I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I got a first hand view of their messaging and strategy.
Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a “Day 2” company now and not out in front of trends
As if the original RTO policies weren’t bad enough for instance, now they are forcing their “field by design” workers to be in the office 5 days a week when they aren’t at a customers site. These are the consultants (full time employees), sales, SAs etc who spend most of their time interacting with the customer and where you rarely have your internal teammates in your same office.
Before anyone asked why I worked there if I knew it was shitty. I worked remotely the entire time, it looked great on my resume and I like money. It definitely opened some doors
What do you mean by making money? That’s not a simple question to answer. At the end of the day, all of AWS runs on a bunch of VMs that are spun up with a certain AMI depending on what the workload is. I’m sure AWS is charging enough to make the price more than the compute costs except for services that are completely free like CloudFormation.
If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making for income, that’s how tech companies work - high fixed costs for initial development and low marginal costs that are spread across the customers.
They have started canceling projects where the cost of continued development doesn’t make a direct or indirect profit and don’t add to the ecosystem. The two I can think of most recently are CodeCommit (a very bad hosted git repository) and Cloud9 (hosted development environment).
There is a redflag here. Their CapEx is growing faster than revenue. And there is no apparent direct correlation between AWS growth, percentage wise, and CapEx surge...Using CapEx makes profits look higher today...
Did we read a different article? It seems like the claim is that it pays for itself in under 2 years.
> For AI servers and the datacenters that wrap around them, as we have shown here, for every $1 you spend for an AI cluster and its datacenter (including its power and cooling), you get 87.8 cents back every year that you rent that AI cluster out to customers, assuming a reasonable mix of on-demand and reserved instance hours and a $9.40 per GPU-hour rate. In 410 days, you get your bait back on the entire AI datacenter investment if you rent all the GPUs out. The model we created (riffing on an Nvidia model) shows that for the three years after that, the 87.8 cents per year goes right into your pocket.
Welcome to capitalism. And remember that we're the ones paying for the dog shit tacos that Amazon sells to the companies that then stuff them down our throats, whether we want them or not.
Financially liquid companies locked into feeding AWS (with their 50%-ish profit margin) should buy Nvidia/TSMC/ASML/(AMD) stock to get some of their money back?
Even if the technology of AI ends up driving a huge economic value there is no guarantee that will translate into NVIDIA stock performance. The expectation that NVIDIA will capture a lot of this value is already priced in to the stock, which is a major reason why the current price is so high.
What I can't wrap my head around is the fact NVDA almost is a representation of "AI infrastructure" in the narrative. It is weird now that everyone is saying the focus is be in inference / test time scaling compute: inference should be easier to offload to chips from other manufacturers.
Maybe I'm too dense to get it, but that doesn't make sense to me.
To everyone going for the shovel metaphor: Samuel Brannan cornered the entire shovel supply of San Francisco before running down the street shouting "Gold! Gold on the American River!". He'd have gone broke if he had just done a big capex to offer Shovels as a Service. He still died without enough money to pay for his own funeral.
With that much power, we’ll be able to reliably predict a hundred thousand years into the future of our societies and shorten the period of barbarism after the fall of the galactic empire.
Amazon requires employees to work five days a week from the office without paying them extra for it. Even if paid extra for it, it is not healthy considering the number of contagiously sick people at the office, risking a persistent inflammatory load on the body. I don't see good workers wanting to work for Amazon, and I don't see good outcomes ahead for Amazon. It will remain a non-innovating laggard that is trivially outcompeted. The only reason AWS even profits is because of its outrageous egress cost.
All of the BigTech companies are forcing RTO. Hybrid work is just as bad RTO. Either way I can’t make an above local market wage and live in a low cost of living area.
Anytime any company reaches out to me and if I ask is it fully remote and they say “no” the conversation ends. I almost ended my initial conversation with AWS in 2020 when they reached out to me about an SDE position that would require an eventual relocation until they suggested I interview a ProServe (no longer there),
I’ve since stopped conversations for a similar position at GCP once they said it would be hybrid. Not that I would ever work for a large company again unless I didn’t have a choice.
Hybrid work is just as bad if you live well outside of a commuting distance. If you live within a commuting distance, it is somewhat acceptable if it's about two days a week with a decent salary.
Good remote jobs are very difficult to get as they are very competitive, so hybrid jobs fill that void for those who can commute.
5x/wk RTO is nothing but a means of growth control and cheap layoffs.
Readit News
Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a “Day 2” company now and not out in front of trends
As if the original RTO policies weren’t bad enough for instance, now they are forcing their “field by design” workers to be in the office 5 days a week when they aren’t at a customers site. These are the consultants (full time employees), sales, SAs etc who spend most of their time interacting with the customer and where you rarely have your internal teammates in your same office.
Before anyone asked why I worked there if I knew it was shitty. I worked remotely the entire time, it looked great on my resume and I like money. It definitely opened some doors
That means no open source work worrying about my GitHub profile, no BS “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn. Nothing.
When I get off of work, I shut my computer down and live my life - exercising, travel, spending time with friends and family, etc.
If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making for income, that’s how tech companies work - high fixed costs for initial development and low marginal costs that are spread across the customers.
They have started canceling projects where the cost of continued development doesn’t make a direct or indirect profit and don’t add to the ecosystem. The two I can think of most recently are CodeCommit (a very bad hosted git repository) and Cloud9 (hosted development environment).
If there is a ton of demand for shovels it seems fine to make more shovel factories?
> For AI servers and the datacenters that wrap around them, as we have shown here, for every $1 you spend for an AI cluster and its datacenter (including its power and cooling), you get 87.8 cents back every year that you rent that AI cluster out to customers, assuming a reasonable mix of on-demand and reserved instance hours and a $9.40 per GPU-hour rate. In 410 days, you get your bait back on the entire AI datacenter investment if you rent all the GPUs out. The model we created (riffing on an Nvidia model) shows that for the three years after that, the 87.8 cents per year goes right into your pocket.
Totally not a bubble.
Maybe I'm too dense to get it, but that doesn't make sense to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
Anytime any company reaches out to me and if I ask is it fully remote and they say “no” the conversation ends. I almost ended my initial conversation with AWS in 2020 when they reached out to me about an SDE position that would require an eventual relocation until they suggested I interview a ProServe (no longer there),
I’ve since stopped conversations for a similar position at GCP once they said it would be hybrid. Not that I would ever work for a large company again unless I didn’t have a choice.
Good remote jobs are very difficult to get as they are very competitive, so hybrid jobs fill that void for those who can commute.
5x/wk RTO is nothing but a means of growth control and cheap layoffs.
OVH, Hetzner, Cloudflare, Vultr, Linode, Scaleway, Equinix (ok Equinix this can be pricey at lower levels)
A million other regional VPS providers, Colocation Hosts, etc ?