He is the only person from AWS who contacted me after my account got locked for 5 days because AWS thought it was vaguely possible my account might possibly be (but wasn’t) hacked.
Any company who wants support people who care ….. give Tarus Balog a job. He seems to be ………. “Customer Obsessed”.
I think this kind of overly dramatic writing makes me struggle to respect the arguments in the piece. Like the blog writer has this style like they’re documenting the collapse of humanity or something when really it’s just a massive cloud company taking some direction that may be suboptimal. I understand this tone can be helpful to drive effective change but I think it should be reserved for situations where people are actually suffering as opposed to when extremely well paid people engineers are laid off.
He should not take it personally. Its clear it was a decision by the algo...The AI probably saw "reduced escalations" and concluded he was no longer needed.
> Not a product launch. Not a keynote. Not a revenue metric. The thing he was most proud of in four years at one of the biggest companies on …
What’s tiresome about this is that people don’t even bother to edit it. I use LLMs to draft long-form text all the time because I think the hardest part is getting something on the page to refine. But I would be embarrassed to leave LLM tells like this in the final result, if only because I want people to know that I actually cared about what I’m asking them to read and that I value their time.
It’s especially ironic here because this is about lauding a person who cut through the impersonal behavior of a large organization. Evidently this person was not worth even an editorial pass over the article though.
This piece imputes motives that I feel like is rather impossible to prove. Is it a bad look? Yes. Did it come from malicious intentions / retribution? Unlikely.
The Bureaucracy of the mundane is totalizing and is intended to put up what look like “understandable” barriers
David Graeber already covered this a decade ago
> Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It also exemplifies what I have come to think of as the defining feature of certain utopian forms of practice: that is, ones where those maintaining the system, on discovering that it will regularly produce such failures, conclude that the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved—or, indeed, of human beings in general.
You know, sometimes corporate America forgets its own principles. You know, Mr. CEO, how you don't really much care why the system went down, you just want it fixed ASAP, no excuses, just get it done?
You know what? We customers are the same way. We don't care why something broke. All we see is that it broke. We are going to take appropriate actions, and you can't stop us.
We don't care that you say it was AI. It was broken.
We don't care that you got lots of cost savings from firing the employees that actually knew what they were doing. It was broken.
We don't care why it broke. It was broken.
Enjoy the window of being able to say "but it was AI" and getting anything from it. It won't last long. We don't care. We don't care for this excuse any more than you're going to accept it from your own employees for much longer.
Yeah, I think one issue is that AI fundamentally dgaf about you and your code base. They don't have a salary on the line, and from their perspective it's not some project they super care about. I think they're happy to help, and dutiful to orders, but if the business dies in two years because of crap code that's no skin off their back.
It sounds like this employee was on a team whose goal was to build developer goodwill in open source. Of course now that AWS is piling money into the AI furnace they're cutting that team.
This article should be called "the guy who made the best sandwiches in our free staff cafeteria got laid off".
| When the people who built and operated your cloud would rather knead dough than touch a terminal again, that’s not a career pivot. That’s a trauma response.
Yes it is and I'm glad someone has said it. I didn't realize it until now.
Gosh. I am very interested in the story here. But I find that I can't engage with the text, because all my attention is going to is noticing the AI-isms. The way in which a message is delivered matters.
This is what happens to companies who dominate completely; they stop playing the game that they were winning and start playing a different game.
While the article speaks about an individual getting fired from a giant corporate behemoth, all I could think is, most people in the company probably have zero idea who that is.
Big becomes a problem in itself, and you start having to solve the problems of bigness instead of the problems you were solving that made you big.
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[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadHe is the only person from AWS who contacted me after my account got locked for 5 days because AWS thought it was vaguely possible my account might possibly be (but wasn’t) hacked.
Any company who wants support people who care ….. give Tarus Balog a job. He seems to be ………. “Customer Obsessed”.
Everyone else ….. why are you still using AWS?
> I’m not saying there’s a direct line from saving my account to getting fired...
Either way, this is a very poor look for Amazon.
What’s tiresome about this is that people don’t even bother to edit it. I use LLMs to draft long-form text all the time because I think the hardest part is getting something on the page to refine. But I would be embarrassed to leave LLM tells like this in the final result, if only because I want people to know that I actually cared about what I’m asking them to read and that I value their time.
It’s especially ironic here because this is about lauding a person who cut through the impersonal behavior of a large organization. Evidently this person was not worth even an editorial pass over the article though.
this could be a heartfelt three paragraph article and have far more emotional impact.
David Graeber already covered this a decade ago
> Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It also exemplifies what I have come to think of as the defining feature of certain utopian forms of practice: that is, ones where those maintaining the system, on discovering that it will regularly produce such failures, conclude that the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved—or, indeed, of human beings in general.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-ut...
You know what? We customers are the same way. We don't care why something broke. All we see is that it broke. We are going to take appropriate actions, and you can't stop us.
We don't care that you say it was AI. It was broken.
We don't care that you got lots of cost savings from firing the employees that actually knew what they were doing. It was broken.
We don't care why it broke. It was broken.
Enjoy the window of being able to say "but it was AI" and getting anything from it. It won't last long. We don't care. We don't care for this excuse any more than you're going to accept it from your own employees for much longer.
> he wasn’t being philosophical. He was describing the exact contradiction that made his own job impossible.
Is this written by AI? It has the typical "That's not X. That's Y." phrasing. A bit ironic given the content.
This article should be called "the guy who made the best sandwiches in our free staff cafeteria got laid off".
Yes it is and I'm glad someone has said it. I didn't realize it until now.
This construction - how is it called? It is clear "AI speak" - at least I remember Claude talking like that (even if it is code).
While the article speaks about an individual getting fired from a giant corporate behemoth, all I could think is, most people in the company probably have zero idea who that is.
Big becomes a problem in itself, and you start having to solve the problems of bigness instead of the problems you were solving that made you big.