Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps Workers with AI Days Before Crash
80.lvHere's a link to the original report: https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops...
> But by the afternoon, nearly 40% of AWS’s DevOps employees were cut in a single internal strike.
> An email memo, which was briefly posted on the internal wiki before being taken down, blamed the cuts on strategic automation initiatives.
I’m an AWS engineer and I haven’t seen any evidence of engineering layoffs within AWS since early this year. As others have suggested we generally don’t have ”DevOps Workers” either. There’s definitely a push for AI tools, but there’s no indication that it was related to any off this from what I’ve seen.
"Amazon's AWS cloud computing unit cuts at least hundreds of jobs, sources say" - https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-aws...
Yes, but that wasn’t engineers.
The story has no direct sources at all, you wouldn't be able to hide a layoff like this .
It's also very opportunistic, you're telling me you were sitting on this story and you decided to release it right after AWS had issues ?
> The story has no direct sources at all, you wouldn't be able to hide a layoff like this .
Exactly. The blog post reeks of bullshit from many angles, not only how AWS does not have "DevOps" roles but also how Amazon and AWS are completely different companies, teams, organizations, everything.
Here's how they sign off their post:
> And do you believe that Amazon cut 40% of its DevOps jobs? Join our (...) Discord server, follow us (...)
It smells of bullshit through and through.
40% from a team of.... 10? 100? 1000? 10,000?
my guess is 4 out of 10, which would make it a single sub team rather than "all devops roles in aws". would love to see something more official.
Does Amazon even have DevOps?
When the product is infrastructure aren’t they just called infrastructure engineers?
> Now, there is a lot of skepticism around this article, and you should take it with a huge grain of salt, but the timing is curious, although we do not claim it is true or is somehow connected to the systems' crash.
Good advice.
I wouldn’t be surprised by a causal relationship. Most people planning layoffs don’t actually know what the laid off people do. When Fisker laid everyone off, their OTA updates went down hard. Had they taken a day to perform a safe shutdown they would have saved months of recovery work. Management likes to lay off with no warning, but for professional infrastructure people that causes more harm than good. Every pro I know will faithfully wrap up the work because they have professional pride.
Layoffs cause loss of institutional knowledge. Minor irritation can balloon into a major outage simply because the person who can fix it easily left the building for the last time.
us-east-1 is the OG region. It has had significant dns problems before. There’s probably a subtle and complicated series of steps for general care and feeding.
Good journalism would identify the process, the owner, cross reference with the layoff list… any of the laid off people would be able to supply those details off the record.
this just gets traction because it just seems too perfect?
It turns out that anyone who wants to can just go on the Internet and spout bollocks. I like how there isn’t even a byline here, just “editorial staff.” Because who’d sign their name to this kind of tomfoolery?
I seem to recall someone signing a name to the idea that the event was so bad because the smart engineers had left AWS, so my own expectations about the amount of bollocks I'm going to read about it have risen
I think there’s a meaningful difference between “a ton of organizational knowledge has departed over the past few years” and “they let people go last week so now their site fell over.”
And I object strongly to the mischaracterization of my point as “the smart engineers left.” It’s unfair to the incredibly talented folks that work at AWS to cast the tenured folks as being any more or less skilled—it’s just that they definitively have more experience with the environment.
If you're in the mood to object to mischaracterization, maybe the best thing would have been to object to your piece being published with a headline including the phrase "brain drain" and a subheadline involving the phrase "When your best engineers log off for good". Whatever you may have meant I do not have a publicly appropriate adjective for how this from somebody prominent felt to see while eating lunch with the other "incredibly talented folks" in the light haze of foundational services event-recovery sleep deprivation.