back

by mlhpdx·10mo ago·view on hn ↗
This is the time to accept that the path forward is keeping people and giving them the best tools you possibly can to do their work. That is, the same as has been true for decades remains so.

Yes, development tools are better every day. Yes, you can downsize. No it won’t be felt immediately. Yes, it mortgages the future and at a painfully high interest rate.

Suspending disbelief won’t make downsizing work better.

4 comments
Seems like it worked fine. They laid off a quarter of their junior principal engineers, the stock went up. They had a massive outage a few months later, the stock went up again. Everything's working out fine for their strategy so far.
I remember comments saying the stock went up because the average joe didn't realize how much of the internet was powered by AWS until all their day to day apps started failing. To most people Amazon is an online shopping site.
The memes going around when the National Inquirer tried to blackmail Bezos and people were showing what their site was running on were pretty classic
It continues to work until eventually the debt is so high the company implodes.

See: general electric, RCA, Xerox, GM

Yes, until the company has had all shareholder value sucked out of it and its hollowed-out shell finally implodes.

But Bezos will still have his billions.

Boeing?
The entire thing reminds me of Wile E Coyote suspended in mid-air before he looks down and plummets to the bottom of a ravine
You would think this would eventually show up on the balance sheets, right? Presumably a lot of their big customers have SLAs with money penalties, so maybe next quarter earnings? Or quarter after that?
SLA monetary penalties won't make the difference there. Enough giant customers moving substantial workload off of AWS (either to another cloud, or otherwise) would, but the timeline for that is years, not next quarter.
More likely outcome is the companies will spend even more on AWS, deploying to multiple AWS regions...

Just a guess but I think this bubble will stretch a bit more before it pops.

Nah, the decades old crop of "new" big tech companies are just entering their IBM phase.
Where are the young companies trying to replace them? There are all the AI companies, but Google and Meta both have competitive chatbots, and OpenAI is signing weird deals that don't make it look like a long-term player.
They all get bought out by Amazon, Google, Meta et al. The cash just tastes too good when stacked up against the prospect of grinding for 15 years and probably nothing coming of it.
Google tried to sell itself to Yahoo! for a million dollars.
Remember these antitrust laws the US decided not to enforce? Turns out they are useful, after all.
I don't think there's ignorance of the fact that turnover is bad, I think the field is being designed to homogenize staff and favor uniform mediocrity so that employees truly do become interchangeable. We're so close to just plain talent being likened to cowboyism.
I observed a similar thing in the post Goldwater active duty officer corps reformations.
> Yes, development tools are better every day

Are they?