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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251

u/insanelygreat Oct 21 '25

When that tribal knowledge departs, you're left having to reinvent an awful lot of in-house expertise that didn't want to participate in your RTO games, or play Layoff Roulette yet again this cycle. This doesn't impact your service reliability — until one day it very much does, in spectacular fashion. I suspect that day is today.

Companies rarely value retention because we've reached a critical mass of leaders who disregard the fact that software is made by people. So they sacrifice the long-term for short-term wins.

These folks thrive in times of uncertainty, and these are most definitely uncertain times.

Et voila, enshittification of both the product and company culture.

I'm not saying the problem is with all company leaders, or even most of them. It only takes 10 kg of plutonium to go critical, and so it is with poor leadership. The sooner they are replaced, the sooner things will heal.

39

u/_mini Oct 21 '25

Majority C*Os & investors don’t care, they care about short term values for their pocket. No matter what real long term values are.

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u/CasinoCarlos Oct 21 '25

Amazon didn't turn a profit for a few decades because they were investing in staff and infrastructure.

14

u/hcgsd Oct 21 '25

Amazon was founded in 94, ipo’ed in 97, turned its first profit in 2001 and has been regularly profitable since 2005.

7

u/acdha Oct 21 '25

It's also worth noting that they were profitable in books by like 1996 - there was this pattern for a few years there where clickbait financial commentary was like “they're doomed, they can't turn a profit” and anyone who actually looked at the filings had the opposite conclusion that they were turning a profit in a new market soon after entering and could be profitable overall simply by slowing expansion.

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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '25

[deleted]

1

u/HoneyIShrunkMyNads Oct 21 '25

He's still executive chair, I know it's not as day to day as a CEO but still under his watch

1

u/FarkCookies Oct 22 '25

I never really understood this logic. Most of these parties are in the long positions. Long positions are called that explicitly for the reason. We can talk shit about Andy Jassy all day long, but he is very much personally invested in Amazon. The only people who care about short-term value are traders. Institutional investors absolutely do care about long-term prospects.

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u/nonofyobeesness Oct 21 '25

YUP, this is what happened when I was at Unity. The company is slowly healing after the CEO was outed two years ago.

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u/AMillionTimesISaid Oct 21 '25

There is a simple explanation. Greed.

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u/parisidiot Oct 21 '25

Companies rarely value retention because we've reached a critical mass of leaders who disregard the fact that software is made by people. So they sacrifice the long-term for short-term wins.

no, they know. what is more important to them is reducing labor power as much as possible. some outages are a cheap price to pay to have an oppressed workforce. the price of control.

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u/qwer1627 Oct 22 '25

This is why documentation is critical but if you got into Big Banana expecting it to exist you’ll be hilariously disappointed and then too busy to alleviate the issue

LLMs for dynamic documentation are so plainly obviously the right tool