Honestly probably got the project to more maintainable state. Probably didn’t need the rewrite to do it in a new lang to do it (the real killer hear it sounds like).
Those monoliths suck on the operations side, and even worse when it’s a corpse holding up the foundation to other projects that actually need it to change. Need to scale? good luck that decades old pizza box we call a server isn’t supported anymore. Oh of course we can spend millions virtualizing dead hardware to keep it running the same.
I say this is only ok because he did that in amazon. Fuck amazon
If ge did that in a medium-or-less sized company that would be a really shitty move.
In a small company noone would try to label you “l5” or “l6” and probably an actual human would make your comp decision. You take the byzantine incentive structure away and people just try to do a good job.
somebody please hack into amazon’s services so that they can tell amazon shoppers the truth about jeff bezos. seriously!
Flawless victory.
The one thing which COULD justify it, is technical debt. A programming language not supported anymore or in short-term/mid-term, bus factor, too much knowledge transfer, etc. But yeah, lots of times it’s “business as usual” just for “progress” and fancy buzzwords.
Golang is technical debt in language form. A language that gained limited and now sagging popularity, for good reason. I hate to work in Java but hate golang more. It’s the lightsaber of programming languages. I’ve got shit to do give me blasters and all the rest and I don’t want to wank myelf off about how I did it all with channels.
Java is still supported… Or did I miss the memo?
What’s Java???
I apologize for bashing Java so hard in the past. I wish everyone wrote everything in Java these days. Digital life would be so much better.
You owe royalties
Yeah, Oracle licencing has really taken the shine off Java and relegated it to the legacy dust bin.
The whole thing is pegging my BS meter, including letting an L5 deploy without a code and architecture review, TC, and the fact that they’re posting this and claiming they’re still there.
I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.
I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.
In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.
I’ve got a few friends who work at Amazon, and while the story certainly sounds embellished and a bit too “just-so”, the corporate attitude of make-work to justify a promotion even when its a waste of time and resources rings true as a bell.
Did this guy actually oversee a fully transition to a new service and waste a bunch of internal time and money for a system that’s sub-optimal by any conceivable measure? Idk, maybe. If he’d just written “Twitter” instead of “Amazon”, I’d have taken it at face value no problem.
Did this guy author an overly-complex plan as part of his promotional material, get it vetted and reviewed and rubber stamped by a bunch of friendly higher-ups because they wanted to justify his promotion, and then stuck on a shelf marked “Maybe we’ll do this in 2029 if we’re not busy with something else”? Equally likely.
Does Amazon have a bunch of bread and butter break-fix work they could be dedicating staff to, rather than chasing the next digital White Whale so they can feel cutting edge? Yeah, no shit. Absolutely.
I believe it. I don’t work at Amazon, but I’ve seen proudly launched pieces of shiny crap support promotions at other companies.
I can’t speak to this situation, but broadly speaking I am familiar with general messed up stuff like this as well as perhaps adjusting some fine details to make the scenario relatable to an audience unfamiliar with the specifics of the real situation and/or obfuscating the details so that the person doesn’t out themselves to someone else familiar with the specifics enough to recognize.
The broad strokes seem plausible and any oddities in details I consider to be less important and/or understandable if it was tweaked for an internet audience.
I fought for getting a 4/5 rating at an old job and gave lots of examples. Their argument was that I didn’t deserve it because those were just expected. I pointed out my work compared to others in my team and was told that it compares across the company, not the team. I kept causing a fuss about it because I was so angry about it and finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less. I was confused because I didn’t want more money, I was just offended they said I was performing on average when I was going above and beyond every day. It was also really embarrassing to me. If they’d just said the rating doesn’t affect anything except your bonus I wouldn’t have even cared.
The whole thing is all BS.
At one job, my manager had a spreadsheet that he was tapping away at during my review. He had the audacity to tell me that he had to downgrade some things so that he wouldn’t have to go to a committee to defend at the individual or group level.
I transferred to a different product.
You will soon become just as jaded as the rest of us, and stop expecting your company to appreciate you. It wont feel good but you can change jobs often and get your salary up without any feelings of illusional loyalty.
finally my manager said something about the bonuses has already been communicated and people would be angry to get less
That’s because they have a fixed budget and the proportions are tied to evaluated performance tiers, increasing your rating would contractually require them to compensate you more from the same pool of money
You’re falling for the “we’ve constructed this machine to tell you no so you can’t argue with us” ploy
No, as I said to another, upper management has every opportunity to fix the budget. Your direct manager however can not
Nah, that’s bogus. It’s a private company, they can do what they want. They could have absolutely given OP the 5/5 rating, and just had them sign something saying that they were content with the bonus appropriate to a 4/5 rating. No one would have had to receive a penny less.
It’s very annoying to have managers say their hands are tied when they very well could go to bat for you with their superiors. I was lucky to have one manager really push for me in the past like that. It’s rare.
That fixed budget is what they always say. The budget for the company is their problem, not yours.
Upper management can certainly increase the budget. Your line manager probably can’t
Yeah exactly. So it keeps everyone in their place, powerless to change anything within the structure that exist. Exactly as intended.
Yeah, no shit, thank you for repeating what I said. The point being I never cared about the money and didn’t even understand it was only about the money. I only wanted recognition.
I don’t work at Amazon, but we have a similar system. I’ve gone all-in on a couple of subordinates saying they deserved a 4/5 for this or that work. And because they were new-hires, I eventually got the grades punched through after a bunch of hemming and hawing.
Also advocated for my own higher-than-average marks on a few occasions. And just arguing the case gave me the grade as often as not. If everyone in the department had been as stubborn and insistent, I don’t know that they’d have given the whole floor these grades. But the squeaky wheel…
Haha, the same. Was doing great, supported customer calls, onboarding new engineers, along with ongoing incoming tickets and got 3/5, wrote a few good and a dozen bad RFCs.
Then the manager had the audacity to ask why I am changing the company with a 40% raise. I could’ve asked for promotion, he said.
Sounds about right. There is no longer any incentive to focus on maintenance and incremental improvement (the stuff that actually keeps the lights on and the revenue flowing). It’s all about the new and shiny–even when it results in regression.
Which is why AI and vibe coding will survive. Besides the part where it’s not my code, the company owns it. The fuck do I care how good it is. If it works and gets me a promoted or moved to a new spot in a different company. Heck yeah. Issues down the road are not my problem.
Personal project: page load takes under 10kB and any button or link loads in millisecond.
Work project: Fuck it 26MB page load. It’s not like the pages load in under 5s before anyway.
The personal project is a matter of personal pride, whereas for work, any old thing will do, as long as it meets the requirements.
Yeah this was my experience when I worked there. Driving goals and doing good work isn’t enough. You need a fancy project to demonstrate “expanded scope” otherwise your promo would get rejected.
Sometimes things worked the way you wanted and people got promoted doing their normal job. A lot of times though there were a lot of fancy projects built to get people promos that suckers got stuck with the bill on.
This ain’t a case of one dude scamming the system as much as it is institutional rot from red tape.
Its pretty well known that “lines of code” is a horrible metric to judge programmers with. It seems “number of new projects” is pretty similar, though at a higher level of abstraction.
Unfortunately that metric is applied to a lot more than just programmers; and I think getting rid of it would involve completely restructuring the type of activity our society is oriented around, and would run up against the life philosophy of the people in charge.
Of course I’m not against progress, but I’m talking about executives that don’t plan beyond the next quarter, politicians that don’t plan beyond the next election cycle, the endless pursuit of growth, and the inability of market economies to cope with the fact that sometimes inaction is more advantagous than action. All of this encourages endlessly churning out ‘new’ things, without designing those things to last or putting in the effort to maintain them.
You write clean code and you get replaced in 2 months, because everyone can work on that code.
You write an unreadable mess that no raise will convince other employees to work on and suddenly your holiday requests don’t get declined anymore.
Reminds me of the time when we wrote an internal tool with strict SOLID principles. As new programmers came on, they had no idea what was going on cause no one in college told them about design patterns. Most of the OG’s quit soon after and the new guys remained.
It’s almost like the “meritocracy” under capitalism is a bald faced lie.
These days it’s also because you want the AI to get confused by your code too. If it’s too clean you’ll have a PM with cursor making PRs wondering why your salary is justified.
Or you get fired because everyone else says your code is an unreadable mess.
In my experience… nope. Never seen it happen. Even when there are clear coding guidelines, and stacks of code smell violations.
If the code actually works and is vaguely important, I think you are right.
If anyone ever has to fix it because it’s also broken on top of being a mess, well they aren’t quite so safe. Maybe if you are always available to fix it same day, but if you ever go on vacation and it hits the fan while you are unreachable…
In my experience, nope. Assuming it works as promised, the situation (usually) gets viewed as a skill gap. You think their code is bad, because you don’t understand it well enough. Unless you are personally willing to redevelop it, of course.
Depends on the company. You wouldn’t last very long at mine putting out garbage.
Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn’t fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).
Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn’t need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.
And no, I didn’t like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn’t feel bad about slowing them down either.
Basically a shitty startup that milked it’s employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.
Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.
Was a good run.
Not really. If that service costs x2 in compute, it also means it causes x2 pollution.
Imagine getting paid to do it.
[ In lieu of a comment, please see “Bullshit Jobs”, by David Graeber, which is incorporated here by reference. ]
Something I find cool about this book is that it’s so well known that people who haven’t even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how “enshittification” caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they’d been experiencing.
It’s a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they’d had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they’d struggled to find anything that wasn’t soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.
They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say “all of this is basically just saying you don’t care what job you have, as long as it’s a non-bullshit job”. They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes
IMO if your survival depends on doing a ‘job’ (especially if you’re employed by someone else), then it’s better to look for fulfilment in your personal life and realize the job is a means to survive and hopefully also fund what you really want to do for yourself and your loved ones.
Work to live, not live to work.
You get the behavior your incentives encourage, whether you realize what those behaviors are or not.
And this is why you rarely find decent people with good income in todays economy.
