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Amazon's Silent Sacking
(justingarrison.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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I'll be honest: I love this. If you have ever known anyone who works at Amazon proper, (ie not in a warehouse or delivering), they are the most insufferable people I have ever met. Basically all of them are just caricatures of people who are masters of throwing buzzwords around that only they would possibly know because its some ridiculous 'Amazon' spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
Then 5 minutes later the conversation topic shifts to them being very, very concerned about some social issue or tragedy at home are abroad, and they will always be blissfully unaware of how what Amazon does as a company usually causes the thing theyre very worried about in an indirect or sometimes pretty direct way, you know like gentrification or rising income inequality, or food deserts or collapsing economies of quaint and charming towns they want to retire to at age 42, but can't because all the local shops collapsed due to everyone ordering everything from Amazon.
God help you if you point out the technicals of how most of their 'unique and innovative' software solutions basically always boil down to stealing other people's ideas, putting a slight twist on them to make them harder for users of their services to quit or enterprise partners to migrate, that you can do basically everything they offer for far far cheaper with libre code and 5% of the money Amazon is throwing at it.
Then, in private when they think no one else is listening, they giggle about how superior they are to other people because they work at Amazon, but they do it in a very muted, posh sort of way.
Then they'll also have a bunch of hairbrained side projects for making money on the side that revolve entirely around wither exploiting the poor very directly, or being paid an absurd amount of money to develop some simple software that one of their other socialite tech bros or gals can convince their idiot boss to pay waaaay too much for because 'you know this guy works at Amazon he really knows his stuff' is sufficient to convince most boomer VPs.
I fucking hate Amazonians.
At least with most MSFT employees you can at least rather quickly tell they fall either into the 'i am so jaded from my job this company is evil but it pays well' camp or the 'i am a megalomaniacal lunatic who will scream at people about things I dont actually understand when asked about why some process or paradigm is so complicated and counter productive' camp.
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It's not that we didn't think it wouldn't affect us, it's that Amazon pays unfathomable, life changing amounts of money to their engineers. Don't get me wrong there are absolutely insufferable people there, but I'd wager most people are there for the money alone.
I was an intern at AWS, and my return offer for full time was $220k per year fresh out of college to do 40 hours work weeks with a 24/7 one-week on call once every two months. My sign on bonus (lump sum on first paycheck) was $60k, or almost the average yearly pay of a US citizen. Unless you came from money, you'd take that offer in a heartbeat. I grew up middle class so money like that was impossible to say no to. I knew what I was getting into, and I tried to get a comparable offer right up until my start date, but few companies will dump over $200k per year on a new grad software engineer.
I got out a few months ago, and it has been the best thing for my mental health. My anxiety is much more manageable, I don't have week long 24/7 on call shifts, I'm full remote, and my pay is only 10% less. With that said, I wouldn't change a thing if I went back in time. I have financial stability I didn't even know was possible, and it gave me a massive headstart in life.
I dont think its ironic, I think it is pretty obvious that I feel superior to every Amazonian I have ever met.
One can know how to write code and /not/ work for a giant evil corp.
One can not be a hypocrite by actually working to ameliorate the negative effects of a giant evil corp instead of working for one and then Patrick Bateman style deliver a bunch of empty rhetoric about being 'concerned for society' or whatever, whenever the opportunity arises.
I’ve worked with hundreds of Amazon and AWS folks over the last 4 years and never once had an experience even close to what you’ve described. I’ve got lots of friends who do or have worked for Amazon and one and all they recognize they’re putting in time working for the devil and hold their nose while they swallow that pill.
Cool, at least they recognize they are building their own personal wealth off of the suffering and exploitation of less well off people all around the world, sound like wonderful, moral people to me.
Hey, whatcha typing this comment on?
Lemme guess, anyone who uses any kind of technological device to post on lemmy is using something likely built in a sweatshop?
So thus because no one is without sin, its not possible to be a morally better person than anyone else?
The first yes, but the second is a straw man of my argument. I'm curious if you can steel man it
Well you have to put the two together to make what I figured your argument was, so I apparently do not understand your argument.
This explains why everything in AWS is named something weird. It's not "DNS" it's "Route 53." It's not virtual servers it's EC2. Makes learning it super hard, and I imagine it makes learning other things even harder.
The /function/ of these stupid naming schemes, despite whatever explanation is proffered as to their origin, is exactly as you have pointed out:
It takes time to learn all this lingo, which makes people tend toward 'specializing' in that ecosystem, which makes you more hesitant to migrate or attempt to interface with some other software ecosystem with its own separate lingo.
It also serves to make you feel stupid for not understanding it, basically in the same way a group of friends laughing at an in joke that you dont understand makes you feel like a lesser member of the group.
Lots and lots of programmers, db admins, etc, are basically low social skills or on the autism spectrum, so keeping people feeling low on the social pecking order makes them easier to boss around, makes them more likely to accept ludicrous and technically inefficient solutions, accept being paid far less than what they are worth, etc.