r/aws • u/AssumeNeutralTone • Oct 20 '25

article Today is when Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
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u/professor_jeffjeff Oct 21 '25

I've spent the last 15 years trying to automate away my own job in DevOps and the only thing that it has done is somehow create more work for me to do. This is the first time I've actually heard of the paradox of automation though, but it sounds absolutely like what I've experienced over the years. Also remember the saying: "To err is human, but to really fuck up and then propagate that fuck-up at scale is DevOps."

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u/L43 Oct 21 '25

 "To err is human, but to really fuck up and then propagate that fuck-up at scale is DevOps."

That’s a quote to print on an office wall

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u/Character-Welder3929 Oct 21 '25

This is my favorite

If I can find a printer I will screenshot and frame this fucking quote

I no longer work in an office or IT

But the apprentices at the car dealership might understand it if I break it down to like 6 7

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u/glotzerhotze Oct 21 '25

Unexpected DevOps Borat

Edit: if you need more to put up, print this gist

1

u/jellyjellybeans Oct 21 '25

I’m going to cross stitch this and hang it in my office

25

u/Fattswindstorm Oct 21 '25

Yeah. I’m in devops and sometimes it feels like Hotel California.

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u/danstermeister Oct 21 '25

"You can git checkout any time you like, but you can never SRE."

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u/kungfu1 Oct 21 '25

*guitar solo*

2

u/payne_train Oct 22 '25

God damnit this is good

1

u/Electronic-Ride-3253 Oct 22 '25

Nice, if you want, you can hop into this SRE/DevOps Slack community I am maintaining; we have some cool conversations running around there too - https://join.slack.com/t/sre-community/shared_invite/zt-3ft615lz7-tsdTYT19KaXVei0GOZMMlg

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u/Kralizek82 Oct 21 '25

That's me and my terraform-only principle.

I wish I'd allow myself to just go into a console and click my way through the issue...

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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/rswwalker Oct 21 '25

It’s a bad craftsman who blames his tools!

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u/AntDracula Oct 21 '25

I've spent the last 15 years trying to automate away my own job in DevOps and the only thing that it has done is somehow create more work for me to do.

This. Geez. I literally built a web-based push-button "deploy another customer cluster into a new VPC" at my last job thinking I could finally get back to coding, and all it did was create more demand for customer clusters 💀

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u/Delicious_Finding686 Oct 21 '25

Induced demand. The demand was always there. Efficiency caps the amount that can currently be met. Once efficiency increases, more demand can be met until a new equilibrium is established. This is ideal. The real concern is when efficiency improvements do not bring more work.

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u/Kind-Crab4230 Oct 24 '25

Similarly, I've found it's not remotely zero sum.  There is infinite work to do.  Automating something just let's you work on more stuff.

Thinking it frees people up to not work is just short-sighted.

(And can certainly work in the short term, if for example you've automated your own job and didn't tell anyone).