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Comment by BatchJob | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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