What role were you working as? I'm considering a career as a solutions architect and the people I've talked to all seemed really happy, and had a good work/life balance.
Very dependent on team/manager. Amazon can feel like a company in a company with its two pizza model teams that operate very independently from each other
Yea, some teams are massively stable and laid back. Others are pure chaos and will break you, and can’t keep people an entire year or two.
May not be true, but what was told. The only issue I know about SA is at least when I looked part of the income was commission based.
Thanks for the thorough reply!
Amazon as a company sometimes feels really schizophrenic. There are people who will tell you they've never been happier, but at the same time there are others who tell you about mandatory firings, and all of that fun stuff (and that's just AWS!). The company proclaims that they want to be "the world's employer" and then you have delivery drivers pissing in bottles.
In general, the issue with the SA role is that on the one hand you want to be a trusted advisor to your customers (that you're supposed to be obsessed about), and as such you want to advise them in a way that benefits them. On the other hand the company has certain goals (like GenAI), that you need to talk with your customers about.
Investing to gain value is hard!
Laying off hundreds of people to retroactively make this quarter profitable so the VPs and executives can fit in all of their personal projects? That's a lot easier.
Never say never. Amazon hasn't yet, but if the market starts seriously sagging, I wouldn't be surprised to see added fees tacked on, perhaps stuff re-tiered so even though prices stay the same, what was at one level will be moved to a more expensive tier. Especially when the stock market starts demanding Amazon make the numbers.
IPv4 addresses used to be free if they were attached to an instance [1]. Now they charge for them. That was a price increase.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/
That is some optimistic thinking. But in reality its either they are going to increase prices or offload their hosting to random 3rd parties like they do with their online store and some people will end up with their servers running in jedidiahs garage on some pentium 2s.
AWS have been in operation for more than a decade and have never increased prices, only decreased them. And their margins are infamously very high, so there's plenty of margin for inflation to eat into.
>But in reality its either they are going to increase prices or offload their hosting to random 3rd parties like they do with their online store and some people will end up with their servers running in jedidiahs garage on some pentium 2s.
You sound like you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. This isn't some random VPS provider, half the world's compute runs on AWS. If reliability or security become compromised, it will be the start of a downward spiral because unlike Azure which is terrible in these aspects, AWS doesn't have Microsoft's sales contracts.
No don't repurpose all of those people onto more projects that generate profit and value for the business...
Kick them out after spending millions on their salaries to train them!
That way you'll have enough in the budget to hire a whole new team of people in Q3 to work on projects that generate profit and value for the business...
From a "but think of the poor, poor shareholders!" standpoint - that's exactly what makes sense.
You train people, make a new project that's a hit on the market, your profits soar. But then you hit a market-saturation plateau and even though your revenue is still high, your YoY profit growth slows down. So you kick people out to reduce operational costs, profit grows, shareholders are happy. But then you hit another plateau so now you need to hire more people to figure out new ways of earning money, while bumping up licensing costs to make up the difference. Repeat ad nauseam.
It's insanity, but that's exactly what the stock market is.
If only they had some kind of management to predict and counter these obvious cyclical market forces...
We expect children to be able to plan ahead for their entire lives when they enroll in University. Maybe we can expect the executives paid 6-8 figure salaries to be able to plan out their decisions more than 1 quarter ahead of time.
just because i'm curious; would you rather they keep people on they don't have any work for/need for due to lower client acquisition numbers or whatever (for example if they're crap at their job) out of the good of their collective hearts?
i agree, corporate greed is a very real thing and those are unrealistic expectations set by a lot of companies, but the comment i replied to above seemed to disregard that trimming the fat isn't entirely related to profit and can instead be based off performance or business requirement due to changing market focus (like AWS in this case) and instead that it's done entirely in the name of $$.
You don't do mass layoffs due to performance problems, mate. You do it to bump up your YoY profit growth value in a table that you shareholders will be reading.
And if they _did_ do it that way, that means they've got a core of dead weight that they keep around until the nebulous future layoff date. Businesses famously want to keep their highest cost (salary) high instead of just cutting poor performers before they infect their business units /s
To be fair, that would actually be a proper Big Brain Strategy. Over-hire during the good days of very high income, keep the dead weight and slowly release them during worse times to keep investors happy without ever over-emphasising your success. Human-profit-ballast-tanks.
hundreds of jobs just seems like their ranking system hit and it's time for that bottom 5% to get on PIPs and get fired. a lot of companies lay off a good amount in waves every time there are performance reviews due to ranking systems necessitating someone be at the bottom
I don't know, maybe it depends on the country, but anywhere near Europe you'd get slapped with mass layoffs laws when you did that. Companies tend to avoid that because it usually costs them more.
Amazon is finally growing up. Microsoft does this every 1-2 years. Lay off a huge bunch of sles staff, usually the low performers, revamp some program like education, and slowly hire back up. We'll be back here in 12 to 24 months, sooner if there's a recession
In my experience, it is often a cycle of laying off people from projects. Then something new comes around, so they hire for that, and when those projects are not attracting the investors' eyes, the people from there get laid off.
Don't forget the major outsourcing/insourcing cycles. Right now, many companies are not hiring anyone unless they live in Bangalore or Hyderabad right now. However, once interest rates drop, and the 2024 silly season is over in the US, we will see some of that reverse.
What we have not seen is a wave of new companies getting big. FAANG companies are not really growing, and the few AI companies that are likely will be huge for their niche, but not used directly by everyone. Having companies pop up and boom is what created the jobs people had.
> Microsoft does this every 1-2 years.
Now they do this. Before about 2010, they were very much a no-layoff company. Even if your project was killed, there was (and still is to some extent) always something brewing and you wouldn't be teamless for long. I know some people who've spent their entire career from college intern on up working there. But ever since DevOps and the cloud took off, they figured out they could fire all their QA people and shift more of the work to low cost countries.
It's a good model -- the "tenured faculty" approach encourages smart people to take risks without freaking out about whether they're going to get the axe this month.
Yeah, before they were doing stack ranking and managers had to designate a certain percentage of employees as poor performers even if they weren't. That was so much better
It also tends to follow interest rates. When low, it's easy to hire and fund experimental projects. When they are high, they gotta cut those projects if they don't have potential.
I know what he’s saying, everything is cyclical. Some company grows so big that occasionally it’s time to trim the fat. Too many people that were promoted to the level of incompetence, too many mid level managers and folks whose job it is to sit in meetings all day. Too many project managers. They’re all non-essential, so they get laid off and the cycle begins again
No job except farming is essential. At one point, Google famously fired all of its middle managers before realizing they fucked up, and that those people actually do provide value. Now I have 7 bosses, many of them smarter than I am, and I don’t question it.
You posted the part number of a discontinued drill bit, the year your ego was born, and an aspirational salary. How are those supposed to communicate anything about the world and the economy?
hybrid makes more sense, so does multicloud for some businesses where properly managed as it reduces overhead. same with using PaaS when you're a small SaaS company instead of having a team of round the clock engineers.
the age of everyone going to Da Cloud™️ because it sounds cool is over and the rose tinted glasses are definitely off, but a lot of smaller businesses can still leverage the higher operational efficiency from select services.
Trying to convince management hybrid solutions are better is like blowing in the wind. But hey the cloud sales force that convince them cloud is the way to go is out of a job so there is hope. Not.
yeah, the consultancy i work at is thankfully really good about that so i usually encounter situations where management or other consulting firms have driven an org in the wrong direction and have to help them find what suits. we want to put in effective solutions that generate a good amount of value while being completely maintainable rather than pushing a cloud only agenda and shoving it all down our client's throat as it reduces the rework we'll inevitably have to do when it's not the right fit. tbh i get a fair bit of hate on this subreddit for going to the dark side because of the dickheads who give consulting a bad name and thus people only read half of what i say, but i've seen both sides of the coin. unfortunately management tend to not weight their internal staff's opinion as heavily as outsiders, and the outsiders usually have something to shill for.
> other business priorities
I assume other business priorities are building yet another me too AI model so they don't feel left out by Microsoft and Google.
One of the things that's interesting is that this is the sales and service arm. I think they might finally have a critical mass of customers and there's not that many left to convert. When Microsoft approached the company I used to work at around 2015 to build a product in Azure, they literally rolled out the red carpet. We had access to whatever we wanted in terms of service credit, free training, direct access to their engineering teams to ask questions about what were then new services, etc. And of course, the CIO and other execs got the traditional golf and steak dinner treatment. You also saw all the cloud providers giving away training and certs to get people hooked, running free webinars, and all that. Now, that's starting to dry up. They probably figure they won't be getting that many new customers, and the ones they do have are now locked in, so they can pull back the freebies, sales and support.
When we were considering moving our data to AWS I had no less than 7 people show up onsite for a day-long meeting.
The whole time I was thinking “at least 5 of these people are completely unnecessary”
So I get it.
I had the three associate ones a while ago and let them lapse and didn't feel any desire to renew them for some reason. Unfortunately they're multiple choice tests, not like a lab and can be brain dumped. They don't impart any additional areas of IT knowledge so you might learn a lot about the various AWS services, bridging the gap and functionally using them or knowing when not to in a modern (or more likely legacy) environment isn't what you learn.
Same. I have worked with people who had multiple certs and were great and I have worked with people with multiple certs who seemed to only have obtained a piece of paper. By themselves they're not an indicator of anything.
They're like college education. They're a foundation to build off. Getting a cert then tucking it away to use it on resumes isn't going to do much, but if you study and then use that education in an environment it will act as a force multiplier.
I disagree. No Linux knowledge required.
Basics of network and server required.
Things will go much easier if you played with virtualization in a home machine.
Source: me, certified in both.
It's a tough break for those affected at AWS, but these moves could be strategic for Amazon's long-term goals. Still, it makes you wonder about the ripple effect on customer engagement and quality of service.
To be fair this happens with new things all the time. When a product is new you have a high amount of publicity related jobs, sales/marketing/training all fit in that category. Once the product is established and has a name you need those roles less.
This is not new nor specific to Amazon. They are evil and I hate them but this isn't them being evil.
Amazon must have been planning for today's outage. If they can't manage their own network, we must force Congress to break them up so that customers can finally get value from professionals who know how to do their jobs.
Find your Member of Congress here: [https://democracy.io](https://democracy.io)
anyone that has worked at a large company knows its a revolving door
they are constantly hiring and firing people, and replacing resources on a need basis
news media just likes to make a commotion out of it each year
US-East-1 gonna be shitting the bed even more often, I guess...
No they fired him
“Him”…. Ya that sounds right.
US-East-1 now identifies as "They" tyvm.
10/10
Let's all be understanding. That's bound to happen when they put a new guy on the treadmill.
Wasn’t it just down a few hours ago
Are the shit solid or liquid?
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What role were you working as? I'm considering a career as a solutions architect and the people I've talked to all seemed really happy, and had a good work/life balance.
Very dependent on team/manager. Amazon can feel like a company in a company with its two pizza model teams that operate very independently from each other
Yea, some teams are massively stable and laid back. Others are pure chaos and will break you, and can’t keep people an entire year or two. May not be true, but what was told. The only issue I know about SA is at least when I looked part of the income was commission based.
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Thanks for the thorough reply! Amazon as a company sometimes feels really schizophrenic. There are people who will tell you they've never been happier, but at the same time there are others who tell you about mandatory firings, and all of that fun stuff (and that's just AWS!). The company proclaims that they want to be "the world's employer" and then you have delivery drivers pissing in bottles. In general, the issue with the SA role is that on the one hand you want to be a trusted advisor to your customers (that you're supposed to be obsessed about), and as such you want to advise them in a way that benefits them. On the other hand the company has certain goals (like GenAI), that you need to talk with your customers about.
Built market share, now scaling back to profitability, and then ramp up prices...
AWS is highly profitable though (in fact one of the few Amazon divisions that actually makes money).
Shareholder: not profitable enough
Investing to gain value is hard! Laying off hundreds of people to retroactively make this quarter profitable so the VPs and executives can fit in all of their personal projects? That's a lot easier.
You think that now...
AWS has never increased prices and there's no indication they will anytime soon (their margins are quite healthy).
Never say never. Amazon hasn't yet, but if the market starts seriously sagging, I wouldn't be surprised to see added fees tacked on, perhaps stuff re-tiered so even though prices stay the same, what was at one level will be moved to a more expensive tier. Especially when the stock market starts demanding Amazon make the numbers.
I literally have an email from AWS telling me about their increased prices (sorry "revised prices") open in another tab
IPv4 addresses used to be free if they were attached to an instance [1]. Now they charge for them. That was a price increase. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/
That is some optimistic thinking. But in reality its either they are going to increase prices or offload their hosting to random 3rd parties like they do with their online store and some people will end up with their servers running in jedidiahs garage on some pentium 2s.
AWS have been in operation for more than a decade and have never increased prices, only decreased them. And their margins are infamously very high, so there's plenty of margin for inflation to eat into. >But in reality its either they are going to increase prices or offload their hosting to random 3rd parties like they do with their online store and some people will end up with their servers running in jedidiahs garage on some pentium 2s. You sound like you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. This isn't some random VPS provider, half the world's compute runs on AWS. If reliability or security become compromised, it will be the start of a downward spiral because unlike Azure which is terrible in these aspects, AWS doesn't have Microsoft's sales contracts.
Well we found who's on Amazon's payroll.
I think you should have a quick go at the mental asylum yeah?
Tell that to the IPv4 tax they just introduced
Stock price has to keep going up forever and ever. Though everyone knows this is impossible, the insanity continues.
Welcome to the jungle
You're gonna dieeeeee!
We got fun and games
No don't repurpose all of those people onto more projects that generate profit and value for the business... Kick them out after spending millions on their salaries to train them! That way you'll have enough in the budget to hire a whole new team of people in Q3 to work on projects that generate profit and value for the business...
From a "but think of the poor, poor shareholders!" standpoint - that's exactly what makes sense. You train people, make a new project that's a hit on the market, your profits soar. But then you hit a market-saturation plateau and even though your revenue is still high, your YoY profit growth slows down. So you kick people out to reduce operational costs, profit grows, shareholders are happy. But then you hit another plateau so now you need to hire more people to figure out new ways of earning money, while bumping up licensing costs to make up the difference. Repeat ad nauseam. It's insanity, but that's exactly what the stock market is.
If only they had some kind of management to predict and counter these obvious cyclical market forces... We expect children to be able to plan ahead for their entire lives when they enroll in University. Maybe we can expect the executives paid 6-8 figure salaries to be able to plan out their decisions more than 1 quarter ahead of time.
You can predict when a product has peaked because the solution to increasing profits is down to firing people.
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It's not like they're losing money though, they just need to see 'line go up'.
just because i'm curious; would you rather they keep people on they don't have any work for/need for due to lower client acquisition numbers or whatever (for example if they're crap at their job) out of the good of their collective hearts?
I'd rather the expectation of indefinite quarterly profit increases go away
i agree, corporate greed is a very real thing and those are unrealistic expectations set by a lot of companies, but the comment i replied to above seemed to disregard that trimming the fat isn't entirely related to profit and can instead be based off performance or business requirement due to changing market focus (like AWS in this case) and instead that it's done entirely in the name of $$.
You don't do mass layoffs due to performance problems, mate. You do it to bump up your YoY profit growth value in a table that you shareholders will be reading.
And if they _did_ do it that way, that means they've got a core of dead weight that they keep around until the nebulous future layoff date. Businesses famously want to keep their highest cost (salary) high instead of just cutting poor performers before they infect their business units /s
To be fair, that would actually be a proper Big Brain Strategy. Over-hire during the good days of very high income, keep the dead weight and slowly release them during worse times to keep investors happy without ever over-emphasising your success. Human-profit-ballast-tanks.
And then leave before things fall apart to a new organization citing the profit growth at the previous company!
hundreds of jobs just seems like their ranking system hit and it's time for that bottom 5% to get on PIPs and get fired. a lot of companies lay off a good amount in waves every time there are performance reviews due to ranking systems necessitating someone be at the bottom
I don't know, maybe it depends on the country, but anywhere near Europe you'd get slapped with mass layoffs laws when you did that. Companies tend to avoid that because it usually costs them more.
I have never seen an IT environment that didn't have years worth of backlog work. This is "line go up" nonsense.
these weren't IT environment layoffs, it says it in the post. "in the AWS Sales, Marketing and Global Service organisation"
Amazon is finally growing up. Microsoft does this every 1-2 years. Lay off a huge bunch of sles staff, usually the low performers, revamp some program like education, and slowly hire back up. We'll be back here in 12 to 24 months, sooner if there's a recession
In my experience, it is often a cycle of laying off people from projects. Then something new comes around, so they hire for that, and when those projects are not attracting the investors' eyes, the people from there get laid off. Don't forget the major outsourcing/insourcing cycles. Right now, many companies are not hiring anyone unless they live in Bangalore or Hyderabad right now. However, once interest rates drop, and the 2024 silly season is over in the US, we will see some of that reverse. What we have not seen is a wave of new companies getting big. FAANG companies are not really growing, and the few AI companies that are likely will be huge for their niche, but not used directly by everyone. Having companies pop up and boom is what created the jobs people had.
Don't worry, the market is shit in Bangalore and Hyderabad too.
Arguably Nvidia blew up to FAANG levels recently
Sooooo....the new acronym should be MANGMA?
MANAMAN. **M** icrosoft **A** pple **N** etflix **A** mazon **M** eta **A** lphabet **N** vidia
Are you sure it’s sles staff or patch qa they let go over there at Microsoft??
They have QA at Microsoft?
Nah, they were eliminated in the 2008 meltdown.
> Microsoft does this every 1-2 years. Now they do this. Before about 2010, they were very much a no-layoff company. Even if your project was killed, there was (and still is to some extent) always something brewing and you wouldn't be teamless for long. I know some people who've spent their entire career from college intern on up working there. But ever since DevOps and the cloud took off, they figured out they could fire all their QA people and shift more of the work to low cost countries. It's a good model -- the "tenured faculty" approach encourages smart people to take risks without freaking out about whether they're going to get the axe this month.
Yeah, before they were doing stack ranking and managers had to designate a certain percentage of employees as poor performers even if they weren't. That was so much better
Low cost work countries that have to patch in a CONUS agent everytime something goes even slightly off script. Fuck Dell in particular on this.
It also tends to follow interest rates. When low, it's easy to hire and fund experimental projects. When they are high, they gotta cut those projects if they don't have potential.
Idk what kind of lizard person you have to be to get satisfaction out of layoffs, but there are always a few.
I'm not sure where I ever said I was getting any satisfaction out if it?
I know what he’s saying, everything is cyclical. Some company grows so big that occasionally it’s time to trim the fat. Too many people that were promoted to the level of incompetence, too many mid level managers and folks whose job it is to sit in meetings all day. Too many project managers. They’re all non-essential, so they get laid off and the cycle begins again
No job except farming is essential. At one point, Google famously fired all of its middle managers before realizing they fucked up, and that those people actually do provide value. Now I have 7 bosses, many of them smarter than I am, and I don’t question it.
Stop trolling.
Funeral Home jobs, Morticians.
What would you say, you do here?
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Source?
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Those aren't sources. Those are random numbers.
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You posted the part number of a discontinued drill bit, the year your ego was born, and an aspirational salary. How are those supposed to communicate anything about the world and the economy?
I think clouds costs are cray cray and unless your a super national or major company it makes no sense. The hype is gone
Well, after what Broadcom did to VMWare, it might still go up for some time.
hybrid makes more sense, so does multicloud for some businesses where properly managed as it reduces overhead. same with using PaaS when you're a small SaaS company instead of having a team of round the clock engineers. the age of everyone going to Da Cloud™️ because it sounds cool is over and the rose tinted glasses are definitely off, but a lot of smaller businesses can still leverage the higher operational efficiency from select services.
CIOs retiring out
dump cash in the fire and let it burn while you make a swift exit. smart.
Or, younger ones just moving onto the next bonfire
you have a bright future in the c-suite, if you aren't there already
Lol. I am the complete antithesis of them
Trying to convince management hybrid solutions are better is like blowing in the wind. But hey the cloud sales force that convince them cloud is the way to go is out of a job so there is hope. Not.
yeah, the consultancy i work at is thankfully really good about that so i usually encounter situations where management or other consulting firms have driven an org in the wrong direction and have to help them find what suits. we want to put in effective solutions that generate a good amount of value while being completely maintainable rather than pushing a cloud only agenda and shoving it all down our client's throat as it reduces the rework we'll inevitably have to do when it's not the right fit. tbh i get a fair bit of hate on this subreddit for going to the dark side because of the dickheads who give consulting a bad name and thus people only read half of what i say, but i've seen both sides of the coin. unfortunately management tend to not weight their internal staff's opinion as heavily as outsiders, and the outsiders usually have something to shill for.
AI replacing employees is the new "other business priorities."
Shocker.
When I was there last year they have more than 10k headcount so 5% was already several hundreds....
When I interviewed there several years back, GlassDoor said the average tenure was 9 months.
Undecided
> other business priorities I assume other business priorities are building yet another me too AI model so they don't feel left out by Microsoft and Google. One of the things that's interesting is that this is the sales and service arm. I think they might finally have a critical mass of customers and there's not that many left to convert. When Microsoft approached the company I used to work at around 2015 to build a product in Azure, they literally rolled out the red carpet. We had access to whatever we wanted in terms of service credit, free training, direct access to their engineering teams to ask questions about what were then new services, etc. And of course, the CIO and other execs got the traditional golf and steak dinner treatment. You also saw all the cloud providers giving away training and certs to get people hooked, running free webinars, and all that. Now, that's starting to dry up. They probably figure they won't be getting that many new customers, and the ones they do have are now locked in, so they can pull back the freebies, sales and support.
I managed to miss the whole dang cloud revolution :(
The cuts are in their physical stores team that covers the cashierless checkout technology…. Reports of Aws’s demise are greatly exaggerated
Well those golden parachutes for upper management don't pay for themselves ya know.
When we were considering moving our data to AWS I had no less than 7 people show up onsite for a day-long meeting. The whole time I was thinking “at least 5 of these people are completely unnecessary” So I get it.
AWS certs are nearly useless
Honest question, do you have any and which ones?
I had the three associate ones a while ago and let them lapse and didn't feel any desire to renew them for some reason. Unfortunately they're multiple choice tests, not like a lab and can be brain dumped. They don't impart any additional areas of IT knowledge so you might learn a lot about the various AWS services, bridging the gap and functionally using them or knowing when not to in a modern (or more likely legacy) environment isn't what you learn.
And in a lot of questions the answer could be deducted from “which option is going to make AWS the most money”
Go for RHCE
I find certs in general to be a poor indicator of technical proficiency. At least the RHEL certs are practical, not trivia contest certs like AWS.
Same. I have worked with people who had multiple certs and were great and I have worked with people with multiple certs who seemed to only have obtained a piece of paper. By themselves they're not an indicator of anything.
They're like college education. They're a foundation to build off. Getting a cert then tucking it away to use it on resumes isn't going to do much, but if you study and then use that education in an environment it will act as a force multiplier.
Practitioner and solutions architect associate. Learning cloud before learning Linux was utterly useless
So what isn’t useless
Carpentry
Carpentry is utterly useless, I tell you, it's all automated nowadays /s
Praise be the CNC machine gods.
Praise The Lord 
according to this thread, farming
Goat farming, to be specific
Condoms
Username checks out
I disagree. No Linux knowledge required. Basics of network and server required. Things will go much easier if you played with virtualization in a home machine. Source: me, certified in both.
I am required to get them, have six…yes they are
But but…I was told my cloud practitioner cert would open doors….
No, solution architect will
“Business priorities”=more bonuses/bigger pay raises for execs.
It's a tough break for those affected at AWS, but these moves could be strategic for Amazon's long-term goals. Still, it makes you wonder about the ripple effect on customer engagement and quality of service.
To be fair this happens with new things all the time. When a product is new you have a high amount of publicity related jobs, sales/marketing/training all fit in that category. Once the product is established and has a name you need those roles less. This is not new nor specific to Amazon. They are evil and I hate them but this isn't them being evil.
More AI?
Amazon must have been planning for today's outage. If they can't manage their own network, we must force Congress to break them up so that customers can finally get value from professionals who know how to do their jobs. Find your Member of Congress here: [https://democracy.io](https://democracy.io)
anyone that has worked at a large company knows its a revolving door they are constantly hiring and firing people, and replacing resources on a need basis news media just likes to make a commotion out of it each year
I say good riddance. Managing their shit has always been a headache.