Comment by hughesjj

Comment by hughesjj 4 days ago

41 replies

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Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there.

Adding on thoughts:

One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).

I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable.

Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical).

Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right)

Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.

hughesjj 4 days ago

Commenting to myself:

This looks interesting and relevant:

- https://github.com/projen/projen

- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/getting-started-with-pro...

- https://projen.io/

Looks Amazon official. Okay, I'm hype, this will be fun to play with.

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  • getpokedagain 4 days ago

    We use projen where I work for the past year or so for new projects. It’s pretty good and the devs are pretty active in terms of responding to bugs and not being shit at documentation.

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bobnamob 3 days ago

Ian finished last week :(

Pipelines, BT and Isengard are absolutely what I'll miss the most as well (I handed in my resignation notice last week, prior to all this RTO2.0 kerfuffle)

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darby_nine 4 days ago

> One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).

Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)

The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.

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  • hughesjj 3 days ago

    I might have just drunken too much of the koolade and believed in the mythos of lowflyinghawk + customer obsession.

    What I meant by this is, in my personal opinion, there were a bunch of half baked products they should have just not mentioned at reinvent because said products never really materialized or had significant usage oncerns for a long, long time after the announcement.

    The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.

    Sorry kind of on a caffeine high and brain isn't working too well right now. I'm also reluctant to throw shade on the products/teams I'm thinking of because I didn't work on them and I don't want to give them any heat, but I'll say it was in the 2017-2019 era I felt it start to change.

    I think it contrasts with the really cool launches like Lambda, Aurora, API Gateway, Sagemaker, etc that has just come out before then.

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    • darby_nine 3 days ago

      > The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.

      Yea, I can certainly see this making one feel claustrophobic.

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trallnag 4 days ago

When you talk about docs at AWS, do you mean internal documentation or the public one?

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  • strivingtobe 4 days ago

    Neither, they're talking about the culture of writing documents as a form of sharing ideas. Where other companies might use powerpoint presentations or unstructured meetings to brainstorm on ideas, Amazon instead encourages people to write a document summarizing their thoughts, and then there is a meeting where people silently read and comment on the document, and then afterwards discuss it.

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    • JonChesterfield 4 days ago

      That's an extremely sensible idea in multiple dimensions. It prioritises clarity of thought over rambling discussion in conference calls. I wonder if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction.

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      • sokoloff 3 days ago

        > if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction

        The path I took was to just start doing it and expecting it for critical topics within my team (which was around 200-250 people when I started it). It takes several iterations to get good at it and the first few feel like it’s quite foreign and even wasteful. (It puts a lot more work on the author, by design.)

        Eventually, it escaped just my group and (with support from others, including the CEO, who liked the process after seeing some of the documents that I or others shared with them) and is now fairly common in the corporate center for our standardized processes, though not nearly as standardized as I perceive Amazon to be in its use.

        Basically: start doing it and stick to it for at least 5 complete cycles. Make sure that influential people (not necessarily org leaders) are public in their praise of well-constructed and effective documents.

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      • Cthulhu_ 3 days ago

        From experience, yes / kind of; for the project I'm on right now, I introduced ADRs (https://adr.github.io/madr/) as a not-too-formal, but still formal way to talk about technology. This was after ten years of working in more hype-driven culture, where the choice was made by one person, or it was the tech du jour, or some guy spent a weekend playing with it so obviously we should integrate it.

        It's a simple shift where people have to do their homework instead of just yeet something over the fence. You want to solve X? Present us with three options and we'll talk about it. You want to introduce Y? But we already use X to solve that, present us with new insights and the justification to spend the time on it.

        It's far from perfect and it requires buy-in and (self) discipline, but it's still better than what happened before. Because some companies are still paying the debt of hype-driven development even though the people that introduced it are long gone.

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      • dheera 4 days ago

        It also means

        - You can't take calls from cars

        - People leave 2 bullshit comments like "justification needed" for participation points and then go drink coffee instead of actually reading the doc or googling for said justification

        - People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes

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    • hughesjj 4 days ago

      ^ exactly, thanks for taking the answer perfectly.

      It's basically panel 2 from this:

      https://xkcd.com/568/

      Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer review process is much more sane than trying to review a bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much easier to refer to a well written document when it comes time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over some power point slides and maybe an associated recording, to say nothing about searchability, discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written document vs PowerPoint slides.

      Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any) one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an author.

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    • nullorempty 3 days ago

      In my experience these documents were actually never good. I’ve never seen anyone ask for estimates either. Surely it’s better than some other companies but if it were good they wouldn’t need this absolutely horrific oncall

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    • dbtablesorrows 3 days ago

      I believe most tech focused companies do it and it's called design docs / RFCs.

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