Their turnover is high though, a hiring freeze will reduce their staff by a lot (compared to other companies). Or is it one of those hiring freezes where they still hire replacements?

Maybe reducing their staff by a lot is the point.

i live in DC and their HQ2 in arlington VA dominates my linkedin suggested roles. they still have hundreds or even thousands of unfilled roles. i remember hearing originally they were hiring like 5000 engineers across both HQs.

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

Could also be a way of making managers take mentoring and development more seriously. Va current rank and yank/pipping

That is not true. AWS has a ton of churn

And that churn is by design. I wonder if they plan to freeze stack ranking, too.

I do wonder if a cloud bubble is actually popping.

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.

When I read these type of comments, I wonder if OP is living in some kind of bubble. Large corporations spent billions over the last years migrating to the cloud. You can't simply 'undo' that. All fine and dandy for small orgs, but they aren't the ones AWS makes most its money with.

Cloud requires growth. All of the massive capital investments require more and more growth to be sustainable.

Even a small shift in the demand curve is very expensive for them. The response is to cut costs and raise prices.

I would guess companies spending billions migrating to clouds has probably peaked, and that would also be part of an argument for cloud bubble bursting.

So you foresee the collapse of swaths of large corporations? Or what happens when this bubble bursts

It does make me think about networking companies and dot.com. Fiber and networking gear considered themselves “real” businesses versus those “web” companies that imploded. Of course, all that IPO money had been buying their hardware and there was a echo crash and a decade of dark fiber.

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.

The issue is that AWS has double exposure. Startups and B2B company's selling to startups (e.g. datadog).

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...

Popping? Not for AWS. Still posting robust double digit growth YOY. Most of the cloud abstraction services out there rely heavily upon AWS.

Not a bubble in terms of cloud adoption but a lot of customers reduced their cloud bill. What happened was that many companies didn't invest time and effort in being more efficient in how they use the cloud and suddenly when money is tight everyone realizes they can save a lot of money by being more responsible. For example, don't use the most expensive GPU instance when training your ML model. Kill the instance once you don't need it. Train smaller models. Etc.

You realize Heroku runs on AWS right?

And no, most organizations are not using K8s and never will.

Docker is not a magic bullet.

> 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.

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, well the OCI and their specs, isn’t magic but it is absolutely the magna carta of application packaging, distribution, and deployment.

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.

You don’t work with the large enterprises that I work with everyday. Let’s not pretend that K8s doesn’t bring its own set of complications. Not to mention enterprises that have 500+ servers, some running Windows, some running COTS, etc.

Much of the time it is easier just to spend up a VM and install whatever you need.

Ahh government work. Can always tell because y’all don’t call them appliances. But I mean idk, I kinda do. The largest place I ops’d for had two 40 rack floors with some misc stuff here and there. Don’t remember at all how many of individual servers that meant once you accounted for KVMs, SANs, UPS, and networking but it was a lot.

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.

> Ahh government work. Can always tell because y’all do

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]

Ahh government work! Look I’m just poking fun at the fact that people who call them COTS are either government or sell to government, it’s not a pejorative.

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.

You have to talk the talk to show them that you’re one of them. I can go from a decent midwestern neutral accent to my natural southern drawl depending on which state I’m working with too :)

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.

Kubernetes and Dockers aren’t coupled anymore…

Like it or not, Docker is the Kleenex of containers.

Last employer is banking. They have a multi year investment in moving various workloads, from VM compute to lambda to container, into multi region, multi cloud environments. Dozens of dev, sec, and ops people working together to make provisioning seamless and safe, code deploys done through CI.

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.

Meanwhile, I have recruiting emails for AWS with the following dates:

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).

They've really lowered themselves by resorting to embarrassing tactics. I was getting emails with subject lines only about dogs, and demands to give a yes/no response... it's weird the little games people pull.

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 be perfectly honest, I've never heard anything other than horror stories about working at Amazon, so I wouldn't ever consider working there unless I was in a really bad place with no other way to pay my bills.

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.

I literally got an email yesterday from Amazon recruiters with the subject line "Tired of recruiters who never give up?"

I hope you responded to that one!

I had one pretending to be an email confirming a package delivery from Amazon.

So it had absolutely no information about the job in the email, you had to click a link and wait for a page to load just to find out if it was an SWE or warehouse role?

I know this is sarcasm about the usability of Amazon's notification emails but the "job" email managed to get past my email filters/categorization and jumped into my "Orders" section. A company using a dark pattern to try and get eyes on their job posting. What trash.

I couldn't find an article, but a cursory search did pull up this: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/10/24/solus-dan-greenhaus-we...

CNBC points to a New York Post article[1]:

> 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...

Perhaps a freeze because they churned through all the qualified talent and now they need to figure out what to do haha.

When the retail part of the Amazon froze corporate hiring, that was a real freeze - open (previously approved but unfilled) positions were closed/advertising pulled.

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.

All HN users who are any good at coding should refuse to do non onsite interviews with AWS (and tiktok). Doing this is the only way to stop them from mass spamming us.

This actually works btw. I've had several on-sites with AWS with no phone screen. The perks of a strong profile I guess!

Thank god. Maybe I'll finally stop getting recruitment spam from them.

They have no one to hire anymore, so I guess you can call that a "freeze" :D

I don't think I understand all of this, was contacted by AWS recruiter yesterday, with info that their hiring process was reduced significantly and with relocation package as part of offer...

Was going to say… just got a recruiter email from them on Friday.

Makes me feel less bad about failing the interview I guess

From what I've read on here, you're not missing out on anything great anyway. The money is good, that's about it.

Ya, I don't feel like I'm missing out on too much there. After taxes it wouldn't be life changing coin anyway in my country.

Amazon has the best inner-company relocation policy IMO. Basically, if another manager accepts you on their team, nobody in Amazon can block your move.

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.

Call me old fashioned but if the only benefit of working for a company is their relocation policy I'd rather just get a job I like and pay for myself to relocate if that's what I want to do.

Agreed

Tries for days

I guess I didn't trie hard enough

Good, maybe their annoying recruiters will stop sending me emails.

Previous freeze was only in retail, not across Amazon

No chance

I see many people are happy to work in Amazon or AWS....is it accurate for majority of Amazonians?

Aren’t both notoriously horrible employers? I’ve heard almost nothing but bad things unless you’re very senior.

Standard internet negative bias.

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.