from October 29, 1996 -- just over 29 years ago (!!) as of this writing. As I have made clear several (many?) times over the years, I do very much regret it: I was young and it was stupid.[0]
But that's also not what this is REALLY about, because that decades-old quip on Usenet had itself been forgotten for over a decade when it was dug up in 2013 by people who newly discovered that they hated my guts. And they discovered they hated my guts because they vehemently disagreed with my handling of the the Noordhuis pronoun incident.[1] And on this, I have no regrets -- and will have no regrets.
Hopefully that clears up where the (seemingly limitless) venom is coming from -- with my apologies for dragging confused bystanders into decades-old internet beef!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041086
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2013/11/30/the-power-of-a-prono...
I would not work for you because you exhibit all the qualities of a bully. You've been exhibiting this behaviour for decades now. Every time I see you say that you needed to "teach the hardware guys a lesson", or you write a blog post that you would sack a non-employee, or you resort to invective when you could calmly address the issue without going full nuclear, then it confirms my opinion of you.
I'm not following you around HN, incidentally. You just happen to comment on posts that I'm also interested in. I know, however, that if I ever did work for you or worked in the same organisation as you, I'd likely become your target.
Solaris 10/11, with all its technologies (zfs, zones, crossbow, dtrace, etc), was the pinnacle of UNIX that came out just when the world changed. At a company I worked at circa 2008-12 (that was a solaris shop) we essentially created a proto-docker with containers and ZFS that allowed rapid deployments and (re)building of our systems. It was a game changer for on-prem.
I do ask myself after reading the HN comment you linked, how often is the limiting factor of systems software the hardware? Potentially a case of this with consumer hardware is ACPI issues, like [1] and [2]. You could design the best software, but if your underlying firmware or hardware is faulty, then you would have to design your software around the faults instead of improving the lower layers or accept bugs.
Oxide describes on their website issues with "vendors pointing fingers with no real accountability, even when teams need it most," and I have seen this point discussed online in regards to Oxide's work on designing their own hardware and firmware. Incidentally, I applied to Oxide recently; I think they're cool for the reasons I thought Sun was cool.
[1] https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...
Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux.
Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM.
Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.
Mocha -> LiveScript -> JavaScript -> EczemaScript or whatever
No, not at all. It became a marketing campaing in the very late 90s dot.com boom, but the concept that defined Sun goes back to the beginning, 1984. Back then, that was a radical vision and Sun truly lived it internally for a long time.
Technically true-ish, but deserves an important qualifier. The Javascript number format has a huge "safe space" of integers between
Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER => -9007199254740991 (-(2^53 - 1))
Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER => 9007199254740991 (2^53 – 1)
> ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language
I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all.
Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is.
For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.
Memorize Amazon’s insane company values and relate your resume experience to it. And that I mean every single bullet point.
Interviewers were all run by robotic people. Coding test had zero flexibility, you had to just write code in a special barebones text editor that had zero feedback besides pass/fail.
You’d have to solely care about Amazon RSUs to consider that job. They are self-selecting for the worst kinds of candidates.
The dumb thing is that it should be a job that doesn’t burn people out because they basically own the market and haven’t needed to do any sort of innovation. Amazon’s corporate culture just has a burnout fetish.
I got the job, and I think being natural helped. I've interviewed thousands of people at Amazon since, and too many people just say the buzz words with no meat, and it gets them nowhere i.e. I showed customer obsession when I.....(and then gives a bad example)
One entire experience story/project example per value, completely insane cult behavior. I felt like I was interviewing for Scientology.
Ha, my interview for an Amazon internship was an hour after a 3-hour final exam :-)
But the job market right now is quite bad, and after hundreds upon hundreds of internship applications I would've been stupid to give up this chance. I would work for Amazon in a heart beat.
For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.
Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?
I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.
Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share?
And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.
For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail.
Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.
Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.
He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund.
Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities.
Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been.
I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do.
Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-taxi-drivers...
Macguire's original study on taxi drivers:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10716738/
BTW it's Fall! So here's to memories - "Four Strong Winds" written by Ian Tyson, sung by Neil Young:
https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i...
https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...
They're also privately held, which makes a difference.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical...
This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek.
You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.
The question that arises is: How can you potentially spot which companies are about/likely to enter a 'golden era' when you interview there? What questions could surface some sort of likelihood? Is it possibly to identify them before they enter the 'golden era'?
I worked there for almost 27 years.
The pay was mediocre. The structure and process would drive a lot of folks here, into fits.
But they consistently and routinely produced stuff that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that people would stake their entire careers on. Stuff that some folks would assume was impossible to make. They have thousands and thousands of hard-core patents.
I felt pride for working there. My business card opened a lot of pretty amazing doors.
It's disappointing to see the stuff that folks here post, when I mention it. It almost seems as if people think I'm exaggerating or outright lying or boasting.
I'm not. There are places that foster greatness; simply by being a place that has a long culture of accomplishment. I was just someone that stood on the shoulders of giants, and I was lucky to have the experience.
That said, I think some of their managers made some big mistakes, and they took a drubbing, but I will bet that they are already getting back on their feet. They are really tough. They weathered being bombed in World War II, and multiple depressions and recessions.
With that said, if you were to try to figure out how someone from the outside could see that it was a great place to work, during an interview, what questions/topics do you think could have surfaced that as clearly as possible?
In my case, I was contacted by a recruiter (the old-fashioned kind, which no longer exists). It was quite low-key. When they first contacted me, I thought it was a joke.
I was flown out to a trade show in San Jose, for my initial interview, and to Long Island, for my follow-up. There were no coding tests. I started as an engineer, on a brand-new team of two. I became the manager of that team, after a few years.
I think observing the people there; seeing how they interact with each other, is important.
Of course, looking at their products is also key. Asking yourself "Do I want to help make this stuff?" is important.
In my case, I was intrigued by the culture of the Japanese. I was born overseas, and spent most of my formative years in a pretty heterogenous environment. I like to mix it up with strange (to me) people.
It is interesting that it was interpreted as some kind of threat, requiring an insult, in response.
Have a great day!
The process should not be adversarial, in my opinion. It's a contract. I do something; you do something. There may be adversity, but that's not required, and it's actually likely to cause problems, down the road. Like any contractural relationship, each party needs to respect and trust the other party to come through with their end.
If the way that you introduce your company to me, is by bullying me (and tests are not "bullying," but many of the other interview games are), then we won't be working together. I don't like bullies. I won't be one, and I won't work with them.
These folks kept me on for a long time. There was a reason for that. I can't speak for all Japanese companies, but this one did not suffer skaters. You delivered, and you were constantly held to account. I did well in that environment. I suspect that many, here, would not.
I don't argue that companies should not give tests. I had tests in other interviews, and did fine. This company chose not to. One reason, is that the folks interviewing me, fought fang, tooth, and claw, for the headcount. When I became a manager, I had to do the same. It was a crazy frugal company.
This meant that they dedicated all their attention to the interview process. This wasn't where they were handed my CV, five minutes before they spoke to me. I was around them all day. They watched me work with others, and they gauged me on my character, more than my tech abilities. The Japanese are really big on character. At least, this company was.
I mentioned that I had an "old-fashioned" recruiter. They don't seem to have those, any more, but part of his job, was to vet me, before putting me forward. They trusted him, and paid him well. I was working for GE, before I interviewed, and had a fairly substantial amount of background, in hardware. That was important to them (it was a hardware company).
I guess that I said the right things, and they gave me a chance. I appreciated it, and worked hard to reward their faith.
I know that my attitude is considered "quaint," in today's cutthroat tech world, but I always legitimately believed in personal Integrity, Honesty, and Loyalty. These qualities actually meant something to this company. I am quite aware that they elicit scorn, from today's tech bros, but they worked for me.
> “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
I suspect that when tech became a place to earn big salaries, is when the dodgy folks started showing up.
It's always been common for folks with little background in tech, or unrelated experience, to apply for jobs. In fact, as a manager, I often looked for that. I was fairly decent at finding "diamond in the rough" talent (I sort of had to, as my company didn't pay especially well).
But, apparently, these days, even fairly innocuous job postings are inundated with tons of totally unqualified (and a significant portion of the "qualified" ones are outright fabrications) CVs.
Also, you get people that are crooks, applying.
The other side (in my opinion), is that modern tech CEOs are behaving quite badly. They consider their workforce to be some kind of hostile, subhuman slurry, and they treat their workers as such.
In order to fix this, the C-Suite needs to "blink first." They need to do better at treating their workers and prospective workers, well. HR culture also needs to change. It's become outright hostile to employees. I saw that happen in my own company, which started off, quite friendly towards employees. By the time I left, it was pretty much openly hostile.
That's unlikely to materialize, in today's tech industry. Any company that does this, will be eaten alive by their competition.
If people are serious about improving things, then legislation needs to be introduced, to prevent companies that improve their employee relations, from being killed by their competitors, and to help companies to survive manifesting risks, when they take chances on employees.
I am not optimistic that this will happen. If it does happen, it’s unlikely that it will be done well. In fact, the chances are good, that it would make things worse.
Maxing out all 3 of those is incredibly rare, but I think once people reach some degree of financial stability, almost all of them go for a job that feels like it's meaningful.
By the time their golden age is known outside of the company they are very likely near the decline phase; even if they aren't you are going to be competing with the best now.
For actual upper level leadership: they have the ability to make the golden age happen but studying the circumstances that allowed it to happen at other companies and being very selective about employee number 2-49. After that it's out of your hands.
Yeah, but that's the thing, when you're interviewing, you usually have some sort of access to talk to future potential colleagues, your boss and so on, and they're more open because you're not just "outside the company" but investigating if you'd like to join them. You'll get different answers compared to someone 100% outside the company.
That's true, but you have to be kind of smart about it. If you just ask the question "Is working here fulfilling?", of course they'll say "Yes, super!". But you cannot take that at face value, your questions need to shaped in a way so you can infer if working there is fulfilling, by asking other questions that can give you clues into that answer.
Indeed. There's an old saying that A-level people hire A-level people, but B-level people hire C-level people.
Obviously this is too simplistic: How do any B-level people get there in the first place? But there's still some truth to the idea that the overall talent level of a company tends to degrade as it gets larger unless very unusual structures are in place to work against that tendency.
Maybe this is the crux of the issue.
“The A students work for the B students and the C students become federal judges.”
When you're at a company at that stage that's doing well and has a lot of commercial runway ahead of it, the reality can often end up being that the golden age will last long enough for a very pleasant 4-6 year tenure if you so decide to stay at the company through its growth phase (which often takes it from a 50m-100m valuation to $1B+). Some of these companies will also make the leap from $1B+ to $10B+ or beyond (which makes the golden era at least as long as 6-10 years) and although nothing lasts forever, it can last long enough for you to find what you're looking for at least for a decently long period of time. This pertains to what other commenters have mentioned with regards to "making it golden" -- the golden era is what it is because everyone needs to make it golden and the company is too small for anyone who would dilute that for their own gain to do so without anyone noticing.
The challenge to this approach is that it requires being able to assess a company's commercial prospects as well as the quality of the company's founders, leadership and early team well enough to assess whether the company merely looks like a golden era company or whether it is actually the real deal -- something which even professional investors who target these kinds of companies struggle with. It is possible, but in my experience, it definitely took a couple of rounds of trial and error and getting burned a few times before my radar worked.
Better advice: when interviewing ask questions when they ask if you have any! Find out what the job is really like.
Ask what hours they normally work - if they give exact times that means they are strict about the times. If they give a lot of hours that means you are expected to work a lot of hours. If they give a range that means they really have flexible times. If they talk about leaving early for their kids third grade events that means they support families.
Ask what they really wear - this is clue to what the dress code is like.
Ask about the perks you care about. I don't play ping-pong so won't mention that perk if I'm interviewing you, but if you ask I can tell you that there are regular tournaments and people do play games here and there, but the tables are empty in the middle of the afternoon: if you care about this perk ask, otherwise focus questions elsewhere.
There are a lot of great jobs. There are a lot of bad jobs. There are jobs that you would hate for reasons that the people who work there don't even care about. There are jobs you will think are great that others will hate.
Was thinking more "Imagine you have 30 years of experience and casually looking for the next Bell Labs, what to look out for when there are the company?"
If you're looking for the next Bell Labs, why not try to found it?
I'm sorry to be a buzzkill, but I just can't get excited about privately-funded space rockets or Japanese girlfriend robots, not even if there were an 8 figure stock compensation package in it for me. To me, it's all just "do something grandiose for the venture capitalist bucks, and then maybe figure out how it helps people in 20 years."
"My sister killed her baby because she couldn't afford it and we're sending people to the moon.
September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time. Now he's doing horse. It's June.
Is it silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes And everyone still wants to fly
Some say a man ain't happy truly Til he truly dies
Sign o the times"
-Prince
Your interview lunch experience sounds like message: this is what it's going to be like, and we don't care if you join us.
I suppose some could also use it as a refresher break, from their battery of antagonistic one-way LeetCode hazings, or a chance to give the person a more comfortable feeling about the company (not otherwise permitted by their hazing process).
Although I doubt it was really their intention to be passive aggressive, I have to say: That was a Flawless Victory of passive aggression.
The third time a Google recruiter reached out to me with the sales pitch that I was a great engineer that they would like to have at any price, I berated him if that was the case why the previous two experiences.
Never heard from Google HR ever again, and I am not sorry, I am happier this way.
I had better experiences in interviews for EA and SCEE than Google, which again I also am an happier person not managing to get an offer, and endure the crunch lifecycle of the industry as reward.
Followed by an interview process that is designed to get those that want to work there at any price.
Both times they asked me the exact same tricky question. First time didn't do so well, second time I knew the 'correct' answer. They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time.
Most places will appreciate if you tell them before you work on the problem. That gives them a chance to give you a different problem instead. Likewise, they won't appreciate if you tell them afterwards since it makes it harder for them to judge any semblance of problem solving skill.
crazy how much time is wasted in US/VC tech.
Every large tech company or any tech company that pays decent money requires preparing for coding interviews *if you are trying to get hired as a developer*.
I personally didn’t do much prep for my Amazon loop accept practice answering behavioral questions in STAR format. But I also had to thread the needle of having experience to get into the Professional Services department as someone who knew cloud, how to talk to people, architecture and leading projects.
If I came out of college post 2012 instead of 1996 with path dependencies in 2012, you damn well better believe I would have been “grinding leetcode” to make BigTech money.
If you want to make $150K+ straight out of college and $259K+ a year three years into your career, you play the game. If you don’t want to play the game, accept the reduced amount of money from staying in enterprise dev.
At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any lathe company especially BigTech again and I’m definitely not going to chase after a job where I have to work in an office. But I know what I’ve been giving up for the last 2+ years by ignoring recruiters from GCP’s internal consulting division based on my stances.
But again, I’m also 51, I’ve done the build the big house in the burbs thing twice and I have grown (step)children that I’ve raised since they were 9 and 14 who don’t live with us
You might be asked to write something like fizz-buzz in an interview - but the point is there isn't a good answer to that. (there are a few possible solutions, but all of them have something you should not like - which makes it a simple yet real world like problem and thus something you should be able to figure out in less than an hour without study)
What you should prepare is figure out how they interview and thus what questions they might ask. (nobody will tell you what questions will be asked, but they may tell you the style) Practice the answers. Practice stories of how you worked in the past so you can twist the story to answer the question (the above is how you should prepare for the STARS interview my company does). If you were in prison or something then be prepared to talk about why they should believe you are reformed, but most people don't have such a thing in their past that they should find.
No, I really shouldn't. Especially if a company reaches out to me. If they are so flooded with fakers and coasters, they don't need to contact me.
Not after 25 years in the industry with easily verifiable companies and references.
part of preparing is learning what the company does. Most of us work for a company the majority reading this have never heard of. you want to know what the potential company does so you can ask intelligent questions.
I certainly am mentally prepared when I speak with a company and treat them professionally. I expect the same basically.
Prepare for an interview means look up the company. You often can figure out what style of interview they do and prepare to answer those questions. You often can figure out if there are concerns that you want to probe in your turn to ask them questions.
- everybody you meet is going to ask "so, tell me about yourself" so you better have a good answer. have a pitch that highlights relevant parts of your work history, discuss goals/interests, show a bit of personality.
- there's always going to be "do you have any questions for me?", so you need to have a couple of questions ready to go that make you seem interested/thoughtful AND help you extract good signal from the interviewer.
Is this a common Google practice? Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java. On how many different levels does this insult work?!
I'm just very interested in this tidbit of information.
If I were turned down for a job that involved writing FreeBSD kernel code and the hiring manager gave me a free book on FreeBSD kernel programming, I'd think they were cool people and try again in 18-24 months.
It's not the act of giving a a rejected candidate a textbook, the insult is that it was a supplemental text book for the very first CS class most undergrads take.
Going back to the interviewers, there are going to be jerks in any organization with more than 20 employees, but the fact that their culture sees this kind of patronizing behavior as "saving the world" and "making a difference" is a red flag for me.
2nd edition of Kleppmann comes out in a few months... if I flunk a DE interview think I can request it?
I too had the pleasure of interning under some former Bell Labs employees, it really was a great experience.
I also was interviewing somewhere else and told the recruiter. His response was to be verbally abusive and say the other place "sounded boring", and then went off on how if I turned down an offer, Amazon would never talk to me again and I'd basically ruined my career. I decided I didn't want to work at a place with that sort of culture.
They reached out to me in 2013 for an interview and again in 2024.
You wouldn't be defrauding anybody if you're not getting paid. You could take a sabbatical for 6-9 months and tell better companies you were working for Amazon that whole time.
I'm more than happy to tell better companies I've received offers from Google and Amazon and declined them, though.
Honesty is generally the best policy, imo :)
I used to (rather rudely) tell them off but recruiter turnover there is just as bad as every other department so it never stuck.
I feel the same, and especially about video games.
I would never work in the modern video game industry. It seems really miserable to be overworked and underpaid to work on some design-by-committee game that I don’t even care about.
But I hear stories of some Of the companies back in the 90s that seemed to magically muster the capital to sit down and put out effectively what was a passion project, but also commercialize it.
Thanks for this.
That's surprising. I've never seen any major tech company provide any sort of feedback, let alone handing you a book, even if it does feel condescending.
That's great imagery and a good description of how it felt! I was lucky to work at two of those three and those were awesome years. Going to work with people who created Unix and had commands named after them and later at Sun with all the magic, those were the days.
Post-Sun I've only done startups and while that has been a lot of fun in its own way, it is nowhere near as special.
However, I think the question is, what percentage of engineers can pass the amazon interview but not the Apple/Databricks/Uber/Google/Meta ones. Because no one is picking amazon over the aforementioned companies.
However, maybe there's an opening at Amazon and not the other companies, or maybe that's your only offer. I certainly think it might be worth it for a a few years.
Lol
First worlders having to "just get by" with 11 thousand dollars every month. What even is this world
But to honestly answer the question, by either not living in large cities and commuting in, sharing those 3BRs, or staying home with parents. Shaving that 48k/year (post-tax) rent down to ~12k/year frees up a lot of money.
(Also if you're young, staying with your parents and saving ~100-200k in rent for a downpayment over 10 years just seems like a smart idea to me).
FAANG has a huge footprint in the town, you're going to have a hard time hiring people when you're paying less than half what they are.
I was single and not a lavish spender so I didn't feel external pressure to try all that hard beyond having a low six figures job.
There are plenty of low prestige, mismanaged small companies that will pay low six figures and overwork people.
Not saying it doesn't happen, but it's probably harder than if it was just suddenly getting a giant salary.
But that company culture leaves me with a very low opinion of them and very little trust. Even Microsoft engineers are less brainwashed. I've had several that just told me the truth about services.
Maybe it depends on the country but it feels like this is just their culture.
I worked at Amazon. Twice. In total about a decade as a Principal Engineer. I left voluntarily a few months ago.
I have zero regrets about my time at Amazon. I learned lots, worked with some incredible people, and had fun doing it.
And the culture? It was life changing for me, especially when I first joined. In all the best ways.
And Amazon today? All I’ll say is that at their size, maintaining solid culture is damn hard. The hiring spree peri-Covid definitely added unimaginable stress to maintaining the culture the company was built on.
They’re a big company, and thus a big target. It’s easy, cheap, and even lazy to kick them with stuff like this.
The truth is that while it’s changed a lot over time, anyone fortunate enough to work there should embrace it.
Before you reflexively jump to "Amazon is just not for everybody", it's only fair to warn you that a lot of people around here have heard this phrase and don't buy it. My former landlord said the same thing at least 9 times in the 8 times I've interacted with him face to face... right up until he got fired. Management conveniently put him on a PIP 4 months before a vesting cliff on his 2-year RSU vesting schedule.
Yeah, Amazon is not for everybody- just the kind of people who either perpetrate or fall victim to pyramid schemes.
To pre-empt hyperbolic responses: I live in Seattle. I personally know plenty of people who have worked at Amazon. I know plenty of local teachers. The teachers work as many hours for a tenth the pay and burn out just as fast.
I don't consider 60 hour work weeks a privilege to be coveted, especially if I'm capturing less than 1% of the value I produce. I'm sorry man, but white collar serfdom is still serfdom.
If you're really going to keep begging this hard to be a serf on someone else's fiefdom, I'll tell you what: you can keep overworking yourself as serf on fiefdoms in which I might own shares, and increase the value of my portfolio for me, so I can draw even more passive income every month. I formally withdraw my protest to your "Protestant" work ethic.
I'm not trying to be an asshole, but I'm just hoping you take what I'm saying burns into your subconscious and something in you changes: that work into which you've placed so much of your self-esteem is just funding other peoples' passive income to either not work or live ostentatiously. If that's a great privilege to you, God bless you. I'm sure my wife would love it if I just retired- please make it happen, she would love me even more for it.
EDIT: P.S. Your "privilege" of working for Jeff Bezos' portfolio sounds a lot like a biblical curse. Specifically, 1 Samuel 8:10-18 and Psalm 105:44.
"He gave them the lands of the nations, that they might inherit the fruit of others’ labor"
No, and no. Your perception of modern labor markets is dated and disconnected from reality. Schools are constantly facing budget cuts and a huge chunk of teachers aren't even full time (instead getting things like a 60% time position - less pay, no security, but enough hours that good luck working a second job). Those that get full time positions still face the elimination of their positions.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. However, there's a fix for that: move to a state where the job prospects are better. That sounds like "let them eat cake", except that moving to another state as an American citizen is a lot easier than what of people went through fleeing the Sicilian Mafia or the Irish Potato Famine, let alone WW2 European front or the fall of Saigon.
California is just as "blue" as Washington.
>move to a state where the job prospects are better. That sounds like "let them eat cake", except that moving to another state as an American citizen is a lot easier than what of people went through fleeing the Sicilian Mafia or the Irish Potato Famine, let alone WW2 European front or the fall of Saigon.
There is no such state. Nearly every state is in budget crisis and cutting school funds, and a certain vocal segment of them are actively attacking the entire concept of education, banning books, prosecuting teachers who provide support to their students or talk about how the world works, and more.
It's not like I have family or friends with kids going to public school or anything in those states, what do I know?
They've criminalized such awful things as having libraries in the classroom with books not approved by dear leader: https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/florida-teachers-could-face-fe...
Texas is doing the same: https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-senate-bill-sb-4...
Definitely worth moving to a different state where just being a good teacher risks felony charges.
You don't have the first idea what teachers do or what their jobs require.
If you really think all teachers have tenure and are supported by unions, you also have not the faintest, foggiest inkling of a clue about the job market or professional environment of most teaching in the US.
I think it's also worth pointing out that, even as you repeatedly label others "arrogant," your comments in this thread are themselves breathtaking in their arrogance. I rarely run across HN comments so condescending, dismissive, self-righteous, or self-congratulatory.
I never said I was opposed to it, either. Quite the contrary. In fact, I think public schoolteachers and firefighters have a great idea about unions, and software engineers should follow their example and unionize.
I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread, because you completely missed my point. I don't care who has it worse. I care about who is making it bad, and what we as software engineers are going to do to make it right.
> I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread
This isn't productive. It's belittling, snotty, and disrespectful. You're also clearly more than intelligent enough to recognize that you're putting in people's mouths claims they haven't made.
I'm definitely on point that most teachers in blue states have worker protections, job security, and lax hours that no software engineer has despite comparatively low pay. In Illinois, the top end of high school teacher salaries even crosses into six figures.
I can't recall one software engineering job with tenure, let alone tenure that vests after 5-7 years.
I also can't recall one software engineering job listing with a benefits package that has the same vacation as a child and civil servant-grade health insurance, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. If you find a job posting like that, let me know.
If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.
Private-school teachers receive none of the protections that public-school teachers receive, and not all teachers are primary or secondary-school teachers. At the university level, teaching is increasingly the work of non-tenured staff, who have no job protections or job security, beyond guarantees that cover at most the current academic year, and their benefits are a bare shadow of what tenure-track faculty receive.
Teachers work longer hours than software engineers. This isn't self-imposed. Those are what the demands of the job require. There is no way to fulfill the average teacher's responsibilities with 40 hours of work per week. Their hours are longer, by necessity, and the stress level is far higher.
I'm a software engineer with experience in teaching. My benefits package as an SWE is vastly better than anything I received at my teaching job(s) or any of the teaching jobs I interviewed for.
So I can only repeat what I've already said: you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
> If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.
And this is odious.
Yeah, I guarantee you that the guy who worked at Amazon as a Principal Engineer for 10 years has a bigger portfolio than you.
levels.fyi says $967k/yr average compensation at that level.
More importantly, the time I spent managing my portfolio taught me how to better manage my portfolio. If Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is richer than Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch, it does not change the fact that Warren Buffett and Peter Lynchs' path to success is much more reproducible and reliable with a much lower barrier to entry.
If you made that kind of money working for Amazon, then good for you. I wish more members of the middle class would make FU money and save their money so they can hold greater leverage and take home a much larger portion of the value they add to society.
"The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will."
-Henry George
P.S. FWIW, I don't need that much to be happy. Last March, I visited my wife (then fiancee) in Hiroshima and spent 3 weeks in a 250sqft weekly-rental apartment in sharing a twin bed, living off of Ogura toast and miso soup for breakfast, < $5 meals at Ramen and Udon shops, making Katsu curry together, and going on walks, and it was the best time in my entire life.
Pardon me if you thought I was trying to convince you I'm rich or humblebrag about it. Far from it, I'm just finally financially independent and happy about it. I never wanted to be rich, just rich enough to say "fuck you" to growing someone else's grapes and pressing someone else's wine so that someone else can wear fine silk.
I achieved my goal of no longer needing to be a software engineer to maintain a lower middle class life. That's all.
Is it fortunate? Working at a place that holds a high bar on hiring, pays extremely well, and provides extremes of learning and growth in tech? Yeah, that’s a pretty good spot to most rational people. Building systems for 20M request/second teaches you cool stuff. So yes, it’s fortunate.
Of course it’s not for everybody. I never said it was.
Nobody is going to take seriously a person that thinks working at Amazon is a pyramid scheme.
After you work at Amazon please report back your experience.
Do you know why? It's because most programmers don't like being told what to do, let alone by people who are not programmers. Most people around here DESPISE corporate HR, and Amazon has it in spades.
As for the pyramid scheme comment, my reasoning is not only sound; it's Puget sound...
Amazon entices new grad hires with RSUs on a backloaded vesting schedule and then fires them very shortly before the vesting cliff. If "they should have read the fine print" is Amazon values, I think you need a new set of values.
> anyone fortunate enough to work there
strikes me as an insane thing to say based on the people I do know who have worked there. Horrible work life balance, mobbing, being hired to be fired by a manager who wanted to keep their team but had to stack ranking. Every one of them has described the culture as a cult, and reading comments like this one makes me think even moreso that they're right.
"Lord, I apologize." -Dan Whitney
There's a lot wrong with AWS (and it's got a lot worse in the last 3 years), but there's also a lot right, and there are some really, really smart people there, several of which have boomeranged (people who left and came back).
FAANG companies do not care about their employees at all and it's clearly just getting worse over time.
Also, I will never work in an office again, and I don't trust FAANG companies to allow me to have that luxury, even if it's in place when they hire me. Money turns groups of people — like boards and shareholders — into sociopaths.
No thank you. I'd rather work at a University or a small company. Less money, but a lot less stress, a lot more stability, and having experience makes me feel useful instead of feeling like a bullseye with a dollar sign in the middle.
MBAs usually wind up eating the seed corn at some point.
The stories I hear there is just not the style of work I'm interested in
Any American working in an Amazon warehouse will be jumping at the chance to get out of there. So turnover would be really high. Same with delivery stuff, I don't think most Americans would enjoy a job where they don't even get a pee break.
As for legal stuff, I'm sure they'd use intermediaries to cover their ass.
Your average local employer with a few dozen people? If he fucks around enough to draw in the attention of OSHA, he will find out. Easy prey and without political connections he's toast.
But Amazon? This company is by direct head count the third-largest employer in the US, second-largest in both the US and worldwide if one excludes militaries [1]. Amazon is frankly too large to enforce laws against and so is similar-sized Walmart (who has been able to extort the government into subsidizing their poor wages with food stamps), too many livelihoods depend on the existence of the company.
IMHO, a lot of the Big Tech and F500 companies should be outright broken up. When a company grows so large that laws cannot be enforced or, worse, laws get willfully ignored because it's cheaper to risk the occasional fine and bad press, eventually the rule of law itself suffers.
Or are you not familiar with Puerto Rico?
I used to be on an H-1b and gladly came back home to India. I run my own business now. And yes. I'm ex-Anazon. It was a tough place to work, but circa mid-nineties, the stock options made it worth working for them.
I'm willing to bet I'll outcode a significant fraction of the audience on this site. And I'm not even close to the best developer around. Some of the smartest people I've met have been on an H-1b visa. Please consider not letting prejudice affect your view. You'll do yourself a disservice by underestimating your competition.
The only thing I implied is that workers with fewer rights that a U.S. citizen are easier to exploit and abuse.
If I refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, the worst that can happen is that I get fired, and spend months looking for a new job.
If you refuse to take a work-related call at 3am, you get fired and lose your ability to stay in a place you have lived for 5+ years and made your home.
That's BS, and I hate it almost as much as you do. You can be blackmailed with deportation, and I can be replaced with someone who can be blackmailed with deportation. We're both getting screwed in this current arrangement.
What is common is that being available counts as work.
I am sure you are a wonderful person, but it’s simply an unjust treatment of Americans, even if you personally had nothing directly or reasonably to do with it. The betrayal and abuse was perpetrated by the “Americans” that led the corporations and paid off the politicians, and also the American citizens that were distracted and careless about their own politics and government and future for their own children. I doubt you would be ok with your own ruling class and rich to betray your children and the future of India, would you? It’s crazy, but America’s people largely and for a long time absolutely betrayed their own people.
I would not wish it on any society, even though it has been pervasive all over the “West”, where the rich, corporate captains, and politicians betray their own people. Imagine if your Indian politicians were to sell out India to the West or maybe import Africans or something similar, I would hope that the Indian people would make it absolutely clear to the politicians and rich that they are staring down a loaded gun and it’s not their finger on the trigger. So do I also wish it for the people of all of the western countries that they retake their sovereignty and self determination away from the rather parasitic oligarchy that has unconscionably been betraying its own people out of undeterred greed and crime against the very people that allowed making them rich and powerful in the first place.
It is not a personal thing, I think it’s just that people are recently getting a lot more angry about things because the American empire is hitting a rough patch that it has not experienced in anyone’s living memory and as it is said, (adapted) the naked people start getting angry when the tide goes out and there aren’t enough jobs to also be super generous by giving them away to Indians benefiting from the abusive systems of the parasitic cabal of the ruling class.
What you may also not be totally aware of, is that H1-B is only one of many different systems and programs that have been abused and quite literally benefit and profit foreigners overt Americans. Imagine if that existed in India; where I go to India, make 2-3x what the average Indian makes, the government gives me free housing, my children get free education and free healthcare, and I get extremely beneficial government secured loan terms on business loans and get grants to start a business and free consulting and services, and I get to bring dozens of my friends and family into India to work in my business, and I also get beneficial home loans to buy up houses and drive up prices, and my foreign children get preferential treatment in Indian universities (…while local Indians don’t get those things) and I run for office while all the foreigners I and my advantaged community brought over to India start getting our people into the government and we start taking over Indian institutions and government offices.
I combine and crossed things a bit because is a bit more complicated and nuances of course, and many Americans aren’t even aware of just how many programs and states are in place that advantage foreigners and disadvantage native Americans, who could even very well be the descendants of the founders of America. That’s why things have gotten rather tense and as it looks, unfortunately, it will likely only get worse from here; especially as BRICS builds out more of their alternative fiscal, monetary, economic, geopolitical structures; and the same traitors that control the USA will/are starting to get very nervous and borderline panicky. It seems Thucydides Trap is in full effect.
None of these are H-1B perks. (Note: H-1B, not H1-B. It comes from ¶ H(1) of the INA of 1952; H-1A for nurses and H-1B for non-nursing specialty occupations [1].)
Immigrants pay for housing in homes that pay property taxes that fund public education. Their employer pays for their healthcare that costs multiples what most of the same treatments and drugs cost in India. (Only once they become a resident alien do they qualify for marketplace subsidies.)
> native Americans, who could even very well be the descendants of the founders of America
You've got to be shitting me. (Try native born next time.)
> my foreign children get preferential treatment in Indian universities
The students of H-1Bs (from India, no less) do not get preferential treatment in American university admissions. If anything, it's the opposite. It's why Indian Americans join lawsuits by Asian and White Americans around removing race considerations from college admissions.
> Thucydides Trap
"Research by Graham Allison," the guy who coined the term in 2011 after a career in the Reagan administration and, before that, at the RAND Corporation, "supporting the Thucydides trap has been criticized" [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap#Methodological...
Yes.
Though I did consider, until noting the context, that they might be referring to descendants of both the founding fathers and Native Americans. Chilling, actually. To think that a good number of one branch of our founding fathers' descendants may have been exterminated by another.
Maybe Jefferson brought some of that whacky weed down to the slave quarters and had a big party. Had a good time. Drugged them up first. Not unlike maybe the underclass of sex workers today, in dire straits and desperate.
Generally it is framed to meant that we are the people who captured and built these countries and they belong to our 'culture'
Fact of the matter is that the tribes that were in what Europeans called America were objectively, factually not Americans, on obvious account that America didn’t exist prior to Europeans creating it, and they did not and would not have considered themselves Americans at all, let alone native Americans.
How would you be a “native” of something you are not a part of and don’t want to be a part of, just because some kid in 2025 is brainwashed about you?? And that’s without mentioning that they not only didn’t like the noting of America for understandable reasons, even if they understood what it meant at all, which most didn’t as they were, for better or worse, literally Stone Age people at the founding, with no reasonable expectation of understanding what a Constitution was since they didn’t even have a written language.
And that’s without even going into the fact that the tribes largely considered themselves antithetical to this European created America and wanted to remain their own identity and not let fools as yourself mash them into America.
They were literally sovereign nations up until recently, literally not part of America for the prior 200 years. Do you even understand any of that?
But you want them to be native Americans by creating them into your propaganda riddled conception of what America is? Why not leave them be their own America, not just another destroyed identity that this perversion called America has devoured and destroyed.
…
Firstly, this is so wildly tone deaf, that I don’t know what to say.
Secondly - India (and most developing nations I will bet) have had violent protests at some point in their history about people from other parts of the same country coming in to take jobs.
Most of the world understands why America feels the way it does. Hell I personally have better articulations of America’s problems than many Americans do.
But for the love of all that is holy, please don’t end up betraying your ignorance of the rest of the world and reminding us of some of the worst features of American stereotypes. It may be meant as an effort to find common ground, but only succeeds in irritating and potentially alienating.
Believe it or not, compared to the vast majority of humanity, your problems are better than what they will face.
I do not ask you to take an interest in the world. It would be nice if you did.
I do ask that you serve your own purpose, your own argument, better.
You have no idea how nice you have it over there.
No. H1b isn't for highly specialized people at all. EB is for that.
Not to mention, that H1b has explicit rules to pay the prevailing wage in the market.
The rest of your comment is so out of touch with reality it's painful to read.
I fail to reach this interpretation in this thread.
I'm interpreting this as mid-1990s, in which case I very much believe in your technical ability. My dad came over late-1990s and he worked at mid-sized companies ever since. Even then, he and his H1B peers were decently intelligent.
I would caution your defense of today's H1B/L1s/OPT workers; I'd say the quality of Indian engineers in the US has halved every 10 years.
Today's Indian engineers come to the US because they can't enroll in a decent college in India and/or obtain a upper-middle class salary from a job. It is an entirely different mechanism for which people are migrating over. It used to be brain drain, now it is sewage drain.
The H1Bs in the big tech companies are maybe 50/50 technically decent, but everywhere else, they are just taking contracting spots. It is a very corrupt and bloated system that has to go because they are not providing valuable work.
> "The rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working-age populace led to another piece of internal research, obtained this summer by Recode, which cautioned that the company might “deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years."
The root cause is global competition, especially from countries with very low wages - Ukraine, a country in Europe, for example, was a top food supplier for Africa -, and widespread income disparity in many Western countries - 67% of Americans self-report to live from paycheck to paycheck [1], for example. First it's "luxuries" that get the cut - travel, eating out, entertainment - and once everything has been cut, people go for savings in food because that's the last large expenses block that they can meaningfully control.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-you...
[2] https://www.boeckler.de/de/boeckler-impuls-vermoegen-nur-jed...
This sentence is rather self contradictory...
Kale in US is about as expensive as the cheapest cut of beef. Despite one taking 2-3 years of labor and the other is 60 days.
https://am.gs.com/en-us/advisors/insights/report-survey/reti...
The only reasonable conclusion is "are you living paycheck to paycheck" is a useless survey question.
I don't know how often this actually happens, but it certainly not an unreasonable conclusion.
Hmm... What do I wanna do more? Keep up with the Joneses, or flip the bird to my boss? Hmm...
One of the central evils of consumer advertising is that it implants the idea in everyone's heads that buying more material things = happiness.
And the ideal consumer is one which only stops buying when they've reached their income...
Which they suggest will make you happier.
The most toxic high-income advertising is all based around creating a need and then fulfilling it... because it turns out wealthy people tend to already have enough things to make themselves happy, if they looked at them differently.
All advertising is based around creating a need and fulfilling it, but not all of those needs are toxic. Imagine getting an advertisement for a concert for some musicians you've never even heard of. You hear their music, and maybe they even have some showmanship. You like what you see and hear, and now you have a need you didn't have before, whether that's going to a KISS concert or whatever kinda music floats your boat.
Toxic ads encouraging you to indulge in toxic behavior, like an Instagram ad making you think you don't matter if you don't publicize every hour of your life, are a different animal.
That's all I'm trying to say, I'm not trying to be pedantic or anything. I just don't think putting out a Disney World ad of a happy family eating breakfast with Mickey Mouse is promoting or exploiting toxic values even though it convinces you that you need something you weren't aware of yesterday.
So in order for FIRE to kill off McMansions and luxury cars most people would have to become resistant to advertising (or advertising would need to be limited).
"If you treat people as they are, they will become worse. If you treat them as they could be, they will become better.
If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
I'm convinced that treating most people as if they have free will is more likely to get them to at least consider my ways.
Mostly because there are infinite ways to misunderstand an individual's motivations and thus arrive at a 'should' prediction that conflicts with observed reality.
Versus reasoning in from 'a lot of people ____, do they still after we ____?'
As time goes on you have to start importing people from further afield.
-Bill Watterson (via Calvin & Hobbes)
At least where I grew up if you drop out and don't file all the necessary homeschooling paperwork the police will visit you.
Miss too many days of government school because your family are poor and you had to help your parents put bread on the table? The truancy officer may show up to arrest you.
Announce you are homeschooling your kids to avoid liberal indoctrination? Sending your kids to work in a factory? A-ok in a number of states.
The US spends more per pupil than every other OECD country except for Luxembourg, and exceeds the average by over 50%. If US schools aren't funded well enough, essentially no one is.
Not accurate in the context you're saying it.
You're probably conflating US K-12 spending (low) with post-secondary spending (high)?
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
Your source there still puts US K-12 spending in the top-5 worldwide.
The allocation of said spending clearly isn't optimal, but there is plenty of money at a high-level
I'd love to see your citations on that.
Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes.
Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time).
At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well.
You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives.
"Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Ref to start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI
The guy you're replying to only posts simple takes to derail conversations. He doesn't have citations.
Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
I'm not sure what I said that made you think I'm arguing against this point. Government Education is absolutely necessary and a common good. It's a bare minimum that keeps a lot of children from a life of total ignorance and squalor.
I do think that government education has some pretty major flaws, but I didn't say anything to setup some zero-sum competition between the two approaches. I was replying to the statement "In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject", which is a bit ridiculous and, in context, is trying to paint home-schooling as some backdoor approach to child labor.
Yeah, sure. Here are the popular studies on the subject: https://nheri.org/academic-achievement-and-demographic-trait...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15582159.2015.99...
https://nheri.org/a-systematic-review-of-the-empirical-resea...
If you look into these you'll see people arguing against Ray's studies saying "the population is overly white, overly married parents, and overly Christian, it doesn't represent potential results for the wider population". That's definitely true, but it's also a fact of the home-schooled population that those groups are wildly over represented, and the results of that actual population being called "meaningless" is what I was responding to.
It is fair to argue that home-schooling isn't a panacea, and wouldn't work for everyone. I never intended to say it would. I did include the second study which is specifically about black American home-schooled students and their results.
As for the rest of your post, I understand your opinion, but don't share it.
The point is that the average result appears to be better.
Consumerism rewards this process, because the glut of mediocre goods remains cheap.
None of it is about talent, it's about giving companies the ability to abuse employees, with a nice side of wage suppression.
It ran into the problem that workers are in fact a finite resource. And of course that at some point the juice ain't worth the squeeze. People aren't going to do part time work being ground to death and still not be able to pay rent. At least ridesharing and delivery is done on and around your own schedule
The depletion of tech workers for Amazon is similar. The part that isn't said is: at the salaries Amazon is willing to pay. Amazon has a different market to worry about, the stock market. They can't just increase their HR spend 25% without taking a hit in the stock market. And I guess they aren't willing to change the work environment to be more attractive. Maybe they can't at their size, as it can be hard to avoid dead weight.
Google doesn't hire in the US for some PAs, for similar reason. Salaries are capped (artificially) by stock market demands. But Google doesn't call it worker depletion.
Same goes for labor: if you pay shit, demand for that job is going to be shit.
Of course on the labor side, part of the "price" is job satisfaction, working conditions, etc. Many more people would rather be receptionists at $17/hr than working in a warehouse or factory for the same rate.
let say you ran a trucking company and decided that you'd pay more to ensure you cornered the market on 'good' drivers. but... it turns out that your customers don't care if you have good drivers or mediocre drivers, so you can't justify charging a higher rate.
How are they going to undercut them without drivers available to actually do the work?
This narrative is absurd. Per mile domestic truck shipping rates have gone up dramatically in recent years, and are generally quite variable. Trucking profit margins were until quite recently way up, the fall driven by high fuel prices and interest rates (which increase the costs of equipment financing and insurance) and reduced demand.
The truth is trucking is currently going through a recession with freight demand down and empty miles up. Trucking companies most certainly could raise rates and pay pay to attract more drivers; right now they don't want more drivers.
>> "The rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working-age populace led to another piece of internal research, obtained this summer by Recode, which cautioned that the company might “deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years."
This article? https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-2...
It's from 2022, so it'd be interesting to see an update.
AWS Manager interpretation. "Few years?, not my problem"
So I'm guessing things will get worse. It took a long time but I remember when "cloud" started getting big lots of people voiced concern about being at the whim of Amazon/Bezos for your business critical infrastructure. Took longer than most people though but we are getting there.
Edit: I see its from 2022, so maybe it is the end stage?
You have a source for that claim?
He's saying even if they had 10m illegal workers they would burn though them all too
I would never work for AWS, given what I've heard, and consistently, of their internal culture.
Also, everything I've seen while working with internal staff makes me feel there's a culture of obfuscating all weaknesses from customers, practically to the point of deceit.
I have a friend who recently started there. He just brought a Mercedes, and a second house, and he’s still in his early thirties.
They keep him busy, though.
I don’t think I’d like it, but he does.
Last couple of days have been a challenge, though…
[1] https://fortune.com/2024/03/20/amazon-layoffs-performance-re...
When you're the, what. Second? Third? Largest employer in the US, enforcing the law now becomes a meaningful hit to economic velocity. And as much as Trump hates brown people, his administration has begrudgingly revealed that there are moves that his billionaire buddies Will Not Allow.
I'm no fan of ice or this administrations deportation strategy, but it's a serious problem that even enforcing the law on Amazon is now an economic liability so much that nobody dares to try
They raised worker pay which, unsurprisingly, did not make Wall Street happy in the short term.
However, over the next couple years there were multiple benefits:
- lower turnover
- less employee theft
- cleaner stores
- more same store sales
etc
Walmart executives seem to claim that the pay raise led to those outcomes; specifically, they talked to employees and realized that in order to get those outcomes they had to stop paying people the least they possibly could because why would anyone stay?
From the article:
> Rissa Pittman, then a store manager in Ponca City, Okla., said it was easier to staff her store after 2015 as wages improved and it became easier to train workers for promotions.
It's likely not just pay, but a concerted effort across the board that drives results, but the pay increase is the one that calls WallStreet's attention.
The one exception is an engineer who stopped engineering, switched into product, and transferred to China to hit on the women there.
Some Amazon practices actually sound great to me (short documents, read before the meeting) but so many things just sound needlessly, relentlessly cheap.
The largest contributor of stress being on-call rotations where getting paged between 12am-6am each night was basically a guarantee. God help you if it was a holiday and you got a high sev page, where the people that you really need are all out of pocket. The many many many instances of their security "regime" relentlessly paging us in the middle of the night for things like having an S3 bucket for static website assets; despite numerous exceptions given by L7+ leadership.
I disagree with the notion around "short documents", not only were they quite lengthy at times, but they actually made the process of "busywork" worse by adding more overhead to trivial matters.
Add on the layoffs and "return to office" horse-shit excuses and it's no wonder nobody wants to go back.
I've since been at Oracle/OCI (absolute dog shit with the worst on call I've ever seen, and I've been in the military lol), and now at Microsoft/Azure, which so far seems like a decent workplace.
Sorry, what?
Even L6 managers feel this, but it becomes more clear as one goes up in levels. Recruiting is job one.
If Amazon runs out of recruitable engineers (unlikely, they are one of the most prestigious firms in the world) then they will simply lower the bar. HC must be filled.
The company is well structured, it will survive.
True, that's the other thing. Even if it's true that brain drain directly caused/exacerbated this event, big companies have a lot of momentum. Money can paper over a terrifying range and magnitude of folly. Amazon won't die quickly.
There is an argument, specifically, that "This is a tipping point moment."
Not the end, and possibly not even the beginning of the end. But the start of what is likely to be a long and persistent slide.
From TFA.
Understaffing and absences would clearly lead to delayed incident response, but such an obvious negligence and breach of contract would have been avoided by a responsible cloud provider, ensuring supposedly adequate people on duty.
An exceptionally challenging problem is unlikely to be enough to cause so much fumbling because, regardless of the complex mistakes behind it, a DNS misunderstanding doesn't have a particularly large "surface area" for diagnostic purposes and it is supposed to be expeditely resolvable by standard means (ordering clients to switch to a good DNS server and immediately use it to obtain good addresses) that AWS should have in place.
AWS engineers being formerly competent but currently stupid, without organizational issues, might be explained by brain damage. "RTO" might have caused collective chronic poisoning, e.g. lead in drinking water, but I doubt Amazon is so cheap.
"My wildly conjectural and self-serving theory is not only correct, it is the most correct".
Lol perfectly represents the arrogance of hn.
My personal "guess" is that failing to retain knowledge and talent is only one of many components of a well-rounded crisis of bad management and bad company culture that has been eroding Amazon on more fronts than AWS reliability.
What's your theory? Conspiracy within Amazon? Formidable hostile hackers? Epic bad luck? Something even more movie-plot-like? Do you care about making sense of events in general?
You seem to be misunderstanding the nature of the issue.
The DNS records for DynamoDB's API disappeared. They resolve to a dynamic bunch of IPs that constantly change.
A ton of AWS services that use DynamoDB could no longer do so. Hardcoding IPs wasn't an option. Nor could clients do anything on their side.
Did you consider that DNS might’ve been a symptom? If the DynamoDB DNS records use a health-check, switching DNS servers will not resolve the issue and might make it worse by directing an unusually high volume of traffic at static IPs without autoscaling or fault recovery.
It's only logical presupposing a lot of other conditions, each of which is worthy of healthy skepticism. And even then, it's only a hypothesis. You need evidence to go from "this could have contributed to the problem" to "this caused the problem."
Based on what little is given in the article, it seems to go strongly against this hypothesis. For example it links to multiple past findings that Amazon's notification times need improvement going back to 2017. If something has been a problem for nearly a decade, it's hard to imagine it is a result of any recent personnel changes.
TFA does not establish how many AWS workers have left or been laid off, nonetheless how many of those were actually undesirable losses of highly skilled individuals. Even if we take it on faith that a large number of such individuals were lost, it is another bridge further to claim that there was neither redundancy in that skillset which remained, nor that any vacancies have been left unfilled since.
No evidence is given that indicates that if a more experienced team were working on the problem it would have been identified and resolved faster. The article even states something to the opposite effect:
> AWS is very, very good at infrastructure. You can tell this is a true statement by the fact that a single one of their 38 regions going down (albeit a very important region!) causes this kind of attention, as opposed to it being "just another Monday outage." At AWS's scale, all of their issues are complex; this isn't going to be a simple issue that someone should have caught, just because they've already hit similar issues years ago and ironed out the kinks in their resilience story.
Indeed, the article doesn't even provide evidence that the response was unreasonably slow. No comparison to similar outages either from AWS in the past, before the hypothecated brain drain, nor from competitors. Note that the author has no idea what the problem actually was, or what AWS had to do to diagnose the issue.
Which is to say: it's entirely possible that the inferences drawn by TFA are just wrong. And it's also possible that TFA is wrong but also right to express concern with how Amazon manages talent.
Yes, development tools are better every day. Yes, you can downsize. No it won’t be felt immediately. Yes, it mortgages the future and at a painfully high interest rate.
Suspending disbelief won’t make downsizing work better.
See: general electric, RCA, Xerox, GM
But Bezos will still have his billions.
Just a guess but I think this bubble will stretch a bit more before it pops.
Are they?
It seems that at L6 and below workers are a Taylorism-style fungible widget driven to convert salary into work product, guided to create the most output for the longest time before mentally breaking down, then being swiftly replaced, with L7 and above being so incredibly political that keeping the snakes and vultures from eating your team is a full time job at every level of senior management.
It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.
I would love to hear positive counter perspectives from Amazonians because the anecdotes from my L6-L10 friends describe what sounds like an inhumane hell on earth.
It’s pretty simple, actually. Once such a dominant market position is achieved, you can get away with almost anything, whether with customers or employees. This is true of all the BigTech companies.
The only time Amazon was forced to change its ways was during Covid hiring boom where they couldn't compete in the talent market. They were forced to increases their salary bands and the culture was also a bit easy during that time. But starting mid 2022 it's been an employer's market and Amazon is making sure to juice every bit out of its employees while it can
Engineers have to spend an inordinate amount of time on "managing up", which means they have very little time and attention to do what would otherwise be a reasonable workload. Additionally, good engineers hate and despise this so it contributes a lot to the burnout.
It doesn't need to be sustainable in the long run: just needs to get to the next quarter and there continues to be enough desperate people in the US or India willing to be ground up in the machine for a chance to buy a house in a major metro
(Source: I was at Amazon for 10 years, finally quit last month)
If there's one thing I have learned from my Amazon mates, then that is they never have a true time off. Hills, beaches, a marriage in the family— no exceptions. It's so pervasive that I can't really imagine it to be voluntary, and my friends' answers on this topic have never been clear.
Maybe it was still at the end of Indian day but together with the holiday I'd say that makes it more unlikely to be handled there
[08:43 AM PDT] We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services...
[08:04 AM PDT] We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues...
[12:11 AM PDT] <declared outage>
They claim not to have known the root cause for ~8hr
Or an NLB could also be load balancing by managing DNS records--it's not really clear what a NLB means in this context
Or there was an overload condition because of the NLB malfunctioning that caused UDP traffic to get dropped
Obviously a lot of reading between the lines is required without a detailed RCA--hopefully they release more info
The initial cause appears to be a a bad DNS entry that they rolled back at 2:22am PDT. They started seeing recovery with services but as reports of EC2 failures kept rolling in they found a network issue with a load balancer that was causing the issue at 8:43am.
Their 14 updates did not bring my stuff back up.
My nines are not their nines. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/
Is 75 minutes really considered that long of a time? I don't do my day-job in webdev, so maybe I'm just naive. But being able to diagnose the single service endpoint in 75 minutes seems pretty good to me. When I worked on firmware we frequently spent _weeks_ trying to diagnose what part of the firmware was broken.
It's good enough, but there's no real evidence it's the best, simply the largest.
One might spend weeks diagnosing a problem if the problem only happens 0.01% of the time, correlated with nothing, goes away when retried, and nobody can reproduce it in a test environment.
But 0.01%-and-it-goes-away-when-retried does not make a high priority incident. High priority incidents tend to be repeatable problems that weren't there an hour ago.
Generally a well designed, properly resourced business critical system will be simple enough and well enough monitored that problems can be diagnosed in a good deal less than 75 minutes - even if rolling out a full fix takes longer.
Of course, I don't know how common well designed, properly resourced business critical systems are.
From my experience in setting up and running support services, not really. It's actually pretty darn quick.
First, the issue is reported to level 1 support, which is bunch of juniors/drones on call, often offshore (depending on time of the day) who'll run through their scripts and having determined that it's not in there, escalate to level 2.
Level 2 would be more experienced developer/support tech, who's seen a thing or two and dealt with serious issues. It will take time to get them online as they're on call but not online at 3am EST, as they have to get their cup of joe, turn on the laptop etc. Would take them a bit to realize that the fecal matter made contact with the rotating blades and escalate to level 3.
Which involves setting up the bridge, waking up the decisions makers (in my case it was director and VP level), and finally waking up the guy who either a) wrote all this or b) is one of 5 or 6 people on the planet capable of understanding and troubleshooting the tangled mess.
I do realize that AWS support might be structured quite a bit differently, but still... 75 minutes is pretty good.
Edit: That is not to say that AWS doesn't have a problem with turnover. I'm well aware of their policies and tendency to get rid of people in 2/3 years, partially due to compensation structures where there's a significant bump in compensation - and vesting - once you reach that timeframe.
But in this particular case I don't think support should take much of a blame. The overall architecture on the other hand...
Because if so, this seems like about the most damning thing I could learn from this incident.
Engineers own their alarms, which they set up themselves during working hours. An engineer on call carries a "pager" for a given system they own as part of a small team. If your own alert rules get tripped, you will be automatically paged regardless of time of day. There are a variety of mechanisms to prioritize and delay issues until business hours, and suppress alarms based on various conditions - e.g. the health of your own dependencies.
End user tickets can not page engineers but fellow internal teams can. Generally escalation and paging additional help in the event that one can not handle the situation is encouraged and many tenured/senior engineers are very keen to help, even at weird hours.
What are business hours for a global provider of critical tech services?
Alerts and monitoring will results in automatic pages to engineers. There is no human support before it gets escalated.
If an engineer hasn't taken a look within a few minutes, it escalates to their manager, and so on.
I have 10 years of experience at Amazon as an L6/L7 SDM, across 4 teams (Games, logistics, Alexa, Prime video). I have also been on a team that caused a sev 1 in the past.
Just capitalised for emphasis, right?
> COE
Center of Excellence? Council of Europe? Still wondering even after Googling.
> SLA
Service Level Agreement. This I knew beforehand.
> SDM
Service Delivery Manager?
I guessed this was an internal Amazon thing so I searched “Amazon COE”
Correction of Error
https://wa.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2020-07-02T19-33-2...
> SDM
Software Developer Manager (from searching Amazon SDM)
https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/sdm-interview-pre...
I tell the juniors it stands for Correction of Employment. Keeps them on their toes.
Quite a few of AWS's more mature customers (including my company) were aware within 15 minutes of the incident that Dynamo was failing and hypothesized that it'd taken other services. Hopefully AWS engineers were at least fast.
75 minutes to make a decision about how to message that outage is not particularly slow though, and my guess is that this is where most of the latency actually came from.
It is possible with professionals, institutional knowledge, drills, and good tools.
With that being said, the problem here isn't that it took 75 minutes to find the root cause, but rather that the fix took hours to propagate through the us-east-1 data center network. Which is completely unacceptable for industries like healthcare where even small disruptions are a matter of life and death.
You cannot just keep abstracting and chopping systems to smaller and smaller subsystems to make them easy to digest.
At some point someone needs to know how these coordinate and behave under disturbances. At some point someone needs to know at a low level what the hell is going on.
If AI is to tech what outsourcing was to manufacturing, then your analogy has me concerned for the future.
I mean this is true, but we aren't talking about the consumer here. We're talking about the industry which is to say the powerful people who own and run all these companies.
What has happened is that those overseas countries now have all the experienced engineers over there and they know it. So you see things like the Trump admin begging Korean companies to keep their workers in the US because they understand how to actually do these things. And the reason the Trump admin did that is because they owe favors to the rich people who want to profit off of factories in the US.
> "engineers had identified DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint for US-EAST-1 as the likely root cause"
Interestingly, we found matching errors in our own logs:
> System.Net.WebException
> The remote name could not be resolved: 'dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com'
Occurrences were recorded on:
- 2025-04-30
- 2025-05-29
- 2025-06-17
- Yesterday
We had logged this as a low-priority bug since previous incidents only affected our AWS testing environments (and never our production env which is on Azure). At the time, we assumed it was some CI/CD glitch.
It now seems that the underlying cause was this DNS issue all along, and only yesterday did it start impacting systems outside of AWS.
At this point I wonder if it's related.
They’ll get acquired and top people leave as their stock vests or get pushed out because the megacorp wants someone different in the seat.
The people who knew the tech are gone and you’re left with an unmaintainable mess that becomes unreliable and no one knows how to fix it.
I would've even liked to work at AWS myself, if it were clear that they're solving a few concerns:
1. Rumors of rough corporate culture, and you needing your manager to shield you from it. (If it can't be immediately solved for all of Amazon or white-collar, maybe start with increasing job-seeker confidence for AWS or per-team.)
2. Even very experienced engineer candidates must go through some silly corporate coding screen, and an interview to make sure they've memorized some ritual STAR answers about Leadership Principles. If your prospective manager can't even get you out of that, what worse corporate things can't they shield you from?
3. RTO. As well as all the claims it wasn't done consistent with the Leadership Principles, and claims that it's not about working effectively.
4. Difficult-sounding on-call rotation, for people who aren't shift workers. (Even if you Principal out of on-call, you don't want your teammates to be overextended, nor to have awkwardness because you're getting a more consistent sleep schedule that is denied them.)
Also, not a concern, but an idea that applies to all the FAANGs lately: What about actively renewing the impression in the field that this is a place where people who are really good go? Meta's historical approach seems to be to pay better, and to release prominent open source code, and be involved in open hardware. Google (besides having a reputation for technical/competence excellence and warmer values) historically had a big frat-pledging mystique going on, though it turned into a ritual transaction, and everyone optimized for that ritual. AWS has a lot of technical/competence excellence to be proud of, and could make sure that they're investing in various facets of that, including attracting and retaining the best workers, and helping them be most effective, and then making sure the field knows that.
Eventually, you begin to consider the drawbacks, such as the monotony of the work or the exhausting nature of on-calls (which disrupt personal life). Then, an opportunity arises from a former colleague at another company, and the outcome is predictable.
Companies present numerous such inconveniences and actively introduce additional ones. Now, we are faced with mandatory RTOs, along with the continuous tightening of the screws and "cutting fat from the bone" (actual words of my company's CTO). Consequently, employees will depart, and it is often the high-performers who will seek opportunities elsewhere, as they are not afraid of the job market.
True, it opened a lot of doors for me - some I chose not to go through. But I went into ProServe working in the consulting division, became a major contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche and made industry contacts by working with outside companies.
You don’t have to memorize LPs. You just have to know how to answer standard behavioral questions like I’ve done a million times before and since - 30 years across 10 jobs.
Every tech company that pays top of market requires coding screens and all of the BigTech companies are forcing RTO and they all have a toxic work culture.
It’s par for the course if you want to make the money they offer.
Google is no better if you look at the leveling guidelines. It’s still based on politics and working on the new and shiny - the reason they have so many products that go nowhere and at one point had 5 or 6 messaging apps simultaneously.
I think you are looking at BigTech - any of them - through rose colored glasses
> Google is no better if [...]
Google has significant differences from Amazon, from everything I've heard. And in some ways a better cultural fit for me.
Two Google problems are the forward-facing frat pledging and egos during hiring, and then misaligned careerism by many on the job, with both problems supported from the top. (Well, and the adtech ethics, with a veneer of "California nice" and rationalizing "we're the good guys, so it's OK to do this"; partly mitigated by the veneer being self-fulfilling to some degree.)
I know less about Amazon, but my impression is that the problems are more like (let's call it) "corporate roughness", and the gradual effects of who survives or thrives in that vs. who leaves. But complicated, because not all teams seem to feel that rough side of corporate culture as much as others. On the good side, the company often does great work, and they have some good earlier ideas about engineering and product culture (but maybe coasting or backsliding in parts).
I haven't seriously considered most of the other big tech companies, and I think many of them have much worse problems.
> Having AWS on your resume as a developer doesn’t set you apart from [...]
That's not much of a goal for me. Resume prestige (and also resume-driven-development keywords) are goals for most developers today, though. Too much so. Which I think is a sign of a serious culture problem across our field, and I think it shows in our field's output.
My personal “blind man feeling on the elephant” perspective in my corner of the world - cloud consulting - is that when I was an employee of the consulting division at AWS, was that we never saw GCP as a serious competitor. It wasn’t because of the technology. But they had no clue organizational how to talk to the “enterprise” and meet them where they are.
I had a more than even odds in 2023 to work for GCP doing the same thing I did at AWS - making more money - but I was kind of over the big company thing and from talking to people at Google, the same political pro mo culture was there too. Besides they had a return to office mandate for their former “field by design” roles before AWS and working in an office was a non starter for me.
But to your other point, at now 51 years old and on my 10th job, I always have my eye on my next job and keep my resume updated. I love my current job. But facts on the ground can always change.
I heard its as bad as this. Take a team of 5 genius engineers, the best 5 in the world.
There is a PIP quota, so one of the genius engineers must be PIP'ed, despite being in the top 5 engineers globally.
Here in Europe they need a very serious reason anyway (like gross misconduct) and if they don't have it they can make you redundant but have to pay significant severance. I'm kinda waiting for an opportunity for that at my current employer, due to leadership changes it's no longer a great place to work. When there's layoffs there's usually voluntary options with a decent severance plan.
I'm glad we don't have this at-will stuff here. I would never considering moving somewhere that does (I've lived in 4 countries now). Universal healthcare is also a must, and good public transport.
So America will never be an option for me in any case.
Definitely not true in all of Europe. There's some countries where severance pay is not mandatory for all workers' groups and reasons aren't needed to fire someone (the green countries)[1] and also some have loopholes where PIP is legal and often used, so in practice YMMV depending on the laws where you live and the unions in your job/industry.
>(like gross misconduct)
Again, not always true. In many countries gross misconduct can be grounds for on the spot termination. For example in NL there was a truck driver that modified the safety system on his truck so he can unload potentially dangerous cargo from the comfort of his cabin without having to keep the outside lift button pressed. When caught he was fired on the spot with no severance and no unemployment, and even lost the case after he sued for unjust termination.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/At_will_...
[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/10/20/aws_outa...
The writing was on the wall for a bit now that something like yesterday would happen.
I use stored DNS data.^1 The data is collected periodically and stored permanently
I seem to be unaffected by DNS-based outages
I use stored data because it is faster, e.g., faster than using DNS caches like Google DNS, Cloudflare DNS, etc., but there are obviously other other benefits
1. When I make HTTP requests there is no corresponding remote DNS query. The IP address is stored in the memory of the localhost-bound forward proxy
The combination never fails.
Why not? It's standard protocol for name-address mapping.
> In case of an address swap (hardware swap, load balancing or whatever reason), one could broadcast it to the network, and the relevant clients would acknowledge & update the address.
Client just performs DNS query before HTTP query or client caches DNS response for some time. It's solved problem and "pull" approach usually preferable to "push" approach. For example, what if that broadcast gets lost (UDP is not reliable protocol)? How application handles initial discovery?
Of course it is possible to replace DNS with something else. But why? If you're afraid that your DNS server will fail, the same could happen with your custom service discovery server.
How would you handle the ack of the broadcast? UDP can be unreliable. If you do send an ack from the destination, that singular endpoint that sent the message is going to get a number of responses equal to the number of devices on the network, which would nuke it at large scale.
I don't get this. Why is Musk tweeting a fake quote and why are you posting it? What does it signify?
…
> This is a tipping point moment. Increasingly, it seems that the talent who understood the deep failure modes is gone. The new, leaner, presumably less expensive teams lack the institutional knowledge needed to, if not prevent these outages in the first place, significantly reduce the time to detection and recovery. Remember, there was a time when Amazon's "Frugality" leadership principle meant doing more with less, not doing everything with basically nothing. AWS's operational strength was built on redundant, experienced people, and when you cut to the bone, basic things start breaking.
Not just Amazon. I woke up this morning, to find my iCloud inbox stuffed with unread spam; much of it over a month old. Looks like someone restored some old backup. This was likely to correct some issues that were caused by the AWS outage; either directly, or indirectly.
It’s nice to know that Apple (or some other middleman) backs up the torrents of spam that I get.
Everything is now at Jurassic-scale. It’s all monstrously big. There’s no such thing as a “small problem,” anymore.
One thing that you get with experience, is “tribal knowledge,” and that stuff is usually impossible to properly document. I suspect that AI may, in the future, be able to incorporate some of this, but it’s by no means certain.
We are now coming into an age in which standing application and infrastructure systems have to run long past their original creators are on the ship.
In my opinion, as a industry we are not mature enough for that and we need to become better.
When that imbalance grows, as it has at AWS (ex-AWS here), and the volume of relentless self-promoting “LinkedIn personalities” and box-ticking DEI appointments starts to outnumber the true builders and stewards of institutional memory, the execution quality, accountability, and technical excellence begin to erode.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Andy Jassy’s leadership is no longer effective, and it is only a matter of time before Wall Street begins calling for his departure.
The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
- Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
I also had a GSM iPhone 4.
Compare that to how quickly they ran away from the shitty Intel modems when they were selling some made by Intel and some made by Samsung (?)
Any interaction you have with a company post-Covid you can feel it. Nothing works anymore and you can’t even tell anyone about it or why.
Again, it was going to happen eventually. Boomers should have done better to mentor the youth and pass the torch. Some did, most didn't. That time has now passed. Millenials and Gen-Z will have to pick up the pieces after things fall apart and it will be painful...many things will just not be the same. Things we took for granted may well just disappear given a smaller population size. But at least they can finally define how they want the world to work. Its been too long. Millenials are in their 40s now. They should have taken the reins years ago if the prior generation actually cared to pass the torch.
One of the things that I recall doing on Election Day was cursing out Trump when he was re-elected.
This shit stain is a representation of the Boomer's last act: To write the final chapters of the Millenials' adult years.
The mess that Trump is making with the tariffs and destruction of institutional knowledge will eventually get fixed but it will take 15-20+ years. Essentially the remaining years of Millennials working lives. At this point I am transitioning to acceptance. Acceptance that so many processes will have to be rebuilt by Millenials and Gen-Z. At least there will be an opportunity to reinvent old ways of thinking despite all the pain.
Company cultures are not built to last, they are designed to generate profit. The culture is incidental, it will be whatever is most profitable at any given moment. At best, a company's culture is just a branding and marketing strategy to attract employees and to appear cool. Therefore they are fickle and prone to complete collapse when just a few people are replaced.
That being said, if many important services (the article mentions banking) are still single-point-of-failure in us-east-1, the least stable but cheapest region, there seems to be a problem far greater than Amazon here.
By 2020, no engineer in their right mind wanted to work there because it was an infamously bad employer for people who wanted to create great tech in a nerdy-fun environment.
The AI space is showing how the "darling fun tech company" to "aggressive tech employer full of psychopaths" trope can take less than a few years now!
As a codebase ages, as services grow out in scale and scope, complexity increases. Developers know this. I don't believe that you can linearly scale your support to accommodate the resulting unknown unknowns that arise. I'm not even sure you can exponentially scale your support for it. There is going to be a minimum expected resolution time set by your complexity that you cannot go under.
I think times where there have been outages like this that have been resolved quickly are the exceptional cases, this is the norm we should expect.
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/10/20/aws_outa...
RTO in combination with Amazon being last place in AI innovation have led to departures of anyone that can leave, leaving.
Jesus, if even an ounce of that is true... Yes, everyone on the internet is a cat clawing on a keyboard... but if a ton of people legitimately confirmed to be ex-AWS point to similar culture issues... probably it's AWS that's rotting.
>I've seen zero signs that this stems from a lack of transparency, and every indication that they legitimately did not know what was breaking for a patently absurd length of time.
That information is under NDA, so it's only natural you aren't privy to it.
Bit of a double edged sword.
Yes, but they bristle at the thought. :)
I do expect much better of them and they certainly have problems to solve but this is a big company evolution thing and not an Amazon-specific thing imo.
This is a big deal. My employer has already started to look at bringing back our old racks from storage and switching back to on-premises. Cannot imagine he’s alone in that.
We had business as usual today.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/1ncm25p/amazon_m...
I’m confused how they can have such a failure, they are employing the best and brightest top tier talent from India.
Hopefully they can increase their H1B allotment even more next year to help prevent these types of failures.
However, talent is a very small part of shipping a project. How that talent is resourced is far more important.
- Get things done as fast as possible, regardless of even short-term consideration;
- Implicitly but loudly discourage people to figure out the issues or write code all by themselves, because it is much slower;
Ex a sloppy as hell and inconsistent premise.
> engineers had identified DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint for US-EAST-1 as the likely root cause
its the point that wasnt the root cause. The root cause was ipso facto much more complex, insidious, and unobservably spooky action at a distance. I say that not knowing the true cause but being very willing to bet a bunch of AMZN that it wasnt as simple as “herp derp dns is hard and college hire sdes dont understand octets and delegation.”
Or this stupid citation if were talking about senior/long term AWS tech roles:
> Internal documents reportedly say that Amazon suffers from 69 percent to 81 percent regretted attrition across all employment levels.
The citation _appears_ to be about consumer/retail delivery and ops folks. And how 69-80% _of total attrition is RA_. While el reg has written it trying to imply 80% _annual attrition_ in a completely different org and business unit.
So I know corey isnt stupid, and hot takes are his paycheck. But does he think his readers are stupid?
Again, Im not saying things are good (I left for reasons!). But use better data and arguments.
Could you provide the data in this thread so that it adds to the discussion?
> "Hopefully today will serve as a massive wake-up call for AWS"
I wouldn't hold your breath. There will be incident reviews, meetings, assessments, analysis etc. but basically boil down to what can we do to stop this from happening again without actually spending any more money. So no, not hiring fresh talent or retaining that talent already in play, no to radical overhaul of process and knowledge. No to remediation of known issues if it involves expenditure. Instead it will be do more with less. Beat the employees harder, enforce more and more diligence and output from less and less people for the same or less money. Spin it like mad with catchy titles like knowledge sharing, centers of excellence, efficiency improvement initiatives, agile resilience, and continuous operational excellence.
There’ll be shiny PowerPoint decks about empowering ownership and shifting left, while the remaining engineers are shifting caffeine straight into their bloodstream at 3 a.m.
Next quarter, they’ll unveil a bold new policy called Focus Fridays which will be promptly filled with mandatory incident retrospectives. Someone will suggest replacing ancient tooling, only to be told, “We’ll revisit that next fiscal year,” which is code for never.
Then come the internal awards: “Unsung Hero of the Outage” goes to the one poor sod who rebooted the wrong thing but accidentally fixed it.
HR will roll out a “Resilience Recognition” badge on the intranet. This will be marketed with great fanfare and excitement, showcasing how the company truly values it's employees and recognized their contribution because badges are cheap. Leadership will congratulate themselves for “learning from adversity,” and by the time the next blackout happens, they’ll have a snazzy new dashboard to watch it fail in real time along side their investment portfolio dashboard that takes up a greater fraction of their attention.
But don’t worry!!!! There’ll be a T-shirt. “I survived the 2025 AWS outage.” Comes in gray. Just like morale. If it wasn't for the negative impacts on the employees and customers the word Schadenfreude would be very applicable.
And it's a sad indictment on current management practices and in particular the MBA brigade* that this is all by design, acceptable losses on the alter of profit, albeit short-term profit. Efficiency theatre as far as the eye can see.
*Yes, the same people who think Jack Welch was a misunderstood visionary rather than the spiritual father of mass layoffs, short-termism, and shareholder-value human sacrifices. The kind who see burnout as a KPI and chaos as a “scaling opportunity.”
Next they’ll launch a “Transformation Task Force” whose primary transformation will be renaming the same broken process from post-mortem to value realization review. A new acronym, a new logo, and boom, problem solved at a low low cost, honest, the consultants said so. Until the next outage, at which point someone will quote Sun Tzu in Slack.
I mean in software. I Know warehouses are pretty bad.
P.S. I’m not an Amazon hater, replace the company name with any other big one of your choice and the article will have the same meaning ;-)
hope it only gets worse for them
> At the end of 2023, Justin Garrison left AWS and roasted them on his way out the door. He stated that AWS had seen an increase in Large Scale Events (or LSEs), and predicted significant outages in 2024. It would seem that he discounted the power of inertia
Your comment is relying on that referenced inertia. Things will continue to function for a period of time, but there exists an inflection point at which they no longer function as previously.
Inertia is a hell of a force.
All that he seems to be doing these days at Twitter is messing around with the recommendation algorithm, override the decisions of what's left of moderation for his far-right friends and that's it. Oh and of course Grok/xAI or however it's called these days, but IIRC that's a separate corporate entity that just got shoehorned onto Twitter.
Conclusion: The brain drain lead to the outage...
I need an LLM trained explicitly on folks confusing correlation and causation and put a big old red dot in my address bar.
I love that there's a whole section "The talent drain evidence" trying to defend their journalistic integrity, but they then go on to totally face plant.
So the title is all speculation. The author put 2 and 2 together and concluded that 10 is greater than 9.
Worthless article.
Or you could just say "there is no way the thing that constantly happens over and over again has happened once again, just no way".
Staff cuts constantly happen in the name of maximising profits. They always yield poor results for a company's performance. Every time. Especially for the consumer's side of it (not the company's finances of course).
Every time.
But maybe this time it's different. That one time.
that said, my suspicion is they're likely on to something here regarding layoffs and quality degradation.
But I know very few people in the industry who know about Amazon’s reputation that have a life long dream of working there given a choice.
I was 46 when I was hired there for a “permanently remote [sic] field by design role” in ProServe and it was my 8th job out of college. I went in with my eyes wide open. I had a plan, stay for four years, sell my RSUs as soon as they vested, pay off debt, save some money, put it on my resume to open doors and make connections and leave.
I was never expecting to make more when I left. I used the time to downsize and reduce my expenses - including moving to state tax free Florida.
When I saw the writing on the wall, I played the game while I was on focus to get my next vest and wait for the “get 40k+ severance and leave immediately or try to work through the PIP”.
I took the latter and had three offers within 3 weeks. This was late 2023.
I left debt free, sold my old home for exactly twice what I had built for 8 years earlier, downsized to a condo half the price I sold it for (and 1/3 the size) and I was debt free with savings.
I’m now a staff consultant working full time at a 3rd party AWS consulting firm with a lot less stress and still remote. They were the last to fall. But AWS made their ProServe department return to office at the beginning of this year.
https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops...
https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3080348/devops-engineer-linux-re...
https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3082914/devops-systems-engineer-...
This one mentions terraform by name (though that doesn't necessarily imply its in use, though having worked in large companies I would argue that sweeping statements about a popular technology not being used is likely to be wrong)
https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3042892/delivery-consultant-devo...
The last one is a ProServe role, which is a consulting role that spends their time working in customer environments, which is where they may encounter terraform. It does not mean anything about internal use of terraform.
I already showed you that AWS has (or hires) DevOps people with publicly available information, maybe the article is incorrect but you’re clearly not better informed, so maybe cut it with the rude commentary.
https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3080348/devops-engineer-linux-re...
Just do a quick google search for that “40% of devops laid off” and you’ll see that it’s actually an old article from months ago that multiple people, including AWS employees, are saying is bullshit and unsourced.
edit: found another source that says this 40% number came from an AWS consultant that worked with customers to help them be better at DevOps, and it was 40% of their specific team that was laid off. Even if it were true, it has nothing to do with the internal operations of AWS services. This is why it’s important to understand the information you’re sharing before making judgements off of it.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/18/aws_sheds_jobs/
Seems wild that you would promote job titles you don’t hire for, makes me think that it’s reasonable for news outlets to refer to those roles in the same way honestly.
You know what though? I’m not wasting my time with you, the fact was that this was all over social media. Then a huge outage- my original comment was factually accurate even if we contend that the article itself was bunk. And AWS clearly hires DevOps staff.
You’ve not even disproved anything you’re just making me play internet fetch. I’m not replying anymore.
I don't have any dog in this fight, but I don't see where this article makes your case. From your article:
> We understand around 100 jobs are at stake.
> Sources familiar with AWS operations who requested anonymity told The Register most of the layoffs affected people in marketing and outreach roles, although chatter on sites like Blind suggests folks in frontline support and in other positions may have been affected, too.
Notice the job description:
As part of the AWS Managed Operations team, you will play a pivotal role in building and leading operations and development teams dedicated to delivering high-availability AWS services, including EC2, S3, Dynamo, Lambda, and Bedrock, exclusively for EU customers.
They aren’t looking for DevOpe engineers to work alongside the “service teams” - the teams that build and support internal AWS services. They are working with AWS customers who may already be using Terraform. AWS has a large internal consulting division staffed with full time employees. When they work with customers they will use Terraform if needed.
The previous commenter is correct, there is no NOC or devops team and I’ve not encountered a Devops job family and I’ve never seen terraform internally. Within AWS, the service teams that work these outages are the same ones that design the service, fix bugs, deploy the pipelines, be oncall, etc. the roles that fill these teams are pretty much one of three types: nde, sde, sysde. They typically use cdk if they’re doing AWS things, else they’ll use internal tooling.
The job you posted is a customer facing consultant like role - customers use terraform so having a customer facing consultant type that knows how customer-y things work is a good decision.
It's one one of the few parts of the internet which could potentially be replaced over time with very little disruption.
The hierarchy of resolvers could be replaced with a far simpler flat hierarchy Blockchain where people could buy and permanently own their domains directly on-chain... No recurring fees. People could host websites on the Blockchain from beyond the grave... This is kind of a dream of mine. Not possible to achieve in our current system.
All the arguments I'm hearing against a Blockchain DNS system are rooted in petty crony-capitalist thinking.
This kind of thinking seems to permeate most other parts of society... It's gotta stop.
"Oh but what if someone steals it"
This ain't gonna be much of a problem in a functioning society where the top 20 domain names doesn't hoard like 95% of the traffic.
"Oh but we don't want people to own domains permanently or else they will take all the good domains"
Um hello?? Have to checked this thing called reality? It's already the case! So happy billionaires have to pay their $20 per months to maintain their market monopolies.
I actually don't mind other people having more stuff than me but tired of petty people ruining good ideas and stalling progress to make a few bucks.
This is precisely why something like this isn't a popular solution lots of people are working towards. Domains broadly speaking aren't a finite resource, but usable domains using common words definitely are. As time marches on human readable/typeable "permanent identifiers" are going to have to go away. Email address, usernames and the like are all going to get recycled, just like phone numbers are. Domains are currently recycled and most people probably think that's a good thing.
This is precisely why something like this isn't a popular solution lots of people are working towards. Domains broadly speaking aren't a finite resource, but usable domains using common words definitely are. As time marches on human readable/typeable "permanent identifiers" are going to have to go away. Email address, usernames and the like are all going to get recycled, just like phone numbers are. Domains are currently recycled and most people probably think that's a good thing (assuming they think about it at all)
I bought tombert.com in 2014 and forgot to renew it in 2015, and it was auctioned off by GoDaddy. For like six years, it was owned by squatters, and they wanted thousands of dollars for the domain [1]. I called offering the $100 for it, and they claimed that they can't go below $1400 because this domain is in "extremely high demand". I finally was able to buy it back in 2021, presumably because the squatter purged out domains that hadn't been purchased for N years and they wanted to save money.
Now, you could argue "see! You wouldn't have had to worry about it expiring if it were permanent on the blockchain", and that's true, but if someone else had gotten to that domain first, then I would also never get it. I think the only thing that keeps the internet even remotely fair in this regard is that domain names cost some amount of money to keep.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160219161720/http://www.hugedo...
At least currently death dissolves bonds.
- simple
- battle hardened
- distributed
- affordable
blockchains are:
- essoteric, backwards, and not easily implemented
- new and unproven, frequently hacked
- effectively a ploy to centralize / redo Web 1.0 but owned by one blockchain
- ...waaaaaaay more about money and "owning something" than DNS is.