AWS/Amazon might be great for customers but it's a horrible place to work. Having worked in AWS for 3 years, almost all services are half baked, tech debt filled in all parts of the code. But hey, we never see any issue? It's because it has army of oncallers who are manually running commands and fixing issues.
I used to work in one of the DB services and we used to get 20+ pages (sev2) every day. Due to insane amount of pages every day, we used to have daily on-call rotations.
Looks like pretty good news. Have worked in AWS before. So AWS is very famous for making money using open source products without contributing upstream.
One very good example is Amazon redis. Amazon figured out that redis asynchronous replication didn't work at scale so instead of fixing issues upstream they chose to develop Amazon redis in house and monetized it.
This is very true. It doesn't lead to PIP always but whole amazonian culture makes it difficult for the person to stay in team/company.
Writing COE is kind of admission of guilt and I have definitely seen promotions getting delayed. During perf-review, lot of times managers of other teams raise COE has a point against the person going for promotion.
Have worked at AWS before, and I can attest to this. Whenever we had an outage, our director and senior manager would take a call on whether to update the dashboard or not.
Having 'red' dashboard catches lot of eyes, so people responsible for making this decision always look at it from political point of view.
As a dev oncall, we used to get 20 sev2s per day (an oncall ticket which needs to be handled within 15 mins) so most of the time things are broken, its just that its not visible to external customers through dashboard.
ex-AWS employee here. I worked in one of the managed services (can't say which one because it might reveal my identity). In Managed services, instances are created in AWS VPC so employees have access to underlying VM.
We have used that capability to get stats about the type of customer workloads, and devised feature products based on that.
Having worked at amazon for 3 years. I don't find it surprising. Amazon, in general, is known for not taking good care of its employees. My experience has been as SWE and its a well know fact of there that if you and your manager don't get along then you have limited time to move to a different team or company before you get PIPed.
This totally sounds like it can happen at Amazon. I worked at Amazon for sometime and for the first time in my life, I saw a grown up man crying because his manager was relentlessly shouting on him. I have never seen this level of heated arguments in a workplace.
Worked in an AWS team, and the biggest issue was constant fire-fighting and oncall/operational load. Code quality is really bad across all teams in AWS due to constant prioritization of features over stability. We use to get 20 pages a day, and it was very common to get 2-3 pages in the middle of night. It was horrible and yet management didn't pay much attention on fixing it. At the end devs starting leaving the team one by one. Recently I heard that the team hired twice the number of devs to reduce frequency of oncall rotation.
It seems this service is targeted towards specific applications where write traffic is somewhat independent between 2 regions. However, you can shoot yourself in foot, if 2 regions are trying to update the same row, because of eventual consistency.
I have observed the same. In my masters, Chinese friends were asked to join meetups and classes for improving english speaking. When I asked how they cleared Toefl(https://www.ets.org/toefl), which is required along with GRE score for getting admissions into US university, they mentioned its very easy to buy these scores. Somebody appears on their behalf in the test.
I don't agree with this article. Lets say a company was managing a mysql like database by themselves which would require a full time database maintainer doing all sorts of devops work. However, if company moves to AWS and starts using RDS, it might only need a part time db maintainer. So company indeed save some devops work like pushing security patches, monitoring etc.
I used to work in one of the DB services and we used to get 20+ pages (sev2) every day. Due to insane amount of pages every day, we used to have daily on-call rotations.