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I am so tired of worse products in the name of upgraded products that are literally worse in every way but a bunch of buzzwords and in groups bragging at the top while not knowing anything at all about programs or even the product at all but just seem to be there because they drink with the CTO.
Ugh. The twiddling thumb era of trying to look busy by dismantling the old machines for parts.
I say this is only ok because he did that in amazon. Fuck amazon
If he did that in a medium-or-less sized company that would be a really shitty move.
The problem is the large companies like Amazon buy all the small ones and put these people in charge lol
In a small company noone would try to label you "l5" or "l6" and probably an actual human would make your comp decision. You take the byzantine incentive structure away and people just try to do a good job.
Honestly probably got the project to more maintainable state. Probably didn't need the rewrite to do it in a new lang to do it (the real killer hear it sounds like).
Those monoliths suck on the operations side, and even worse when it's a corpse holding up the foundation to other projects that actually need it to change. Need to scale? good luck that decades old pizza box we call a server isn't supported anymore. Oh of course we can spend millions virtualizing dead hardware to keep it running the same.
somebody please hack into amazon's services so that they can tell amazon shoppers the truth about jeff bezos. seriously!
Flawless victory.
I apologize for bashing Java so hard in the past. I wish everyone wrote everything in Java these days. Digital life would be so much better.
Fuck no.
I wish everyone used C#, Scala, Rust or Python (DSLs like VHDL, SQLs and CUDA and super specific languages like C, Erlang, Haskell and Bash notwithstanding).
You can hate on them, sure, each for their own reason, but they're all very well supported and good for what they're intended for.
You owe royalties
Yeah, Oracle licencing has really taken the shine off Java and relegated it to the legacy dust bin.
The one thing which COULD justify it, is technical debt. A programming language not supported anymore or in short-term/mid-term, bus factor, too much knowledge transfer, etc. But yeah, lots of times it's "business as usual" just for "progress" and fancy buzzwords.
Golang is technical debt in language form. A language that gained limited and now sagging popularity, for good reason. I hate to work in Java but hate golang more. It's the lightsaber of programming languages. I've got shit to do give me blasters and all the rest and I don't want to wank myelf off about how I did it all with channels.
Java is still supported... Or did I miss the memo?
What's Java???
The whole thing is pegging my BS meter, including letting an L5 deploy without a code and architecture review, TC, and the fact that they're posting this and claiming they're still there.
I've seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don't do them well.
I'm doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn't work. (No, they don't have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that's insane. No, I don't have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It's not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.
In my experience, people don't want to say "I think this is all a bad idea" if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it's pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he'd spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.
I've got a few friends who work at Amazon, and while the story certainly sounds embellished and a bit too "just-so", the corporate attitude of make-work to justify a promotion even when its a waste of time and resources rings true as a bell.
Did this guy actually oversee a fully transition to a new service and waste a bunch of internal time and money for a system that's sub-optimal by any conceivable measure? Idk, maybe. If he'd just written "Twitter" instead of "Amazon", I'd have taken it at face value no problem.
Did this guy author an overly-complex plan as part of his promotional material, get it vetted and reviewed and rubber stamped by a bunch of friendly higher-ups because they wanted to justify his promotion, and then stuck on a shelf marked "Maybe we'll do this in 2029 if we're not busy with something else"? Equally likely.
Does Amazon have a bunch of bread and butter break-fix work they could be dedicating staff to, rather than chasing the next digital White Whale so they can feel cutting edge? Yeah, no shit. Absolutely.
I fought for getting a 4/5 rating at an old job and gave lots of examples. Their argument was that I didn't deserve it because those were just expected. I pointed out my work compared to others in my team and was told that it compares across the company, not the team. I kept causing a fuss about it because I was so angry about it and finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less. I was confused because I didn't want more money, I was just offended they said I was performing on average when I was going above and beyond every day. It was also really embarrassing to me. If they'd just said the rating doesn't affect anything except your bonus I wouldn't have even cared.
The whole thing is all BS.
At one job, my manager had a spreadsheet that he was tapping away at during my review. He had the audacity to tell me that he had to downgrade some things so that he wouldn't have to go to a committee to defend at the individual or group level.
I transferred to a different product.
Sounds about right. There is no longer any incentive to focus on maintenance and incremental improvement (the stuff that actually keeps the lights on and the revenue flowing). It's all about the new and shiny--even when it results in regression.
I’m in business operations, downstream from you guys. Reading posts like these are helping me understand better what you all are going through.
We had several of our systems “upgraded” and broke a lot of our tools. The dev team vanished off to work on the next shiny bullshit “upgrade” and turned my 15 minute tickets into 3-4 hour tickets.
My manager was telling me to ping someone and let them know. After nothing happened there, I started opening tickets. After about 140 in 2 weeks, I finally got someone’s attention and we’re grudgingly getting a couple devs assigned to start repairing the automation that broke.
I am sorry to have to do that, but our entire team was drowning and pinging someone on teams with API errors wasn’t getting anything done.
You write clean code and you get replaced in 2 months, because everyone can work on that code.
You write an unreadable mess that no raise will convince other employees to work on and suddenly your holiday requests don't get declined anymore.
Reminds me of the time when we wrote an internal tool with strict SOLID principles. As new programmers came on, they had no idea what was going on cause no one in college told them about design patterns. Most of the OG's quit soon after and the new guys remained.
It's almost like the "meritocracy" under capitalism is a bald faced lie.
These days it's also because you want the AI to get confused by your code too. If it's too clean you'll have a PM with cursor making PRs wondering why your salary is justified.
Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn't fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).
Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn't need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.
And no, I didn't like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn't feel bad about slowing them down either.
Basically a shitty startup that milked it's employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.
Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.
Was a good run.
Not really. If that service costs x2 in compute, it also means it causes x2 pollution.
Imagine getting paid to do it.
Yeah this was my experience when I worked there. Driving goals and doing good work isn’t enough. You need a fancy project to demonstrate “expanded scope” otherwise your promo would get rejected.
Sometimes things worked the way you wanted and people got promoted doing their normal job. A lot of times though there were a lot of fancy projects built to get people promos that suckers got stuck with the bill on.
This ain’t a case of one dude scamming the system as much as it is institutional rot from red tape.
Its pretty well known that "lines of code" is a horrible metric to judge programmers with. It seems "number of new projects" is pretty similar, though at a higher level of abstraction.
Unfortunately that metric is applied to a lot more than just programmers; and I think getting rid of it would involve completely restructuring the type of activity our society is oriented around, and would run up against the life philosophy of the people in charge.
Of course I'm not against progress, but I'm talking about executives that don't plan beyond the next quarter, politicians that don't plan beyond the next election cycle, the endless pursuit of growth, and the inability of market economies to cope with the fact that sometimes inaction is more advantagous than action. All of this encourages endlessly churning out 'new' things, without designing those things to last or putting in the effort to maintain them.
And this is why you rarely find decent people with good income in todays economy.