Amazon is about to shed 14,000 jobs to “stay nimble”. Would it be rude to tell the Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon that this bird has already flown? Engineers trying to use AWS will tell you that they days of Amazon’s amazing technical prowess are well behind them. And it’s across the board – from their smart devices (has anyone used the new Alexa App) to AWS services that only half work. Only their retail system remains best-in-class.
Amazon blamed the recent DNS outage that took so many of their customers offline a week ago on a “race condition” where the DynamoDB back-end to their unified DNS solution simply failed. They explained it in great detail here:
https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/
What they didn’t say why it failed; why the race condition existed. Why they screwed up. I’ll hazard a guess that they made the people who really knew how their systems worked redundant by mistake, replacing them with new and cheaper hires to fill the hole in a spreadsheet. There was no one left to spot the flaw until it became manifest. Engineers are interchangable, right? And you just need the right number to fit the project plan.
You don’t need large teams of qualified people to make this stuff work. You need small teams of experienced people who stick with the job and are treated enough respect that they’re empowered to do it. The good ones are not going to stick around to play redundancy roulette every six months, hoping that HR actually understand they’re necessary to keep the show on the road. HR take pride in saying they’re “people people”. Good engineers are not people people; they’re more likely to be neurodiverse. Their managers are unlikely to understand what they do, and HR certainly won’t.
I dare say there is a lot of dead wood in Amazon. They were recruiting like crazy during the pandemic; anyone who looked vaguely like an engineer with a pulse. The trick is identifying who to keep; if, indeed, there is anyone left who they haven’t made redundant already, or who simply got too spooked and left.