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hn_throw_away

21 karma · joined March 18, 2011

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hn_throw_away··on "Amazon's EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability"
I work at Amazon - a lot of teams are like this. They're stuck managing a woefully broken product and spend all of their time propping up the beast, leaving no capacity left for meaningful fixes (in these cases, meaningful fixes are always gigantic engineering projects).

The team develops a reputation internally for being glorified firefighting, and have trouble recruiting. More senior engineers eventually flee (having, well, choice in the matter) leaving a team heavy with junior talent with no seasoned gurus leading the way.

The company is also growing at ludicrous speed, and hiring is difficult. When the product is in such a painful state, attrition from the team is high, and with slow hiring you are barely countering attrition (exacerbating the junior talent problem), and not even close to growing the team to be in a position to take care of the problem for good.

I suspect this is an industry-wide problem though, and is hardly unique to this place.