Amazon sends chills through its workforce with mixed message memo about AI use | Hacker News Reader

Amazon sends chills through its workforce with mixed message memo about AI use

theregister.com

23 pointsLogans_Run12 comments

If you click this link expecting to read the memo you'll be disappointed as its 95% about what the author thinks about it.

Welcome to the Register.

Here's the actual memo - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-softwar...

Welcome to corporate drivel. That memo says next to nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if it had been written by some LLM. "Write it in a grand style, like Kennedy's moon speech, but don't scare the share holders."

I was very glad for that! It sounds boringly useless, and the extensive response to it is much more valuable than yet another corporate memo of spendthrift-firemore.

Edit: Yeah, it’s just stack ranking by token/use pivottable; keep your work within 1.5 stddevs of everyone else’s or get targeted. Definitely missable.

> We recommend paying special attention to the 10th percentile (finding those teams who aren’t embracing AI effectively and understanding why) and the 90th percentile (finding those teams who are heavily using AI and understanding whether they’re seeing delivery increases to match) of AI adoption.

They could at least post the actual memo... especially after a header that says "What's the thing say?". Bloviating clickbait nonsense like this doesn't deserve to be here.

We differ on that subjective opinion: I feel the memo is rather bloviating and the Register’s opinion post about it rather less so. (This tends to leave me incompatible with Upper Management, for good or ill.)

I'm not going to pass a judgement on whether this is a good or bad thing (disclosure I used to work there).

But this is very Amazon. If the leadership believes AI usage is critical then they will use a blunt stack rank to identify those who aren't using it.

I would be unsurprised to see this as an automated flag that managers have to explain during performance reviews (e.g. "this person was on Maternity leave for three months and therefore their usage is lower, but if you see XYZ data they are now on track for the months after they returned and are catching up as they adopt the new way of working")

Of course Amazon is telling their teams to use AI; they are heavily invested in it not being a flop. More token usage metric for the hyper scalers means more traction and usage irrespective of revenue.

Amazons tokenmaxxing problems are of their own making and its their money. I fail to see how Amazons opinion on much of anything is that relevant.

Have you seen that website? While hocking sweatshop products is highly profitable, and their shipping empire is impressive if not destructive to retail shipping in general. I dont really view them as much of a software company.

But each company will need to decide how to usa AI and if they want to publish "deep thoughts" by Amazon, Inc, its a free country.

Personally, the people token maxxing to me are violating the ethos of what it means to be a software developer, so maybe they arent really software devs.

I cant sum it up in a short write up, but one thing true software devs are NOT is - sheep.

The ones that are can go back into real estate after the bust.

You’re reasoning about them being a software company may be a little flawed. I’m guessing AWS slipped your mind lol (it’s 85% of their revenue).

While data center management and wrapping open source software and renting deployments is software adjacent and involves alot of software, their scale is impressive, I would not call AWS some huge achievement in software engineering. Operations maybe. Making money is impressive I guess. I applaud them for figuring out how to charge people to transfer files.

You don’t comprehend what actually happens inside of AWS. 99.999% of the job is dealing with ancient proprietary Amazon systems that were designed a decade or two ago, and have an unbelievable amount of warts and sharp edges. And you’re not allowed to use any newer tools, because Amazon invented “Not Invented Here” a couple of decades before anyone else in the world ever heard of that term.

Yes, they make use of some open-source products as the core of some of the software and services they provide. But as an internal AWS employee, you’re not allowed to use anything but Tier-1 products as components to your software or service, if you use any AWS products or services at all.

This way you don’t have Tier-1 services dependent on Tier-2 or higher services. Priority inversions are avoided at all costs.

But then you still have all the control planes for all of these services which are so heavily dependent on US-East-1. And if US-East-1 goes down, then the data plane has to continue trying to function blindly, because the control plane doesn’t exist anymore. They’re still working on trying to fix that problem.

Open source software, or any software not designed and developed by Amazon/AWS, is no more than 0.001% of the job — if that much.

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