Amazon reportedly freezing AWS hiring
CNBC reporting that Amazon made the announcement after market close. In the past they had announced freezes across Amazon except AWS.
So far I can't find an article or official announcement, but CNBC is reporting it and that seems to be why the stock price has been dropping post close.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread> Amazon has frozen hiring in parts of its lucrative web services division — an apparent escalation of the company’s cost-cutting efforts, The Post has learned.
> Amazon Web Services — the highly profitable division that brought in more than $62 billion in revenue in 2021 — has started telling some job candidates that roles they were seeking have been frozen, according to prospective candidates.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2022/10/24/amazon-freezes-hiring-in-parts...
surprising that they would straight up freeze hiring, unless this is maybe just freezing of junior roles or something. I want to see more details about this
People use this all the time to look for teams with very easy or non existent on call and relocate super easily to places they want to live in, including Europe.
For small orgs you have Heroku, etc. Having a dumb place to run code or turn on a service is really valuable. Especially when it comes with an SLA and support.
Above a certain level you probably adopt k8s for different components, and just want to treat your cloud as a commodity. Then you realize, like base camp has, any kind of compute - even static servers you own - also does the trick and can also run k8s.
And no, most organizations are not using K8s and never will.
Docker is not a magic bullet.
Yes, he does. He's saying that when you grow to a point, you might want to seek just dumb commodity compute -- even including servers you own.
Docker commoditized “platforms” and k8s is on its way to do the same to “cloud.”
And it’s a good thing, as someone who is very on-prem oriented. I now have a set of APIs and specs that let me present “here’s your full self service cloud devs, enjoy.” And all the tooling works.
Much of the time it is easier just to spend up a VM and install whatever you need.
I mean yeah we had a huge Hyper-V cluster for the Windows IT folks, bunch of random appliances bought over the years, but then for our software stack we ran a big-ole RHV cluster (look, we had a sweetheart deal from RH gave us everything) spent a lot of time getting k8s hooked up to everything (open stack we decided wasn’t worth the squeeze) and devs were v happy, no more tickets! All the backing infrastructure was vm based but we managed it and the devs got to care no percent.
Uhh I work in the Professional Services department of a little cloud provider based out of Seattle you might have heard of…
Sure I’ll work on a project porting to EKS (managed Kubernetes) if they are already familiar with it. But rarely will I suggest introducing the complexity of it unnecessarily.
I’ve worked with governments, colleges, F500s, startups, and everything in between.
I mostly focus on green field app dev. But I know my way around “DevOps” [sic]
Not doubting your expertise at all, I’ve worked at shops that are entirely vm based, I just think that when it comes to making dev teams happy in an on-prem world giving them a k8s cluster has so far never not been a good decision. I can hide so many of the ugly realities of running a production service.
And besides, even when I worked in the real world as your bog standard Senior enterprise dev, I got to the point where I wouldn’t work at any company that had on prem architecture.
My main reason for going to the cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.
AWS may have a significant customer base of VC funded startups which may be scaling back their spending rapidly; coupled with larger customers migrating to on premise it could eat away at both ends of their market share.
However, AWS will be fine. Their growth rate is what 30% YoY. I highly doubt the reduction in spend to comprise 30%+ of their revenue base.
AWS Growth rate over time. Note while growth rate declines, the amount of revenue added each quarter increased. (Percentages are easier to grow when you have a small base) https://www.statista.com/statistics/422273/yoy-quarterly-gro...
Even a small shift in the demand curve is very expensive for them. The response is to cut costs and raise prices.
When you make that kind of decision, going back or altering course is a similar multi year decision. Going cloud native at a cost of tens of millions in billing and labor specialty means you have lost or reprovisioned other specialties, haven’t renewed on premise equipment, and so on.
These companies are like supertankers, not racing yachts. Take a long time to alter course.
Oct 17 Oct 14 Oct 12 Sept 26 Aug 24 Aug 15
Each one is from a different "person" (probably the same automated software, of course).
I ran into a homeless guy, hands full of pennies, and low value change. He's saying "please, I just want money for a hamburger". I'm wondering, how is holding fistfuls of change gonna help. I do get the psychology, but that's a weird strategy; yet part of me think it must be effective for him to try it.
To hedge against that scenario, I used to do the standard quick, polite response. Not anymore. All that got me was even more spam, and even more annoying spam, to boot. Sometimes identical messages, and sometimes messages about how they're trying "one last time" since I obviously must have missed the first N attempts... hilariously, I did't get those kinds of messages any of the times I actually didn't respond!
Not only am I almost certainly talking to automated software, but exceptionally low quality software at that! Now I'm thinking even if I do ever become desperate I'd be better off living in a van for a while than working at a place like this.
Compared to people who are unhappy, people who have good experience post about it at a much, much, much lower rate.
Its the same for product reviews. There are a lot of products with mediocre reviews because people who actually bother to write a review most often have complaints.
Statistically speaking, if you look at the total number of Amazon SDEs, and consider the fact that Amazon still makes a shitload of money in all their sectors, that means that majority of the people have no issues working there. If it was across the board bad, people would go to other places, which would directly results in declining profits and growth of competitors.
This isn't that. This is just AWS finally meeting hiring targets (i.e. filling open, approved headcount) in some parts of the business and not continuing to hire beyond them. Other parts of AWS are still hiring. Backfills for attrition are still a thing, etc.
What this really says is that the job market and/or the aggregate risk tolerance of job seekers (e.g. betting on a startup) has cooled.
This actually works btw. I've had several on-sites with AWS with no phone screen. The perks of a strong profile I guess!