AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn

ablation

A challenging writing style on a really difficult to read page with a sloppy AI header image means that this article was a not a great experience.

almostdeadguy

Linguists centuries from now are going to wonder why everyone suddenly started writing like Paul Graham.

Boxxed

The massive AI generated image header is more than a little bit ironic

andrewstuart

That name looks familiar. He is the only person from AWS who contacted me after my account got locked for 5 days because AWS thought it was vaguely possible my account might possibly be (but wasn’t) hacked. Any company who wants support people who care ….. give Tarus Balog a job. He seems to be ………. “Customer Obsessed”. Everyone else ….. why are you still using AWS?

haburka

I think this kind of overly dramatic writing makes me struggle to respect the arguments in the piece. Like the blog writer has this style like they’re documenting the collapse of humanity or something when really it’s just a massive cloud company taking some direction that may be suboptimal. I understand this tone can be helpful to drive effective change but I think it should be reserved for situations where people are actually suffering as opposed to when extremely well paid people engineers are laid off.

tcp_handshaker

He should not take it personally. Its clear it was a decision by the algo...The AI probably saw "reduced escalations" and concluded he was no longer needed.

vintagedave

> The man who triggered a CEO-level investigation into AWS’s own dysfunction? Gone within ten months. > I’m not saying there’s a direct line from saving my account to getting fired... Either way, this is a very poor look for Amazon.

Spooky23

Wait? I thought only Google did stuff like this, and AWS was an amazing, customer obsessed(tm) organization?

bayesnet

> Not a product launch. Not a keynote. Not a revenue metric. The thing he was most proud of in four years at one of the biggest companies on … What’s tiresome about this is that people don’t even bother to edit it. I use LLMs to draft long-form text all the time because I think the hardest part is getting something on the page to refine. But I would be embarrassed to leave LLM tells like this in the final result, if only because I want people to know that I actually cared about what I’m asking them to read and that I value their time. It’s especially ironic here because this is about lauding a person who cut through the impersonal behavior of a large organization. Evidently this person was not worth even an editorial pass over the article though.

jadar

This piece imputes motives that I feel like is rather impossible to prove. Is it a bad look? Yes. Did it come from malicious intentions / retribution? Unlikely.

recursivedoubts

why ruin what could be a great human-centric story w/so much AI generated content? this could be a heartfelt three paragraph article and have far more emotional impact.

AndrewKemendo

The Bureaucracy of the mundane is totalizing and is intended to put up what look like “understandable” barriers David Graeber already covered this a decade ago > Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It also exemplifies what I have come to think of as the defining feature of certain utopian forms of practice: that is, ones where those maintaining the system, on discovering that it will regularly produce such failures, conclude that the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved—or, indeed, of human beings in general. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-ut...

eoskx

AI generated slop. Why would anyone waste the time to read this if you won't take the time to thoughtfully write something?

renyicircle

The way the author thanks the person from AWS who helped him with a human approach is an AI generated article blaming AWS for using AI. Brilliant.

jerf

You know, sometimes corporate America forgets its own principles. You know, Mr. CEO, how you don't really much care why the system went down, you just want it fixed ASAP, no excuses, just get it done? You know what? We customers are the same way. We don't care why something broke. All we see is that it broke. We are going to take appropriate actions, and you can't stop us. We don't care that you say it was AI. It was broken. We don't care that you got lots of cost savings from firing the employees that actually knew what they were doing. It was broken. We don't care why it broke. It was broken. Enjoy the window of being able to say "but it was AI" and getting anything from it. It won't last long. We don't care. We don't care for this excuse any more than you're going to accept it from your own employees for much longer.

bragr

The original blog post this references is a better read: https://www.adventuresinoss.com/aws-four-years/

_pdp_

In the age of abundant intelligence the most valuable thing will be human capital - especially those that give a damn.

BariumBlue

Yeah, I think one issue is that AI fundamentally dgaf about you and your code base. They don't have a salary on the line, and from their perspective it's not some project they super care about. I think they're happy to help, and dutiful to orders, but if the business dies in two years because of crap code that's no skin off their back.

schnitzelstoat

> that’s not a career pivot. That’s a trauma response. > he wasn’t being philosophical. He was describing the exact contradiction that made his own job impossible. Is this written by AI? It has the typical "That's not X. That's Y." phrasing. A bit ironic given the content.

hdndjsbbs

It sounds like this employee was on a team whose goal was to build developer goodwill in open source. Of course now that AWS is piling money into the AI furnace they're cutting that team. This article should be called "the guy who made the best sandwiches in our free staff cafeteria got laid off".