AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
seuros.com
seuros.com
You mean Claude has this style.
We’ll look back on 2026 AIs fondly.
Because if aws tanks, they will likely tank.
I pardon the drama. If you were in those shoes and the costs being spent for operating business costs- wouldn’t you be freaking the heck out?
But the story, my goodness. Giving a damn is such a rare commodity. It makes me sad when companies throw away people with that quality.
I hope that Tarus Balog finds a good spot to land. Here's his LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarusbalog/ if you're in the market for an "Open source wonk. Catalyst. Storyteller. Collector of Memories"
Was the pay worth yeah, was seeing AWS's revenue hopefully take a minor hit worth it, most definitely would do it again hit me up if you really need help. If you pay Amazon over 10M I am certain we can bring it down below 1M lmao.
AWS is just unhinged in terms of pricing and costs.
after he literally single-handedly ruined the product by personally censoring the editorial team and/or firing large numbers of journalists on multiple, extremely high-profile PR-disastering occasions [1] [2]
from that perspective, Bezos seems perfectly content to weather PR disasters from his companies and drape them in bizarre rationalizations.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/29/washington-pos...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-60-000-washington-post-2...
This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"
This "author" certainly never baked his own bread or grew his own vegetables. Let alone becoming a professional, which is hard work, probably more hard work than sitting at a desk asking claude to change this or that react component.
To me that sounds more like letting circumstances nudge you into implementing your "Coast FIRE" plan than taking some kind of principled stand.
A lot of pretty normal people without much to their name are deciding to call it quits over the AI craze. I'm one of them, I'm heading for electrical engineering - even if the "engineering" part gets replaced by AI sooner than later, I'll still be more qualified running wires than some robot.
Besides, opening up coffee shops and bakeries isn't that capital intensive. Don't need millions for that, there's a reason a lot of non-chain restaurants are founded and operated by immigrants.
I've been filling the war chest against the potential need to re-train. I'll do nursing school if I have to but if there's a path for someone who spent many years studying computational plasma physics to get into EE I'd want to look at that.
I'm in the US myself and I have a family so minimizing costs (including opportunity cost of the time spent) is critical.
21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.
This was false. University of Alabama said this was according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.[1] NCES said 21% of US adults had low English literacy. This meant could not participate due to a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability to be interviewed, below level 1, or level 1. Their definition of functionally illiterate in English was below level 1. This was 4.1%.[2]
[1] https://risingtide.ua.edu/education/statewide-ua-literacy-ce...
"Putting their name on documents" or "speaking publicly" is just an excruciating requirement to keep cashing checks, and each time it comes up the first thought bubbling up from the autonomic system is "how the fuck do I get out of this".
"Not X, not y, not z, A!"
The overly emotional paragraph headlines were also off putting.
You know, humans do that sometimes as well. Not GenAI's, not Agents, not automated systems, but actual humans!
The 'not a, not b, but c' writing style used to be _effective_. If someone wrote that way I paid attention because it was good writing. But because it is everywhere now, it has ceased to be effective, and it has the opposite effect. My mental heuristic sees this and zones out now.
Even the premise of the article has built-in ridiculousness, as if the author has enough special insight into all of AWS to conclude that all of the other employees are bad. Of course by point that out I’m sure this comment will be critiqued as missing the point. The point is you’re supposed to be angry and not think about the details of the story in a way that diminishes that anger!
I feel like everything posted to HN that talks about technology or the business around it while trying to show personality or make arguments from humanity gets this kind of response. Sure each time the reason is tailored, but they all add up to point the vector in one direction. Unless it's bland buisnessminded blandness, it can't be taken serious. Even the cringe coke-fueled rants about tech are received better because they're in the direction of excitement for building future product.
Remember the good old days with real honest CGI?
At some point AI is going to produce realistic situationally-sensible images, with creative restraint. That will unleash another wave of disruption and dissonance.
It throws a different spin on the phrase "living in a simulation".
You know what? We customers are the same way. We don't care why something broke. All we see is that it broke. We are going to take appropriate actions, and you can't stop us.
We don't care that you say it was AI. It was broken.
We don't care that you got lots of cost savings from firing the employees that actually knew what they were doing. It was broken.
We don't care why it broke. It was broken.
Enjoy the window of being able to say "but it was AI" and getting anything from it. It won't last long. We don't care. We don't care for this excuse any more than you're going to accept it from your own employees for much longer.
> Yes, i used AI to resort it [..]
> Yes, i used AI to resort it,
It may be not "generated", as in it's a true story, but the writing is AI.
Also, you've cut out the part where he says he did use AI, but just to "resort" the article (by which I assume he means "reorganize"). Whether one believes that is gonna be a judgment call I suppose.
Most LLM copy-paste accounts will deny it when called out.
Maybe they're being sincere, and they just edited it so heavily with AI that it comes out sounding generated, but that's a distinction without a difference.
Is there still grammar police on the Internet, calling out people for making grammatical mistakes in their writing? Who is asking for flawless English? Thinking that the LLM style is an example of flawless writing is a common mistake of ESL people. It's not flawless. A single rhythm, structure and flow permeates every piece of LLM writing. There is no variation whatsoever. People have been reading so much of that stuff recently that they don't bother to read the article if they spot one of these patterns. They're so easy to avoid, too.
> Fired. And the part that gutted me: His proudest accomplishment at AWS? Restoring my account.
change to
> I was gutted to read that his proudest accomplishment at AWS was restoring my account.
Is it flawless? Probably not, I'm not a writer, or a native English speaker. However I think it's more sincere, explains the feelings without any fluff, and is just simpler.
If the author's goal is to have people read their article, they should consider that people are tired of reading these patterns over and over again, it's not "flawless English" and it's not "writing clearly" because the patterns are unnecessary and obscure the message.
This is one of the last places on the internet that actually has grammar police, as commenters here have a desire to be technically correct in all aspects.
> he wasn’t being philosophical. He was describing the exact contradiction that made his own job impossible.
Is this written by AI? It has the typical "That's not X. That's Y." phrasing. A bit ironic given the content.
Would an author come here on hacker news and just post rage-baiting AI slop? For sure not!
Excellent candidate for throwing into AI and asking for a summary; if you bother reading it at all.
I just hope the guy rewrites this post to be less AI and drama and more about the human essence of what just happened here. It is a very human story and an interesting discussion nonetheless.
> I’m not saying there’s a direct line from saving my account to getting fired...
Either way, this is a very poor look for Amazon.
this could be a heartfelt three paragraph article and have far more emotional impact.
It is, indeed, heartbreaking to learn that the one person in a giant corporation that cared about your problem enough to pull some strings and fix it gets laid off. But if you truly care about them, why don’t you try and write about it yourself, in your own voice?
AI writing aside, I still think the author has a point: the customer-centric AWS/Amazon of yesterday is not really there any more, or at least appears in a form that isn't recognisable or useful to every day users.
David Graeber already covered this a decade ago
> Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It also exemplifies what I have come to think of as the defining feature of certain utopian forms of practice: that is, ones where those maintaining the system, on discovering that it will regularly produce such failures, conclude that the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved—or, indeed, of human beings in general.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-ut...
I've mentioned this before, but you want the default to be a dry run and for there to be a --commit, --prod, --for-real, or whatever you want to call it to opt in to the destructive behavior.
While the article speaks about an individual getting fired from a giant corporate behemoth, all I could think is, most people in the company probably have zero idea who that is.
Big becomes a problem in itself, and you start having to solve the problems of bigness instead of the problems you were solving that made you big.
He is the only person from AWS who contacted me after my account got locked for 5 days because AWS thought it was vaguely possible my account might possibly be (but wasn’t) hacked.
Any company who wants support people who care ….. give Tarus Balog a job. He seems to be ………. “Customer Obsessed”.
Everyone else ….. why are you still using AWS?
What’s tiresome about this is that people don’t even bother to edit it. I use LLMs to draft long-form text all the time because I think the hardest part is getting something on the page to refine. But I would be embarrassed to leave LLM tells like this in the final result, if only because I want people to know that I actually cared about what I’m asking them to read and that I value their time.
It’s especially ironic here because this is about lauding a person who cut through the impersonal behavior of a large organization. Evidently this person was not worth even an editorial pass over the article though.
It's not clear that this individual was fired for being too helpful, but it's been my experience that escalation 2 or more levels to report a problem is always a threat to your career, because it means you're exposing a failure within your management chain.
In this case it went all the way up to the CEO, so it's entirely possible he was mentally marked for "eventual downsizing after enough time to not raise red flags"
(To be clear this is a failure by organizations to protect their own bottom line. By not protecting/rewarding people for calling out systemic they incentivize all sorts of dishonesty by managers and directors which are the rule and not the exception in my experience. Famously there was the amazon case about how long customer support took to answer)
You weren't "laid off", you were fired, because the company doesn't need you anymore. Calling it a "layoff" exonerates the company, as if it was something unfortunate and outside their control.
This article should be called "the guy who made the best sandwiches in our free staff cafeteria got laid off".
If you're in a position like that, better start thinking about plan B cos it isn't getting any better.
Yes it is and I'm glad someone has said it. I didn't realize it until now.
I'd probably much rather have read the prompt for this article than whatever this is.
Anyway, I use my `buzzoff.wtf` slop site for this kind of thing. Originally built so I could figure out what startups actually did behind all their buzzword landing pages, but now also to get a summary of articles like this to decide if it's worth reading or not
https://buzzoff.wtf/https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-fired-th...
The following will give an idea of my concern. The problem that nobody addresses is that police have overtaken FBI in authority because of their ability to commit espionage. The courts and all agencies have been accessed in every way possible by AWS "highly available" services "mission critical". So an agenda is there given by unelected officials. It looks like the WTO is Firstnet Authority and has created a network under the secrecy of DHS fusion centers run by a version of "Nazified Police."If we treat this like a coup and the fraud, which you have no idea how extensive it is thanks to AWS, as a bounty, we would be better off.
From their site . aws
Government
Improve public safety and justice outcomes with the AWS Cloud
Justice and Public Safety (JPS) agencies are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy cost-effective and highly-available mission critical services to serve their public and protect their employees.
This construction - how is it called? It is clear "AI speak" - at least I remember Claude talking like that (even if it is code).
The trick was always finding the person, but now the elephant has no handlers because all of the people are gradually being removed. It's like all the tech bros watched "The Matrix" thirty years ago and said "What a great business model!"