I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I got a first hand view of their messaging and strategy.
Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a “Day 2” company now and not out in front of trends
As if the original RTO policies weren’t bad enough for instance, now they are forcing their “field by design” workers to be in the office 5 days a week when they aren’t at a customers site. These are the consultants (full time employees), sales, SAs etc who spend most of their time interacting with the customer and where you rarely have your internal teammates in your same office.
Before anyone asked why I worked there if I knew it was shitty. I worked remotely the entire time, it looked great on my resume and I like money. It definitely opened some doors
That's a wonderful attitude. I'm the same. The stuff that's on my GitHub is there for me, I needed it and/or I wanted to contribute to it. It's not for visibility.
But with that I do feel that I've had a couple of jobs slip through the cracks. Not enough exposure.
The truth about not doing open source work and a personal GitHub profile is kind of lie.
The department I worked for at AWS had a very easy to use open source approval process to open source work we did from scratch for a client as long as it didn’t have client information we could put it here after approval.
I was able to legally/ethically fork all of the work I submitted (MIT Licensed) to my own profile after I left. But, no one cared or even looked at my open source profile.
However, I was also a major contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” that was big in its niche.
What do you mean by making money? That’s not a simple question to answer. At the end of the day, all of AWS runs on a bunch of VMs that are spun up with a certain AMI depending on what the workload is. I’m sure AWS is charging enough to make the price more than the compute costs except for services that are completely free like CloudFormation.
If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making for income, that’s how tech companies work - high fixed costs for initial development and low marginal costs that are spread across the customers.
They have started canceling projects where the cost of continued development doesn’t make a direct or indirect profit and don’t add to the ecosystem. The two I can think of most recently are CodeCommit (a very bad hosted git repository) and Cloud9 (hosted development environment).
I mean it’s literally one command to retarget the remote url of your git repository and Cloud9 was just a remote hosted VSCode with some AWS extensions you can get locally
Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a “Day 2” company now and not out in front of trends
As if the original RTO policies weren’t bad enough for instance, now they are forcing their “field by design” workers to be in the office 5 days a week when they aren’t at a customers site. These are the consultants (full time employees), sales, SAs etc who spend most of their time interacting with the customer and where you rarely have your internal teammates in your same office.
Before anyone asked why I worked there if I knew it was shitty. I worked remotely the entire time, it looked great on my resume and I like money. It definitely opened some doors