Posted by zerosizedweasle 2 days ago
But the reciprocal side is also worth soulsearching some into too. It feels like such the crisis of our time that we don't have good things for people to do, respectable enough efforts, that so much is ensnared and tangled up in such huge enterprise running along at its own pace. I crave a government that tries to encourage new players, new enterprises, that outright lopsidedly favors those trying to get things started.
Other systematic drivers here also filter out so many would be entrepreneurs and business owners. Cost of essential food, shelter, transportation, health care needs has become incredibly daunting to many, and greatly challenges the ability for new things to get started.
Also the unchecked acquisitions spree of the world brings up all the opportunity in such uncomeptitive and fragile large companies. If we allowed small medium size companies to acquire each other, but kept more controls on bigger companies, we wouldn't be facing such wild shocks from what a couple big players do on the world.
Constant churn is simply the new big tech strategy to keep employees on their toes. Plus it lets them wipe away future RSU comp that was granted to employees when stock prices were way lower.
I think you are talking out of ignorance and spite. Most of the services used by Amazon employees are internal services that may or may not be on par with the state of the art. Apparently a big chunk of Amazon doesn't even use AWS at all, and instead use proto-cloud computer services that are a throwback from the 90s take on cloud computing.
Is there more information on this somewhere. I had leadership telling me and a few others that we needed to replicate something on-par with AWS for internal use (with about 10 devs and less than a year timeline). I thought this sounded crazy, and it would be interesting if Amazon themselves didn’t even have what was being asked of us.
Yes, everywhere. You just need to look for it. See the following link, which has references to Apollo and MAWS.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/amazon-notable-systems/
> I thought this sounded crazy, and it would be interesting if Amazon themselves didn’t even have what was being asked of us.
Amazon has multiple incantations of this. As legend would have it, AWS was an offshoot of Amazon's internal cloud infrastructure designed to monetize it to amortize their investment on bare metal infrastructure. They partitioned their networks for security reasons and for a few years their infrastructure evolved independently. Then AWS was a huge success and took a life of its own. Only relatively recently did Amazon started to push to drop their internal infrastructure to put all their eggs on AWS in general but serverless solutions in particular.
Somewhere, someone, has to buy a set amount of servers, based on a running capacity projection and build those into usable machines. The basis of a datacenter, is an inventory system, a dhcp server, a tftp server, and a DNS server that get used to manage the lifecycle of hardware servers. That's what everyone did at one point, and the best of them build themselves tooling.
What amazon has is built on what was available at the time both for tooling and existing systems that they'd have to integrate with. You almost certainly don't have to build anything that complex. Additionally, you can get an off the shelf DCIM that integrates with your DHCP and DNS servers and trigger ansible runners in your boot sequences that handle the lifecycle steps. It's considerably easier to do now than it was 15 years ago.
While they don't use AWS specifically for a lot of stuff, the internal tooling can still build thousands of boxes an hour though they don't really pay for UI work for that stuff.
You can put a host(s) in a fleet, tell it the various software sets you want installed and click go and you'll have a fleet when you come back, so don't think that what you're being asked to build is impossible or not being used under every single major cloud provider or VPS provider.
The slightly harder part is deciding what you're going to give to devs for a front end. Are you providing raw hosts, VMs, container fleets, all of it? how are you handling multi-zone or multi-region . . ., how are you billing or throttling resources between teams.
The beauty of this is you get a lot of stuff for free these days. You can build out a fleet, provide a few build scripts that can be pulled into some CI/CD pipeline in your code forge of choice and you don't really need to build a UI.
Provisioning tooling is hard, but it's a lot easier now that it was 15/20 years ago and all the parts are there. I've built it several times on very small teams. I would have loved to have 10 devs to build something like that, but the reality is that you can get 80% with a little glue code and a few open source servers.
And frankly I hold them to a higher standard so they disappoint me more often.
Amazon has been doing that since it was founded, certainly 2001-2006. Every year there would be stack ranking, and they'd get rid of employees and even entire departments in reorgs and layoffs.
Firing people to make new new hire grants is more expensive
A company either dies a hero or lives long enough to install its own Ballmer.
All sounds like a sick fetish. I want to see them getting replaced - I want to see the look on their face and their archive box walk
Wanna bet? The 3-month balance of hired minus fired will be less than 20K. Those ballrooms don't pay for themselves [1].
Let's mark the calendar 01/27/26
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-ballroom-donors-white-hou...
It's been over 5 years and I don't know how many rounds of Amazon layoffs since the pandemic. How are investors still fooled into thinking this is a valid excuse?
Then, when the next earnings call comes they make some moronic excuse and do it all again. And the past 20 years in the domestic market should have made it abundantly clear to everyone that Wall Street are too stupid to catch on / so bought in they need it to work.
The layoff numbers keep growing too, if you notice. (Fraudulent) numbers keep going up! Yay!
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Not to mention, what happened to making money by being innovative and changing the world? These days, everything just looks to be in the business of growth via scamming consumers of their hard-earned money. They just gave up any pretense of good products or quality service - "fuck you, give me your money" at every. single. turn.
Then all that money goes to 10 guys while everyone else breaks their back for nothing, forced to piss in bottles before going to their +10% YoY apartment to wait to die from health problems they can't afford to fix.
Too slow and expensive. Why innovate when you can extract instead. It's the financialization of our economy. No one cares about or even has incentive to make better widgets, all the incentive is in financial optimization and squeezing out every last cent because the business is now a financial asset, not a product company.
"Pandemic overhiring"? Christ, that was half a decade ago. The pandemic has been over long enough for a kid to go through high school or get a Bachelor's!
But the board will be enriched by this, and that's all that matters.
Earnings report in 3 days maybe they were a few metric shy.
You would need China-level capital controls to make this work and that is not compatible with the dollar remaining as a reserve currency. Nor will Congress or the Supreme Court go for it.
Perhaps it was less expensive to hire offshore, but if importing foreign talent isn't an option anymore, the tradeoff will change and US companies will have to expand their foreign offices (which I personally hope).
Earnings call is this week. Expect some good tap dancing.
Is going to be lovely to see how they spin this as AI optimization ....
Edit: Doing it right before the holidays can only mean their data on consumption / consumers is grim.
Are many corporate roles seasonal?
Funny, they said the same thing about AWS before layoffs last year.
Valuing things though, that's a dirty activity for the "technical" ones.