The whole thing is pegging my BS meter, including letting an L5 deploy without a code and architecture review, TC, and the fact that they’re posting this and claiming they’re still there.
I’ve got a few friends who work at Amazon, and while the story certainly sounds embellished and a bit too “just-so”, the corporate attitude of make-work to justify a promotion even when its a waste of time and resources rings true as a bell.
Did this guy actually oversee a fully transition to a new service and waste a bunch of internal time and money for a system that’s sub-optimal by any conceivable measure? Idk, maybe. If he’d just written “Twitter” instead of “Amazon”, I’d have taken it at face value no problem.
Did this guy author an overly-complex plan as part of his promotional material, get it vetted and reviewed and rubber stamped by a bunch of friendly higher-ups because they wanted to justify his promotion, and then stuck on a shelf marked “Maybe we’ll do this in 2029 if we’re not busy with something else”? Equally likely.
Does Amazon have a bunch of bread and butter break-fix work they could be dedicating staff to, rather than chasing the next digital White Whale so they can feel cutting edge? Yeah, no shit. Absolutely.
I believe it. I don’t work at Amazon, but I’ve seen proudly launched pieces of shiny crap support promotions at other companies.
I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.
I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.
In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.
I can’t speak to this situation, but broadly speaking I am familiar with general messed up stuff like this as well as perhaps adjusting some fine details to make the scenario relatable to an audience unfamiliar with the specifics of the real situation and/or obfuscating the details so that the person doesn’t out themselves to someone else familiar with the specifics enough to recognize.
The broad strokes seem plausible and any oddities in details I consider to be less important and/or understandable if it was tweaked for an internet audience.
I say this is only ok because he did that in amazon. Fuck amazon
If he did that in a medium-or-less sized company that would be a really shitty move.
In a small company noone would try to label you “l5” or “l6” and probably an actual human would make your comp decision. You take the byzantine incentive structure away and people just try to do a good job.
The problem is the large companies like Amazon buy all the small ones and put these people in charge lol
Sounds about right. There is no longer any incentive to focus on maintenance and incremental improvement (the stuff that actually keeps the lights on and the revenue flowing). It’s all about the new and shiny–even when it results in regression.
Which is why AI and vibe coding will survive. Besides the part where it’s not my code, the company owns it. The fuck do I care how good it is. If it works and gets me a promoted or moved to a new spot in a different company. Heck yeah. Issues down the road are not my problem.
Personal project: page load takes under 10kB and any button or link loads in millisecond.
Work project: Fuck it 26MB page load. It’s not like the pages load in under 5s before anyway.
The personal project is a matter of personal pride, whereas for work, any old thing will do, as long as it meets the requirements.
I’m in business operations, downstream from you guys. Reading posts like these are helping me understand better what you all are going through.
We had several of our systems “upgraded” and broke a lot of our tools. The dev team vanished off to work on the next shiny bullshit “upgrade” and turned my 15 minute tickets into 3-4 hour tickets.
My manager was telling me to ping someone and let them know. After nothing happened there, I started opening tickets. After about 140 in 2 weeks, I finally got someone’s attention and we’re grudgingly getting a couple devs assigned to start repairing the automation that broke.
I am sorry to have to do that, but our entire team was drowning and pinging someone on teams with API errors wasn’t getting anything done.
It’s a terrible working arrangement in most companies–particularly between dev and infrastructure teams. “Legacy” sysadmins that were previously celebrated for maintaining rock-solid environments with high uptime are now denigrated (and eliminated) when they can’t make up a new shiny for MBA managers (who are not real leaders)–to peddle the same bullshit to senior executives.
It’s all fucked.
I apologize for bashing Java so hard in the past. I wish everyone wrote everything in Java these days. Digital life would be so much better.
You owe royalties
Yeah, Oracle licencing has really taken the shine off Java and relegated it to the legacy dust bin.
Fuck no.
I wish everyone used C#, Scala, Rust or Python (DSLs like VHDL, SQLs and CUDA and super specific languages like C, Erlang, Haskell and Bash notwithstanding).
You can hate on them, sure, each for their own reason, but they’re all very well supported and good for what they’re intended for.
Sure, me too, but that’s my point. Even Java is better than what we have now, especially from the user’s perspective.
The one thing which COULD justify it, is technical debt. A programming language not supported anymore or in short-term/mid-term, bus factor, too much knowledge transfer, etc. But yeah, lots of times it’s “business as usual” just for “progress” and fancy buzzwords.
Java is still supported… Or did I miss the memo?
What’s Java???
Golang is technical debt in language form. A language that gained limited and now sagging popularity, for good reason. I hate to work in Java but hate golang more. It’s the lightsaber of programming languages. I’ve got shit to do, give me blasters and all the rest. And I’m not interested in wanking myself off about how I did it all with channels. [edited for typo/clarity]
Flawless victory.
I am so tired of worse products in the name of upgraded products that are literally worse in every way but a bunch of buzzwords and in groups bragging at the top while not knowing anything at all about programs or even the product at all but just seem to be there because they drink with the CTO.
Ugh. The twiddling thumb era of trying to look busy by dismantling the old machines for parts.
So that’s why we suffer enshitification.
Those who succumb to the Socio-Economic and climb it so.
“Upwards mobility”.
Honestly probably got the project to more maintainable state. Probably didn’t need the rewrite to do it in a new lang to do it (the real killer hear it sounds like).
Those monoliths suck on the operations side, and even worse when it’s a corpse holding up the foundation to other projects that actually need it to change. Need to scale? good luck that decades old pizza box we call a server isn’t supported anymore. Oh of course we can spend millions virtualizing dead hardware to keep it running the same.
Yeah, longterm wise - Go is far easier than Java to maintain. This is still a win, albeit with a slight initial disadvantage
somebody please hack into amazon’s services so that they can tell amazon shoppers the truth about jeff bezos. seriously!
Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn’t fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).
Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn’t need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.
And no, I didn’t like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn’t feel bad about slowing them down either.
Basically a shitty startup that milked it’s employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.
Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.
Was a good run.
Not really. If that service costs x2 in compute, it also means it causes x2 pollution.
Imagine getting paid to do it.
And this is why you rarely find decent people with good income in todays economy.
Sounds like whoever decides these things knows nothing about IT.
they don’t. I mean for example Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month. the LAST people I would want working On Call and waking up at 2am to try and solve something are fresh grad hires. You can actually watch videos on youtube of new grad amazon hires doing this, they actually document themselves, and the vast majority of them are “well it’s 1am and I just got a call…I’m going to try and fix this ticket but really I have no idea what I’m doing” annnnnd generally nothing gets fixed or they break it worse. So they end up being sleep deprived, going into the office the next day and sleeping at whatever workstation they can find available and it leaves you wondering “what’s the point?”
I personally am of the belief that being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world but I guess Amazon treats it as a sort of initiation process or whatever.
Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month
That’s insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you’d just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you’d be the “shadow” on call. The primary would get paged and you’d get paged too. You wouldn’t actually do anything, but you’d watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.
being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world
Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there’s no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.
Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you’d be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.
you should really watch some of these videos on youtube, there’s quite a few of them and yes you’re 100% spot on that if I recorded myself doing this stuff I would be fired but some of these kids go into great detail as to what issues Amazon is having, the details of said issues, and potential work-arounds/fixes their seniors suggest to them. When on call only the new hire is paged and it’s up to them to page a senior or someone else on the team when they’re stuck. The problem is these kids don’t want to admit they’re stuck to their seniors or other team members because they feel it’ll impact them negatively. They admit to it. So I’d say 8 times out of 10 the tickets they get paged for don’t get resolved and are passed on to another team in the morning. So the whole thing is pointless.
In one video I watched they do have a shadow but it was reversed. the senior is the shadow and ONLY during the day. the new grad hire is still doing all the work. and after office hours they’re no their own. I wish I could find the video again as it was awhile ago but one kid recorded himself working on a ticket at like 3am and I was almost screaming at the screen like “NO DON’T DO THAT OH MY GOD PLEASE CALL SOMEONE!”
It’s like when AWS went down a few weeks ago I was thinking “probably one of these new hires at 2am trying to fix something”
I just really hope that Amazon at least has it set up so that the really important stuff goes to actual, trained SREs. They could set it up so there are queues for things that aren’t business critical and have a very loose SLO that get assigned to the new grads. Or, the new grads get paged when the error rate for the service is 1% and if it gets above 3% someone who knows what they’re doing is woken up. If say all issues with Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service is shunted to new hires, AWS would be going down constantly.
Its not an initiation, it’s hazing
I wonder if you’re actually right. I’ve held positions I had no business holding. Ended up having to escalate half across the world anyway. But sure got my feet wet. Don’t know how much the company lost. Sorry, companies.
“You are saying you are superfluous to the organization, gotcha.”
Technical people don’t understand the business, you see.
You fuck over poor people for money, it’s not complicated
As long as I fuck over more people than fuck me over, I’m ahead.
Ah, a republican!
Zero Sum Party 4 Lyfe.
Not untrue. I don’t understand or give a fuck about the business side. Same goes for my business colleagues about software.
How do “real” engineers handle this shit? I feel like IT shouldn’t have to reinvent it
You write clean code and you get replaced in 2 months, because everyone can work on that code.
You write an unreadable mess that no raise will convince other employees to work on and suddenly your holiday requests don’t get declined anymore.
These days it’s also because you want the AI to get confused by your code too. If it’s too clean you’ll have a PM with cursor making PRs wondering why your salary is justified.
It’s almost like the “meritocracy” under capitalism is a bald faced lie.
Reminds me of the time when we wrote an internal tool with strict SOLID principles. As new programmers came on, they had no idea what was going on cause no one in college told them about design patterns. Most of the OG’s quit soon after and the new guys remained.
Or you get fired because everyone else says your code is an unreadable mess.
In my experience, nope. Assuming it works as promised, the situation (usually) gets viewed as a skill gap. You think their code is bad, because you don’t understand it well enough. Unless you are personally willing to redevelop it, of course.
Depends on the company. You wouldn’t last very long at mine putting out garbage.
In my experience… nope. Never seen it happen. Even when there are clear coding guidelines, and stacks of code smell violations.
If the code actually works and is vaguely important, I think you are right.
If anyone ever has to fix it because it’s also broken on top of being a mess, well they aren’t quite so safe. Maybe if you are always available to fix it same day, but if you ever go on vacation and it hits the fan while you are unreachable…
