arrakeenrevived

> RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift.

Again, this is just demonstrably false. But if you want to continue to have some personal vendetta against Amazon's culture, you do you.

I guess I don't really see the point of your comment in context of this article. The article doesn't mention most of those things you mentioned - it doesn't mention cutthroat culture, or stack ranking, or PIPs. The article is almost entirely about RTO and layoffs, which _is_ a demonstrably large shift in Amazon's culture if you compare, say, the period of 2017-2021 where remote work was encouraged and the company was was rapidly growing, to now.

I think this is true of any company. As things get larger, red tape increases, and the mess of spaghetti code and complexity/inter-dependencies of systems means it gets harder and harder for any one person or team to fully understand the environment and avoid/recover from issues.

I actually think that the "pizza team" model in Amazon can help mitigate this, as each individual team operates as its own entity that is discouraged from relying on other teams for uptime... but this is only effective to a point.

Are you under the impression that company cultures don't change over time? Of course they do. "nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter" is a ridiculous statement to make, as it's demonstrably false. As just one simple example, the company culture of many companies, including Amazon, has drastically shifted from allowing remote work over the last several years to now not allowing it.

The article cites a few data points for "Austin losing its luster":

- Techstars pausing their Austin tech accelerator and venture funding being down 46%. This is the most compelling data point in the article, however venture funding is down 48% globally [0], so this has nothing to do with Austin specifically.

- A startup moving its HQ from Austin to Houston (where they previously were before moving to Austin), specifically because it is looking for non-software talent that they believe will be more plentiful in Houston.

- A laundry company that has ~10 employees moving from Austin to Tulsa

- An "online travel agency aimed at Millenials" with ~10 employees moving to Sacramento

Meanwhile, companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle have some of their largest office locations in Austin and show no signs of slowing down, as far as I can tell. This is definitely a new side of Austin, which used to be known for smaller tech startups and didn't have these giant behemoths - so I'll agree that it's losing luster in that way, if that's what is being looked at.

I mean no disrespect towards the company's listed in the article, but I'll wait to make conclusions until there's better data points than a few random companies I've never heard of moving.

0: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/venture-capital-fun...

A "regular human" would die just sleeping at 20,000 feet like these people did. You're really underestimating the amount of preparation and skill that goes into a feat like this.

Likewise for this part: "The first two days involved about 6,000 vertical feet of climbing, 60 meters of rope at a time." No "regular human" is even making it 50 feet free climbing up a vertical wall, let alone the technical skill required to clip the rope, place protection, and manage equipment while climbing and working with your partner.

It's really easy to underestimate this stuff, especially if you've never actually tried rock climbing or done high altitude stuff before. It may look easy, but at around 15,000 feet it gets to the point where even the most physically in-shape person cannot walk more than a few steps without having to stop and take a breath, let alone climb a vertical wall.

Likewise, rock climbing might look easy, but go to a local climbing gym and pick a 5.9 or 5.10 (which are about medium difficulty) and unless you have past experience climbing, I guarantee you won't even make it halfway up. And that's at a gym, where everything is easier, and you don't need to worry about placing your own protection or carrying ropes.

Direct Connect locations are not the locations where the main region data centers are. AWS has a network link from their DC to Equinix, etc to make it easier for customers who are in Equinix's colo to make a direct connect to the AWS network.

They're not custom made, but I recently bought a couple pairs of "Vibes" and "Loop" earplugs and they are easily the best <$50 purchase I've made in the last year. I prefer them to Etymotics (one of the other commonly recommended earplugs). I carry them everywhere with me and even wear them at places like restaurants to mute the noise. I can't recommend them enough.

Vibes: https://www.discovervibes.com/new-products/vibes-high-fideli...

Loop: https://us.loopearplugs.com/

Being awkwardly goaded by your boss to chant some weird company saying at a company holiday party is _exactly_ the kind of stuff that people make fun of after-the-fact by making memes about it (speaking from experience here... which is why this phrase in the article gave me pause in the first place).

There's not enough info in this article to know if it was seen as weird by the employees or not, but my point is that "they created a reacji of it" isn't evidence one way or the other for it being "popular".

Yes it does, it says within the quote that the phrase was "popular" and is using the creation of a reacji as supporting evidence. The fact that an employee made a reacji of something does not mean it is popular. It takes a extremely low amount of effort from an extremely low amount of people (often, just one person) to create a custom reacji.

> The phrase itself was popular enough that OpenAI employees created a special “Feel the AGI” reaction emoji in Slack.

I know it's small and kind of a throw-away line, but statements like this make me take this author's interpretation of the rest of these events with a healthy dose of skepticism. At my company we have multiple company "memes" like this that have been turned into reacji, but the vast majority of them are not because it's "popular" but rather because we use it ironically or to make fun of the meme. Just the fact that an employee turned it into a reacji is a total non-event and I don't think you can read anything from it.

This posting isn't for SAR, which typically requires specialized skills and the time commitment is different. This is for _Preventative_ SAR aka PSAR, which basically means just being physically present on trails to give people guidance, direction, and education about how to not get into dangerous situations. The time commitment for PSAR can be greater.

Your boundaries aren't the same as someone else's boundaries, and just because someone else has different boundaries doesn't mean they don't have any at all.

Some people wouldn't want to spend their weekends working at a homeless shelter unless they were paid for it, but would happily spend time in a national park without being paid for it, and don't see it as being "exploited". You have different values/interests, and that's fine, but I don't know why you're trying so hard to be condescending to people that just have different interests than you do.

The target audience of volunteers for this type of position are people that are probably used to happily sleeping in tents and eating camp food for days/weeks at a time. I don't think they'd mind.

Some of these postings are indeed asking a lot, but I don't think this specific one is that crazy. It's essentially an opportunity to live out in the wilderness and go hiking regularly, with free housing provided in exchange for maintenance and rescue work. I know a lot of outdoors enthusiasts that would love to do that. Hell, I know a lot of outdoors enthusiasts that would probably do it without the free housing, or even pay out of pocket to do it (see also: PCT or Appalachian Trail hikers).

You can filter the opportunities to only show "Event" types (as opposed to "Position" types) which are things like one-off volunteer events like this one: https://www.volunteer.gov/s/volunteer-opportunity/a093d00000...

But in general, I agree with you. From what I can tell, even though this is just broadly called "volunteer.gov", it really seems like it's specific to the Bureau of Land Management/National Park Service, and is missing a large amount of types of positions that I think most people would expect when they think "go volunteer".

Replace "manually read through every file" with "run your security code scanner against every file" and it becomes less nonsense, but just as applicable.

In reality this really isn't how code scans are done, so it's still a little silly, but I could theoretically see something like this being a desire.

Arstechnica [0] has a better article on it.

The tl;dr is that Amazon already uses a fork of Android called FireOS. However, Google makes manufacturers sign a contract that says that if they manufacture devices that run Android, they cannot manufacture other devices that use forks of Android. This was making it difficult for Amazon to find manufacturers that could make device with FireOS, so Amazon is ditching Android entirely.

0: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/amazon-fire-tablets-...

>other than pulling support from Google as they continually show how much Amazon truly sees them as a competitor.

It seems the opposite to me. The article talks about this. Google has contractual limitations on manufacturers that ship devices with Android that says they are not allowed to also manufacture devices with forked versions of Android. This was making it hard for Amazon to find any manufacturers that contractually even could make Fire devices (since FireOS is a fork). It seems like Google was the one pulling support from Amazon.

My impression from reading the writeup is that CF did receive support and communication from Flexential during the event (although not as much communication as they would have liked), but hasn't received confirmation from Flexential about certain root cause analysis things that would be included in a post-mortem.

Two days without support communications would be a long time, but my original comment about the two day period is about the post-mortem. It's totally reasonable IMO for a company to take longer than two days to gather enough information to correctly communicate a post-mortem for an issue like this, and IMO its unreasonable for CF to try to shame Flexential for that.

I think you misunderstand what's being talked about in this thread. "Operations" in this context has nothing to do with external-facing documentation, and instead refers to the resilience of the service and ensuring it doesn't for example, stop working when a single data center experiences a power outage.

They aren't telling the facts as they know them. Cloudflare themselves say that the information in the article is "speculation" (the article literally uses that term).

Publicly casting blame based on speculation isn't something you do to someone that you want to have a good working relationship with, no matter how much money you pay them.

>If Flexential and PGE aren't sharing information or otherwise cooperating as much as Cloudflare might like, then going public with some speculation might be an attempt at applying some pressure to get to the bottom of what happened.

It's been 2 days. I doubt PGE or Flexential even have root caused it yet, and even if they have, good communication takes time.

You don't throw someone under the bus and smear their name publicly just because they haven't replied for two days, and you certainly don't start speculating on their behalf. That's bad partnership.

You also don't publicly share what "Flexential employees shared with us unofficially" (quote from the article) - what a great way to burn trust with people who probably told you stuff in confidence.

>if Cloudflare is going to effectively anticipate this cluster of failure modes in future design decisions, it's reasonable for them to want to know what happened all the way down.

They can do all of that without smearing people on their company blog. In fact, they can do all of that without even knowing what happened to PGE/Flexential, because per their own admission they were already supposed to be anticipating this, but failed at it. Power outages and data center issues are a known thing, and is exactly why HA exists. HA which Cloudflare failed at. This post-mortem should be almost entirely about that failure rather than speculation about a power outage.

I've been involved with some new service launches at AWS, and it's a strict requirement that everything goes through some rigorous operational and security reviews that cover exactly these issues before the service can be launched as GA. Feature-wise people might consider them "alpha", but when it comes to the resilience and security of the launched features, they are held to much higher standards than what is being described in this post-mortem.

I don't think I agree that the use of the word "another" implies that the breaches were equal, but I can see why others might interpret it that way.

I won't disagree with opinion on the quality of Ars' reporting or this particular article, but I do disagree with the original comment's statement that "this had nothing to do with Okta".

It says Okta was "hit by" a breach, which it was. A breach happened, and Okta was impacted. Furthermore, it happened to data which Okta is ultimately responsible for, and Okta should be held responsible for their choices which led to their employees' data being stolen.

I'm not sure why you're splitting hairs on this.

I would.

A critical part of having a robust security program is having an effective third party risk management program which evaluates all third parties that you do business with and holds them to high security standards. Okta is the ultimate party that is responsible for protecting this data, and that still remains true even if they subcontract out the protection of that data. If you aren't doing third party risk management, then it calls into question what other critical parts of security you're failing at.

For a company like Okta, which supposedly is a "security" company, to have _repeated_ security failings like this should make everyone question them.

>Every company and every vendor has strengths and weaknesses.

Yes, every company and every vendor does have strengths and weaknesses. That's why it's foolish to lock yourself in to only one vendor.

If you locked yourself in to AWS, for example, you'd benefit from some great AWS services, but be stuck using the awfulness that is Workmail/Workdocs. Or you could lock yourself into MS and get Outlook/Office, but then be stuck using subpar offerings like Azure Functions or be a victim to their lackadaisical attitude towards security. Why would you ever choose to do either of those? Instead, you can choose both Microsoft for Outlook/Office, and AWS for other offerings that they are stronger at. Now you benefit from the strengths of both, while avoiding their weaknesses.

If you _can't_ do that, there might be good reasons and that's fine. But to _intentionally_ not do that, and especially to _brag_ about not doing that is laughable, no "holier than thou" attitude required.

In comparison to other cloud companies, AWS "deprecated" SimpleDB over a decade ago and stopped letting new people use it, but still hasn't deleted the data for anyone that is still using it. EC2 Classic was the same.

Not giving updates and not allowing customers to create new instances is one thing, and is normally how these big deprecations are done. Outright destroying your customers' data just because they didn't migrate in time is wild (and its very easy for something like a database migration to take much longer than 2 years).

>We brag to our customers about the fact that our only major technology vendor is Microsoft.

If anyone bragged to me about this I would laugh in their face. You're putting your entire company at major risk.

Sometimes it has benefits, and sometimes its necessary, to use something like Azure. But I would never actively seek tying your existence solely to a single company, nor would I be happy about it. And I would certainly never _brag_ about it. That's insane.