The first level or two of management are completely useless and operate more as “slave drivers” than engineers.

> Yeah but they wouldn't risk disruption.

Funny, they said the same thing about AWS before layoffs last year.

Because investors aren’t actually very intelligent, beyond some vague desire to “make my money bigger”.

Investors only see cutting people as a good thing, the excuse isn't for the investors, its for everyone else.

Right after that egregious U.S.-east-1 outage?

Now its just an api call...

  aws hr reduce workforce --region us-east-1

replacing hr with claude code powered bash scripts might just be what the industry desperately needs

Amazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.”

> They’re not “separate companies.”

They should be completely separate. If they were two independent companies, a low margin distribution and logistics company on one side and a high margin software services company on the other then nobody would suggest merging the two together.

How is AWS getting billions of cash and low interest rate loans for capex?

That’s right. The trillion dollar low margin dinosaur pays cash by writing close to zero profit in the books, and signs the bonds.

> How is AWS getting billions of cash and low interest rate loans for capex?

AWS is the cash cow. It owns between a third and half of the world's cloud computing market. Do you think it's hard for AWS to get financing?

Yes. This year only they announced they will exceed 100B in AWS investment. This is almost as high as their 2024 revenue (not profit).

Which cloud company can casually find 100B cash in a year?

> Which cloud company can casually find 100B cash in a year?

AWS. Because AWS reports close to $11B/quarter, which is over half Amazon's entire revenue, and AWS owns the cloud computing market, on which the whole world runs.

AMZN revenue was over $150B/quarter in 2024. AWS was around 25B. So closer 20% of AMZN revenue.

Probably you mean operating income.

The key number for operating a company is the free cash flow.

AWS does not have the cash flow to maintain its CAPEX. It currently uses part of Retail FCF and additional debt that the entire AMZN company takes.

NVIDIA does not offer you 10 year payment plan (like depreciation schedules assume). They ask for their cash upfront.

If it was that easy to find cash OpenAI would not have given up so much equity to dinosaurs with strong balance sheet.

> Amazon includes AWS. They’re not “separate companies.”

Actually, they are. Perhaps what is causing your confusion is that other parts of Amazon, such as Ring or Rivian, are also separate companies, whereas parts such as Alexa and Amazon Music aren't.

By your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo. For the purposes of the discussion at hand they’re all the same. Amazon PXT and finance is the same team as AWS PXT and finance.

> By your definition then every little part of “Amazon” is technically a separate “company” including every geo.

No. My definition is Amazon's actual organization chart as a holding. AWS is an independent first-level branch of direct reports of Andy Jassy, who was AWS's CEO before replacing Bezos. A similar branch is Worldwide Consumer, which groups what you think Amazon actually is, which means the online store, prime, books, devices, etc.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.

There’s clear data that shows an increase in the frequency and severity of LSEs post RTO3 in 2023, and it looks like RTO5 has accelerated that trend.

“Little evidence?” If the “aws” partition doesn’t actually exist when IAD breaks, Amazon hasn’t even discovered how to make multi-region cloud infrastructure. That’s a big deal.

The real story from this incident is that Amazon’s “aws” partition doesn’t actually have multiple regions - effectively, it’s all IAD in a trench-coat.

This is a big deal. My employer has already started to look at bringing back our old racks from storage and switching back to on-premises. Cannot imagine he’s alone in that.

Can you elaborate what convinced you of this? We were running mostly in us-west and saw almost no impact, despite using a broad spectrum of AWS infrastructure and tooling.

We had business as usual today.

Especially when big employers all collude in the open.

And yet here you are, perpetuating the “crabs in a bucket” mentality that continues to be a blight on our industry.

A manager who’s not doing their job and is never reachable can be pretty demoralizing. That same manager would probably not be great in person either, but at least you’d know where to find them.

As long as a company is able and willing to move out or correct low performers quickly, remote work is fine.

>but at least you’d know where to find them.

In my experience, managers of that calibre tend to fuck off to a meeting room first chance they get and hide there until around 4 when they slip out.

Great time to be a recruiter in Seattle outside AMZN and MSFT.