strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

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.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree with most of your comment.

However...

>choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join

I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.

Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

They have repeatedly tried to remove the free coffee perk (usually by claiming that it was only intended as a temporary thing and will be removed at the end of the year) and the only reason it has been retained this far is because for multiple years running now there was an internal uproar about it.

I suspect at the end of this year they will fully remove it, uproar be damned.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

Money, mostly.

But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.

Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

> We want to operate like the world’s largest startup

It's always amusing when a multi-decade-old, multi-hundred-billion-dollar company says stuff like this. You're not a startup. You never will be.

And if you were, you probably would actually offer perks in your offices that might actually encourage people to be there. Instead, the only perk that Amazon has is that you get one free coffee per day, and even that they have tried to remove multiple times.

I've never seen a company where it seemed more like the leadership of the company actively despises the employees that worked for them. Between stuff like this and the incessant pushing of Amazon Q against everyone's will, it's really apparent that Amazon execs think that having to employ humans as SDE is a defect they're trying to get rid of ASAP.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

TIL the origin of the term "cutover" for IT migrations. Fascinating!

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

My understanding is that it's the latter. "in SCED" basically means they have pre-planned availability that is cheap.

The "Physical Response Capacity" in that graph is the amount of capacity actually available, but it's not part of SCED. However it doesn't say anything about the timeframe it would be available in. Given that ERCOT didn't call for conservation, I would have to assume it was capacity that was "quickly available, but not cheap" rather than "not quickly available", but I don't know for sure.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

Texas has a lot of incentives for residential solar. I'm not sure where you live, but in my DFW suburb, my neighborhood _is_ peppered in rooftop solar.

https://www.gosolartexas.org/available-incentives

A lot of the incentives are from local power companies like Oncor, but one notable state-wide incentive is that solar installations are exempt from property tax by state law.

I dunno why people act like Texas is staunchly anti-renewable. TX state politicians have said some goofy stuff about "windmills freezing over", but overall Texans are extremely pro-wind and pro-solar. It's a huge economic driver for a large part of the state, and it's seen as an overall part of Texas's strong energy industry, complimentary to oil rather than as a competitor to it. George Bush and Rick Perry were both Republican governors but both were _very_ pro-renewable and oversaw massive booms in wind energy especially. In 2005 Texas (including Perry at the time) passed a law to invest billions of state dollars into building transmission lines specifically to make it feasible for renewable energy generation in west Texas to bring power to the populated areas in the east, which is attributed to the massive wind boom. Abbot, on the other hand, has sadly not been very pro-renewable, but much of the state still is.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

No. The 130 MW remaining capacity was the amount available "in SCED within 5 minutes", which in super simplified terms means "the amount of energy available quickly and economically".

The grid actually had ~4 GW spare capacity (according to the graph) if it was needed, but it wasn't part of SCED.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

> At the time we did not auto-scale any of our containerized services and were spending a lot of unnecessary money to keep services provisioned such that they could always handle peak load, even on nights and weekends when our traffic is much lower.

Huh? You've been running on AWS for how long and haven't been using auto scaling AT ALL? How was this not priority number one for the company to fix? You're just intentionally burning money at that point!

> While there is some support for auto-scaling on ECS, the Kubernetes ecosystem has robust open source offerings such as Keda for auto-scaling. In addition to simple triggers like CPU utilization, Keda supports scaling on the length of an AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue as well as any custom metrics from Datadog.

ECS autoscaling is easy, and supports these things. Fair play if you just really wanted to use CNCF projects, but this just seems like you didn't really utilize your previous infrastructure very well.

strivingtobe

há 2 anosdiscuss

The article brings up the two new LPs that were added, one being "Strive to be the world's best employer".

The biggest slap in the face about this LP is that the word "strive" used to be a bad word at Amazon. If you ever said you were going to "strive" to do something, you would be told that's not good enough. If you put it in a doc, you would be told to remove it. "Strive" was a weasel word. We never accepted "striving" as part of our tenets or our goals. Our goals never were to "strive to build a good service", our goal was just "build a good service"!

And then they went and made the new LP "Strive to be the world's best employer". Why isn't it just "Be the world's best employer"?

It may seem like a small thing, but it's an example of the ethos that has been chipped away inside Amazon. That particular LP has always been the butt of jokes because it's been clear over the last 5 years that leadership isn't actually serious about it, but the use of the weasel word "strive" really just put the cherry on top.

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