[HN Gopher] Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down t...
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Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout
Author : raw_anon_1111
Score : 106 points
Date : 2025-10-20 20:50 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Nothing gets sold or fixed without people who know how it's
| built.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| But it is more important to keep the PIP, stack-ranking,
| ladder-climbing game running than keeping the people /s
| bwfan123 wrote:
| cue in: programming as theory building [1] or building systems
| as theory building, ie, mental causal models of how and why
| things work the way they do.
|
| why not prompt ai's to fix this outage ? or maybe thats what is
| taking so long to fix [2] ?
|
| [1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
|
| [2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1980221072512635117
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640838
| ortusdux wrote:
| "If you were a 'product person' at IBM or Xerox: so you make a
| better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a
| monopoly market-share, the company's not any more successful. So
| the people who make the company more successful are the sales and
| marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the
| 'product people' get run out of the decision-making forums.
|
| The companies forget how to make great products. The product
| sensibility and product genius that brought them to this
| monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these
| companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad
| product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's
| required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And
| they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help
| the costumers."
|
| - Steve Jobs -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Great words, but he lost any right to them when he made famous
| the "You're holding it wrong" workaround. IMO that was the
| defining moment when Apple started its decline on product
| innovation.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| It was a nothingburger. Apple sold the same GSM iPhone 4 for
| three years with no design changes and nothing else was said
| about it three months later.
| bobbiechen wrote:
| Well, there was a software change to smooth out how the
| bars would display..
| https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/08/a-15-year-mystery-solved-
| the-...
| DecentShoes wrote:
| It was not nothing. The phone stopped working if the user
| held it naturally in their hand. I had one. Reception
| completely cut out.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| If it were that big of deal, don't you think Apple would
| have been forced to recall it and definitely couldn't
| keep selling it for 3 years. True they did redo the
| antenna for the Verizon CDMA iPhone 4. But they never
| bothered to back port the changes to the GSM one.
|
| I also had a GSM iPhone 4.
|
| Compare that to how quickly they ran away from the shitty
| Intel modems when they were selling some made by Intel
| and some made by Samsung (?)
| behnamoh wrote:
| > It is a fact that there have been 27,000+ Amazonians impacted
| by layoffs between 2022 and 2024, continuing into 2025. It's hard
| to know how many of these were AWS versus other parts of its
| Amazon parent, because the company is notoriously tight-lipped
| about staffing issues. Internal documents reportedly say that
| Amazon suffers from 69 percent to 81 percent regretted attrition
| across all employment levels. In other words, "people quitting
| who we wish didn't." The internet is full of anecdata of senior
| Amazonians lamenting the hamfisted approach of their Return to
| Office initiative; experts have weighed in citing similar
| concerns.
|
| So the title is all speculation. The author put 2 and 2 together
| and concluded that 10 is greater than 9.
|
| Worthless article.
| samrus wrote:
| Just because its speculation doesnt mean its worthless. But
| yeah it should be taken as speculation rather than a validated
| and tested hypithesis
| behnamoh wrote:
| Anything that wastes my time and only reveals its half-assed
| reasoning half way through the article is indeed worthless.
| a0123 wrote:
| You could make smart inferences based on past and very
| frequent occurrences.
|
| Or you could just say "there is no way the thing that
| constantly happens over and over again has happened _once
| again_ , just no way".
|
| Staff cuts constantly happen in the name of maximising
| profits. They always yield poor results for a company's
| performance. Every time. Especially for the consumer's side
| of it (not the company's finances of course).
|
| Every time.
|
| But maybe this time it's different. That one time.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| I worked at AWS and still have friends who work there. I don't
| know any L5s who wouldn't jump at a chance to leave if they
| even got a slightly worse offer than what they are making now.
| I know a few L6s and L7s that would stick around out of
| momentum.
|
| But I know very few people in the industry who know about
| Amazon's reputation that have a life long dream of working
| there given a choice.
|
| I was 46 when I was hired there for a "permanently remote [sic]
| field by design role" in ProServe and it was my 8th job out of
| college. I went in with my eyes wide open. I had a plan, stay
| for four years, sell my RSUs as soon as they vested, pay off
| debt, save some money, put it on my resume to open doors and
| make connections and leave.
|
| I was never expecting to make more when I left. I used the time
| to downsize and reduce my expenses - including moving to state
| tax free Florida.
|
| When I saw the writing on the wall, I played the game while I
| was on focus to get my next vest and wait for the "get 40k+
| severance and leave immediately or try to work through the
| PIP".
|
| I took the latter and had three offers within 3 weeks. This was
| late 2023.
| azemetre wrote:
| How long did you stick it out? Were you close toward
| completing your plan?
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Close enough. I missed 2 vesting periods. But the severance
| and rapidly having a job made up for one and I got
| refreshers my third year that I hadn't counted on.
|
| I left debt free, sold my old home for exactly twice what I
| had built for 8 years earlier, downsized to a condo half
| the price I sold it for (and 1/3 the size) and I was debt
| free with savings.
|
| I'm now a staff consultant working full time at a 3rd party
| AWS consulting firm with a lot less stress and still
| remote. They were the last to fall. But AWS made their
| ProServe department return to office at the beginning of
| this year.
| dijit wrote:
| Maybe its speculation, but I mean drawing conclusions becomes
| easy when 40% of devops staff being laid off by AWS was in the
| news _three days ago_.
|
| https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops...
| placardloop wrote:
| AWS doesn't even have a "devops team" nor even any devops job
| roles. AWS also does not use Terraform (which is what the
| article says everyone was replaced with) at any significant
| scale, so this article is similar junk.
| dijit wrote:
| Uh, they still have a role open for DevOps:
| https://amazon.jobs/en/jobs/3042892/delivery-consultant-
| devo...
| jongjong wrote:
| Speaking of DNS, I still cannot comprehend why we still rely on
| the current complex, aging, centralized, rent-seeking DNS.
|
| It's one one of the few parts of the internet which could
| potentially be replaced over time with very little disruption.
|
| The hierarchy of resolvers could be replaced with a far simpler
| flat hierarchy Blockchain where people could buy and permanently
| own their domains directly on-chain... No recurring fees. People
| could host websites on the Blockchain from beyond the grave...
| This is kind of a dream of mine. Not possible to achieve in our
| current system.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| To bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first overthrow
| capitalism.
| chicagobuss wrote:
| perfection
| tpmoney wrote:
| > People could host websites on the Blockchain from beyond the
| grave...
|
| This is precisely why something like this isn't a popular
| solution lots of people are working towards. Domains broadly
| speaking aren't a finite resource, but usable domains using
| common words definitely are. As time marches on human
| readable/typeable "permanent identifiers" are going to have to
| go away. Email address, usernames and the like are all going to
| get recycled, just like phone numbers are. Domains are
| currently recycled and most people probably think that's a good
| thing.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > People could host websites on the Blockchain from beyond the
| grave...
|
| This is precisely why something like this isn't a popular
| solution lots of people are working towards. Domains broadly
| speaking aren't a finite resource, but usable domains using
| common words definitely are. As time marches on human
| readable/typeable "permanent identifiers" are going to have to
| go away. Email address, usernames and the like are all going to
| get recycled, just like phone numbers are. Domains are
| currently recycled and most people probably think that's a good
| thing (assuming they think about it at all)
| yreg wrote:
| Also the potential for a domain to get irreversibly stolen is
| not a good feature for the security of the users.
| tombert wrote:
| I think this would make the squatting problem that we already
| have way worse. There would be bots buying every single
| remotely usable domain, and there would be no incentive for
| them to sell it unless they get an absurdly large offer.
|
| I bought tombert.com in 2014 and forgot to renew it in 2015,
| and it was auctioned off by GoDaddy. For like seven years, it
| was owned by squatters, and they wanted thousands of dollars
| for the domain [1]. I called offering the $100 for it, and they
| claimed that they can't go below $1400 because this domain is
| in "extremely high demand". I finally was able to buy it back
| in 2021, presumably because the squatter purged out domains
| that hadn't been purchased for N years and they wanted to save
| money.
|
| Now, you could argue "see! You wouldn't have had to worry about
| it expiring if it were permanent on the blockchain", and that's
| true, but if someone else had gotten to that domain first, then
| I would also never get it. I think the only thing that keeps
| the internet even remotely fair in this regard is that domain
| names cost some amount of money to keep.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160219161720/http://www.hugedo...
| chicagobuss wrote:
| internal reports from current AWS engineers seem to be confirming
| all of the speculation in this article. Shit's rotten from the
| inside out and you can pretty evenly blame AI, brain drain, and
| good old fashioned "big company politics"
|
| https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/10/20/aws_outa...
| pdonis wrote:
| One thing I love about El Reg is that they never shirk from
| calling a spade a spade.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Amazon has reportedly been a shitty place to work forever, so
| using issues that happen to be popular today to explain turnover
| is disingenuous.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| This is the time to accept that the path forward is keeping
| people and giving them the best tools you possibly can to do
| their work. That is, the same as has been true for decades
| remains so.
|
| Yes, development tools are better every day. Yes, you can
| downsize. No it won't be felt immediately. Yes, it mortgages the
| future and at a painfully high interest rate.
|
| Suspending disbelief won't make downsizing work better.
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(page generated 2025-10-20 23:00 UTC)