[ranman]

You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.

That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.

What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.

This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.

[hughesjj]

Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.

There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.

Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.

[lotsofpulp]

What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.

MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.

AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.

It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.

[bmitc]

I've never been truly impressed with an Amazon product. Is Amazon's engineering culture really that strong?

[JBlue42]

>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture.

What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?

It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).

[hintymad]

> That said there are a ton of cons.

Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?

What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.

[dboreham]

The software equivalent of a The Onion article..

[mparnisari]

Omg CFN guard! That was such a load of BS!

[ants_everywhere]

> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?

I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.

[goostavos]

>entrenched management class

This exists among the ICs class, too. "The bar" is under active manipulation so that they sit higher amongst the sea of low performers.

[lubesGordi]

What's their narrative and what's the reality? Sounds like you got something to say!