Comment by zjaffee

11 hours ago

I'm also an AWS alumni from many years back now, and truthfully, the organizational problems really took off when Jassy moved to being CEO of amazon as a whole and major leaders left the company (Charlie Bell, et al.).

There were always other problems too, pressure on the company in both directions across many different product lines on both cost (any number of cheaper baremetal providers who are much faster at providing customers instances than they were a decade ago), and product quality (any number of startups to now bigger companies, databricks probably being the biggest success) along with a number of expensive bets that were made that didn't work out especially as interest rates began to rise (there were numbers of of different services ranging from IoT, AI, business support, robotics, groundstation, that essentially all failed).

AI infra being their latest bet, along with doubling down on custom hardware is smart, but these roles don't require the same number of SWEs and instead require a different type of high skilled professional.

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zjaffee

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sokoloff  8 hours ago

I find it hard to call Amazon robotics a failure. All of the small/binnable item FCs make extensive (and, as an outsider, apparently very productive) use of robotics.

  • zjaffee  7 hours ago

    I'm talking specifically their AWS service for ROS applications, all of my concerns are AWS specific for that matter, not the robotics they build in house.

bigstrat2003  11 hours ago

> I'm also an AWS alumni

Unrelated to your main point, but it's "alumnus" in the singular form. For bonus language nerd points, you would use "alumna" to refer to a woman, or "alumnae" to refer to multiple women. Not sure how Latin handles mixed gender groups, though I would guess it's "alumni".