Operations nightmare

Ops. Ops. More Ops. Everything is breaking in new and terrible ways all the time. Amazon has grown way too fast, and everything is brittle and messed up. Thousands of high sev tickets in many teams. Senior engineers working tickets all day. Getting paged all night. 15 minutes response time. Have a life? Not anymore.

You thought they were on cutting edge stuff? Hah! Amazon doesn’t care about what is going on outside of Amazon, and they are so inwardly focused, they don’t even know that they are getting passed by open source technologies. Sure, at first a lot of what they did was innovative, but not anymore. And, let’s say you get on a team that is doing something cool. Your chances of being “the man” on that project are small. You will likely be spending your days keeping the lights on. Refer to my first paragraph above.

No respect for planning. Amazon is a dev ops culture from top to bottom. Everyone does ops. But everyone does planning. And project management. And deployment. And on and on. There is no time for architecture, planning, or proper testing. They are constantly behind the curve on scaling, their projects are always late, there is nothing documented, there is no architecture (or even respect for having an architecture or design). Technical debt is huge, and the environment is too big to ever clean it up. This is what leads to ops and not being able to work on anything cool (refer to my first paragraph again).

Long hours and intense days. Everyone knows you work long hours in most groups at Amazon. But it’s the intensity most people don’t know about. You are moving and multitasking all day. You are tired when you leave. Okay; so you are fine working hard and fast? Are you fine working hard and fast while being constantly berated and backstabbed in a horrible condescending culture? You must like pain, I guess….