I’m an AWS engineer and I haven’t seen any evidence of engineering layoffs within AWS since early this year. As others have suggested we generally don’t have ”DevOps Workers” either. There’s definitely a push for AI tools, but there’s no indication that it was related to any off this from what I’ve seen.
> The story has no direct sources at all, you wouldn't be able to hide a layoff like this .
Exactly. The blog post reeks of bullshit from many angles, not only how AWS does not have "DevOps" roles but also how Amazon and AWS are completely different companies, teams, organizations, everything.
Here's how they sign off their post:
> And do you believe that Amazon cut 40% of its DevOps jobs? Join our (...) Discord server, follow us (...)
> Now, there is a lot of skepticism around this article, and you should take it with a huge grain of salt, but the timing is curious, although we do not claim it is true or is somehow connected to the systems' crash.
I wouldn’t be surprised by a causal relationship. Most people planning layoffs don’t actually know what the laid off people do. When Fisker laid everyone off, their OTA updates went down hard. Had they taken a day to perform a safe shutdown they would have saved months of recovery work. Management likes to lay off with no warning, but for professional infrastructure people that causes more harm than good. Every pro I know will faithfully wrap up the work because they have professional pride.
Layoffs cause loss of institutional knowledge. Minor irritation can balloon into a major outage simply because the person who can fix it easily left the building for the last time.
us-east-1 is the OG region. It has had significant dns problems before. There’s probably a subtle and complicated series of steps for general care and feeding.
Good journalism would identify the process, the owner, cross reference with the layoff list… any of the laid off people would be able to supply those details off the record.
It turns out that anyone who wants to can just go on the Internet and spout bollocks. I like how there isn’t even a byline here, just “editorial staff.” Because who’d sign their name to this kind of tomfoolery?
I seem to recall someone signing a name to the idea that the event was so bad because the smart engineers had left AWS, so my own expectations about the amount of bollocks I'm going to read about it have risen
randycupertino|4 months ago
> But by the afternoon, nearly 40% of AWS’s DevOps employees were cut in a single internal strike.
> An email memo, which was briefly posted on the internal wiki before being taken down, blamed the cuts on strategic automation initiatives.
oxymoron|4 months ago
belter|4 months ago
999900000999|4 months ago
It's also very opportunistic, you're telling me you were sitting on this story and you decided to release it right after AWS had issues ?
motorest|4 months ago
Exactly. The blog post reeks of bullshit from many angles, not only how AWS does not have "DevOps" roles but also how Amazon and AWS are completely different companies, teams, organizations, everything.
Here's how they sign off their post:
> And do you believe that Amazon cut 40% of its DevOps jobs? Join our (...) Discord server, follow us (...)
It smells of bullshit through and through.
lazystar|4 months ago
my guess is 4 out of 10, which would make it a single sub team rather than "all devops roles in aws". would love to see something more official.
koinedad|4 months ago
more_corn|4 months ago
pavel_lishin|4 months ago
Good advice.
more_corn|4 months ago
Layoffs cause loss of institutional knowledge. Minor irritation can balloon into a major outage simply because the person who can fix it easily left the building for the last time.
us-east-1 is the OG region. It has had significant dns problems before. There’s probably a subtle and complicated series of steps for general care and feeding.
Good journalism would identify the process, the owner, cross reference with the layoff list… any of the laid off people would be able to supply those details off the record.
whycome|4 months ago
QuinnyPig|4 months ago
kixiQu|4 months ago