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throwaway82931 | 4 years ago

I've always heard about technical debt at AWS, with thousand line functions everyone is terrified to touch, demotivated employees doing whatever it takes to close tickets without dealing with the root causes, and so on.

I presume that this rash of downtime is just the rickety structure inevitably creaking and breaking. It's probably too late now to fix things — dealing with legacy code requires patience, discipline, and understanding which the management of Amazon doesn't have. They'll just yell at people louder, and hold people "accountable" by punishing anyone where anything breaks.

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goldenkey|4 years ago

I worked there and can vouch for what you said. AWS is built like a house of cards. They just painted it orange and white to make it look cohesive. What's funny though is that the CSS isn't even sourced from one place. They tell front-end engineers to use a dropper tool and to just copy and paste style from other places. DRY is not in Amazon's vocabulary.

Gotta love their leadership principles:

> Frugality (we'll give you a shitty laptop, shitty chair, and a shitty desk.)

> Be right a lot (are you too stupid to forecast the future?!)"