Not even tests but just some basic anomaly detection lol.
Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
You'd be better off letting the heart attacks happen and take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead. It would be good promo doc material, and being a hero is extremely good insurance against getting kicked out of the country (via the PIP->H1B grace period expiry mechanism).
The point was not that their opinion is suspect, the point was that they are former because people who care about the customer get fired and/or that everyone who cared is former, so nobody who is left cares.
Or in my case, actively ignore any and all recruiting from that sesspool.
Every once in a while (~1:12) you get one that sounds like a Mormon missionary praising how its not that way and AWS is perfect.
The strange thing is that I only come across those missionaries online and never in person (although I did go to a AWS event once [never again] and met a bunch of them, so seemingly they are actually real, to my surprise).
The other factor to add here is that, with some exceptions, the whole company feels like a Rube Goldberg machine and very few people care about what happens outside their cog (because they’re not incentivized to do so).
I got put on Focus because my "contributions were not coming through" to leadership.
There is literally no fucking reason to try to improve your skill. Any IDIOT with AI will do an OK job.
And no one is shooting for better than OK.
If it takes no skill or intelligence then nobody can get left behind because it's very fast to get back in.
In fact, there are regular AWS-wide meetings where L10 technical staff will randomly pick and review reports from across the organization. Getting picked for one of these is not a fun experience.
COEs are such a huge annoyance for teams that they create a strong incentive to be proactive in preventing issues like this from happening. One of the rules when it comes to writing COEs is that they are not the fault of individuals but processes; but in reality, no one wants to be the cause of one.
Depending on if you're a cost cutting team, fixed expense team or organization, if you're a revenue driving team, or if you're a core team, or the very many other splits you can come up about the relationship between the expense/balance sheets and the team itself...there are very very different attitudes towards COEs and leadership principles.
There's just extreme variation in the quality of the management, the quality of the engineers, the operational/development role split, the on-call schedule, and the development and testing methodology.
If you find a problem like this thread’s hypothetical, the process stops being an annoyance just to line level managers, and something that directors and vice presidents need to handle by changing strategic priorities within their organizations.
That entails a real loss of face for them, and because they are the ones who actually run the show, it would will only happen if you have one that is naïve or a masochist. In either case that moves them out of management.
From the perspective of people you manage, it's a very different picture.
We (I say "we", because I was an IC) sit under you, and every year at performance review time you're effectively required to put some percentage of us in the "LE" bucket. Never mind that we could theoretically all HV3+ if you measure by "normal" peoples' standards, your manager isn't going to let you mark all of us as HV3 at the performance meetings. I know this, because I've been there as well at those meetings where truly high performing people were downrated to fit a distribution.
So what happens? When I see a peer's critical lurking bug, I have no incentive to fix it for the sake of prevention. If I fix it quietly so that it never surfaces, it looks like I haven't done any work for the week, or have done un-impactful work, and I get the stick from you. Preventing fires doesn't look like work, to non-technical eyes.
The only "safe" way to play this game of "survivor" is to let that bug surface eventually, then when the SEV comes up, I jump in and fix it, earning your approval, skip approval, VP approval, as well as potentially the other person gets the stick from you, because you have to give the stick to someone anyway, you get a reason to stick it on them. At least it's not getting stuck on me.
I'm sorry if this comes off as shocking to you, but it really shouldn't; the incentive structure is NOT set up for teamwork, plain and simple. If "putting customers first" is a value, then it absolutely needs to start from systematic changes of how people are managed.
> this is not the case
> [describes all sticks and no carrots]
Absolutely not my experience at AWS.
All the teams I was on treated them as "not a big deal", kind of a non-punitive exercise in technical writing, and the COE was always assigned to be written by an engineer who was not involved in causing the COE.
Also, the kinds of issues that did or didn't lead to COEs appeared to be largely random. I was considered to be an extremely good operational trouble-shooter on the team where I spent most of my time at AWS, and I was never able to predict what an L7-8 manager would decide was COE-worthy.
I spent the slight majority of my time at AWS in RDS.
And this surely works out great and completely prevents any issue, and this "inaccurate estimated billing data" issue this submission is about is both the first and last time this issue ever happens at Amazon?
Ah yes, the good old ITism "Everything's good, what are we even paying you for?" followed by "Everything's on fire, what are we even paying you for?"
I moved out of it largely for that reason, am now an infrastructure/IT project manager, quite refreshing actually.
I learned about <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...> from alarms like this, as sales in Japan almost entirely stopped.
I've been told a tale of another incident where some customer ran some huge cpu-intensive workload that didn't do any networking. It caused various alarms to fire because it "looked like" a part of the network was idle (potentially indicating some sort of networking failure)
It's generally (in the broad sense) easy to add alarms for things going wrong, but in my experience anomaly detectors are just as likely to fire from other weird things like that happening.
Well you’re half right. Either there wasn’t monitoring for this or if there was monitoring in place that’s not what caught this, because the page originated from a customer support ticket.