AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn

https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-fired-the-human-who-made-the-difference/

by berlianta • 2 months ago

196 106 2 months ago

ablation• 2 months ago

A challenging writing style on a really difficult to read page with a sloppy AI header image means that this article was a not a great experience.

gchamonlive• 2 months ago

Just use browser's reader mode already or skip to the next article.

agmater• 2 months ago

It's like reading an article that drops in "moist" in every sentence, I'm literally uncomfortable trying to read this

arkon_hn• 2 months ago

Extremely difficult to read when it's completely broken in Firefox (Focus at least).

shiandow• 2 months ago

Reader mode seems to salvage most of it. Though I will never understand why people mess with basic operations like scrolling.

threatofrain• 2 months ago

Just have Claude digest it, that's the future we're heading toward. But what is after that?

KolmogorovComp2• 2 months ago

Yeah, unbearable AI-writing at a level not seen often, it's like the author purposely asked it to be even more bloated than usual.

Nevermark• 2 months ago

with a sloppy AI header image

Remember the good old days with real honest CGI?

At some point AI is going to produce realistic situationally-sensible images, with creative restraint. That will unleash another wave of disruption and dissonance.

It throws a different spin on the phrase "living in a simulation".

almostdeadguy• 2 months ago

Linguists centuries from now are going to wonder why everyone suddenly started writing like Paul Graham.

Boxxed• 2 months ago

The massive AI generated image header is more than a little bit ironic

relativeadv• 2 months ago

The obviously ai generated dramatic prose. The entire site has the veneer of AI generation as well. The gradient background, the glowing header text, the monospaced fonts, the dots next to the footer subnav items that serve no purpose. If i were writing a blog today i would take comfort knowing it has never been easier to stand out by simply being yourself.

notpushkin• 2 months ago

The “Question? Answer.” format seems way overused, too. I don’t usually comment on “LLMiness” of blog posts, but here it seems to somewhat devalue the point the author is trying to make.

It is, indeed, heartbreaking to learn that the one person in a giant corporation that cared about your problem enough to pull some strings and fix it gets laid off. But if you truly care about them, why don’t you try and write about it yourself, in your own voice?

andrewstuart2• 2 months ago

That name looks familiar.

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”.

Everyone else ….. why are you still using AWS?

haburka• 2 months ago

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.

bakugo• 2 months ago

Like the blog writer has this style

You mean Claude has this style.

eoskx2• 2 months ago

Claude's style is now overuse of sentence fragments, which this "article" has in spades. Fragments are the new emdash or "delve".

SV_BubbleTime• 2 months ago

I’ll miss when em dashes were a key giveaway. This generation of LLM has one sure fire tell.

We’ll look back on 2026 AIs fondly.

klodolph• 2 months ago

Beautiful, lovely sentence fragments. Last I heard, I was on the HN em dash leaderboard, and now sentence fragments?

pfdietz• 2 months ago

And here's the thing

catigula• 2 months ago

Claude is a bit of a drama queen.

hilariously2• 2 months ago

If I scroll down and you do animations to the text I am out instantly.

sam1r• 2 months ago

Any business with an aws account should by default pretend like that world revolves them and their company.

Because if aws tanks, they will likely tank.

I pardon the drama. If you were in those shoes and the costs being spent for operating business costs- wouldn’t you be freaking the heck out?

mooreds• 2 months ago

I get that the writing was a bit over the top.

But the story, my goodness. Giving a damn is such a rare commodity. It makes me sad when companies throw away people with that quality.

I hope that Tarus Balog finds a good spot to land. Here's his LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarusbalog/ if you're in the market for an "Open source wonk. Catalyst. Storyteller. Collector of Memories"

zzzeek2• 2 months ago

i dont think employees are expected to prioritize one customer of (we would assume) little monetary consequence in this way. amazon would rather everyone keep heads down, dont let the casualties slow down the machine or create exception cases, and definitely dont bother upper management with your personal salvation quests.

qlm• 2 months ago

I am so sick of reading this horseshit AI writing. It's like eating vaseline.

neutronicus5• 2 months ago

Some switched to farming. Others opened coffee shops. One bakes bread now. That’s the level of abyss we’re talking about. These are people who know they can’t do anything online anymore. Not because they lack the skills. Because their brains were so filled and indoctrinated with complexity that they found decorating a cookie more fulfilling than maintaining 87 files of Kubernetes manifests plus CloudFormation templates plus Terraform state plus whatever abstraction layer Amazon invented that quarter.

This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"

jaapz2• 2 months ago

The wording also suggests decorating a cookie can't be as fulfilling as working on a complex software project.

This "author" certainly never baked his own bread or grew his own vegetables. Let alone becoming a professional, which is hard work, probably more hard work than sitting at a desk asking claude to change this or that react component.

mschuster913• 2 months ago

This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"

A lot of pretty normal people without much to their name are deciding to call it quits over the AI craze. I'm one of them, I'm heading for electrical engineering - even if the "engineering" part gets replaced by AI sooner than later, I'll still be more qualified running wires than some robot.

Besides, opening up coffee shops and bakeries isn't that capital intensive. Don't need millions for that, there's a reason a lot of non-chain restaurants are founded and operated by immigrants.

lacewing• 2 months ago

This is an AI-written story. It exists to get upvoted and reshared, so overly-dramatic language is the point.

dilap• 2 months ago

It's just Claudeslop. It's everywhere. An epidemic. If you're familiar it stands out instantly. (Would you let someone else talk for you? In real life? Like open up your mouth and let a TTS system spit out the sounds and pick the words? No? Then you shouldn't do the same thing with writing!)

breakpointalpha2• 2 months ago

I actually think many people would choose this option, if it was possible.

21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.

IcePic• 2 months ago

It worked for Stephen Hawking, and he was totally worth listening to.

breakpointalpha2• 2 months ago

I quit reading after the first paragraph when I saw this pattern:

"Not X, not y, not z, A!"

The overly emotional paragraph headlines were also off putting.

mindcrime2• 2 months ago

"Not X, not y, not z, A!"

You know, humans do that sometimes as well. Not GenAI's, not Agents, not automated systems, but actual humans!

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

This extra dramatic writing style really appeals to the current doomer zeitgeist. The rhetorical trick is to write everything so dramatically and exaggerated that when any point is challenged the critic gets attacked for taking it too literally. These articles exist in a duality of wanting to be taken as deadly serious but also immune to criticism; If you try to challenge any point in the story it will be brushed off as taking it too literally. The real point remains hidden in the mist behind the dramatic tone and will shape shift any time it is challenged.

Even the premise of the article has built-in ridiculousness, as if the author has enough special insight into all of AWS to conclude that all of the other employees are bad. Of course by point that out I’m sure this comment will be critiqued as missing the point. The point is you’re supposed to be angry and not think about the details of the story in a way that diminishes that anger!

dogleash• 2 months ago

overly dramatic writing

I feel like everything posted to HN that talks about technology or the business around it while trying to show personality or make arguments from humanity gets this kind of response. Sure each time the reason is tailored, but they all add up to point the vector in one direction. Unless it's bland buisnessminded blandness, it can't be taken serious. Even the cringe coke-fueled rants about tech are received better because they're in the direction of excitement for building future product.

tcp_handshaker• 2 months ago

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.

qsxfthnkp23222• 2 months ago

The only people or thing to blame for reduction of workforce is leadership/management. F** them.

vintagedave• 2 months ago

The man who triggered a CEO-level investigation into AWS’s own dysfunction? Gone within ten months.
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.

Spooky23• 2 months ago

Wait? I thought only Google did stuff like this, and AWS was an amazing, customer obsessed(tm) organization?

qsxfthnkp23222• 2 months ago

Apple does this shit too.

andrewstuart2• 2 months ago

It is…. in the imaginations of management.

bayesnet• 2 months ago

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.

jadar2• 2 months ago

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.

Octoth0rpe• 2 months ago

I think the lack of motives are part of the argument: that aws management is acting with complete indifference, not out of malice; and that this indifference is leading to the people who actually make a difference being forced out.

jadar2• 2 months ago

But that's a weak argument, an argument from silence. And a pretty lame one at that. "You didn't say it's wrong to kill puppies, therefore you must be indifferent to killing puppies."

hilariously2• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

recursivedoubts• 2 months ago

why ruin what could be a great human-centric story w/so much AI generated content?

this could be a heartfelt three paragraph article and have far more emotional impact.

AndrewKemendo• 2 months ago

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.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-ut...

eoskx2• 2 months ago

AI generated slop. Why would anyone waste the time to read this if you won't take the time to thoughtfully write something?

renyicircle2• 2 months ago

The way the author thanks the person from AWS who helped him with a human approach is an AI generated article blaming AWS for using AI. Brilliant.

frenchtoast8• 2 months ago

Not AI-generated. Not everyone is born writing flawless English. If it sounds like an LLM, maybe it is because people like me had to learn how to write clearly from LLMs because English is not our first language.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44774474

mh-• 2 months ago

You cut off the part where he says he did "use AI to resort it".

Yes, i used AI to resort it [..]

KolmogorovComp2• 2 months ago

from the same post

Yes, i used AI to resort it,

It may be not "generated", as in it's a true story, but the writing is AI.

wavemode• 2 months ago

That comment appears to be from 9 months ago, regarding an entirely different article.

Also, you've cut out the part where he says he did use AI, but just to "resort" the article (by which I assume he means "reorganize"). Whether one believes that is gonna be a judgment call I suppose.

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

The article is clearly AI written. You can also see in their account history where they’re switching between their own writing style or copy and pasting from an LLM.

Most LLM copy-paste accounts will deny it when called out.

Planktonne2• 2 months ago

The author's voice in that comment doesn't sound like their writing in the article(s).

Maybe they're being sincere, and they just edited it so heavily with AI that it comes out sounding generated, but that's a distinction without a difference.

renyicircle2• 2 months ago

writing flawless English

Is there still grammar police on the Internet, calling out people for making grammatical mistakes in their writing? Who is asking for flawless English? Thinking that the LLM style is an example of flawless writing is a common mistake of ESL people. It's not flawless. A single rhythm, structure and flow permeates every piece of LLM writing. There is no variation whatsoever. People have been reading so much of that stuff recently that they don't bother to read the article if they spot one of these patterns. They're so easy to avoid, too.

Fired. And the part that gutted me: His proudest accomplishment at AWS? Restoring my account.

change to

I was gutted to read that his proudest accomplishment at AWS was restoring my account.

Is it flawless? Probably not, I'm not a writer, or a native English speaker. However I think it's more sincere, explains the feelings without any fluff, and is just simpler.

If the author's goal is to have people read their article, they should consider that people are tired of reading these patterns over and over again, it's not "flawless English" and it's not "writing clearly" because the patterns are unnecessary and obscure the message.

jerf• 2 months ago

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.

happymellon• 2 months ago

They've been milking the elevated volume of calls thats been happened over the past 6 years...

bragr• 2 months ago

The original blog post this references is a better read: https://www.adventuresinoss.com/aws-four-years/

_pdp_• 2 months ago

In the age of abundant intelligence the most valuable thing will be human capital - especially those that give a damn.

BariumBlue• 2 months ago

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.

schnitzelstoat• 2 months ago

that’s not a career pivot. That’s a trauma response.
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.

jaapz2• 2 months ago

Is this written by AI?

Would an author come here on hacker news and just post rage-baiting AI slop? For sure not!

zdc1• 2 months ago

I've seen some other posts on this site and yeah it's probably AI, and low-quality writing regardless.

Excellent candidate for throwing into AI and asking for a summary; if you bother reading it at all.

hdndjsbbs• 2 months ago

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".

SpaceL10n• 2 months ago

| 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.

protomikron• 2 months ago

Not a X. Not a Y. Not a Z. The thing he was most proud [...]"

This construction - how is it called? It is clear "AI speak" - at least I remember Claude talking like that (even if it is code).

ramblurr• 2 months ago

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.

gorjusborg• 2 months ago

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.

zug_zug• 2 months ago

Though perhaps a bit long-winded and emotional, it's charming to see something so sincere still in this era.

It's not clear that this individual was fired for being too helpful, but it's been my experience that escalation 2 or more levels to report a problem is always a threat to your career, because it means you're exposing a failure within your management chain.

In this case it went all the way up to the CEO, so it's entirely possible he was mentally marked for "eventual downsizing after enough time to not raise red flags"

(To be clear this is a failure by organizations to protect their own bottom line. By not protecting/rewarding people for calling out systemic they incentivize all sorts of dishonesty by managers and directors which are the rule and not the exception in my experience. Famously there was the amazon case about how long customer support took to answer)

jalev• 2 months ago

Existing HN discussion from the ex-AWS engineer's side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254475

AI writing aside, I still think the author has a point: the customer-centric AWS/Amazon of yesterday is not really there any more, or at least appears in a form that isn't recognisable or useful to every day users.

josefritzishere• 2 months ago

If Jeff Bezos was a less terrible person AWS might be a better product and Amazon a better place to work. In this story, AI is front and center. It plays the protagonist, and while we all know AI is terrible, I think this distracts somewhat from the poisonous Amazon corporate culture that created the situation where AI became that villain.

ritzaco• 2 months ago

It's annoying when people post slop with no substance, but it's somehow worse when there's actual substance _hidden_ by the slop.

I'd probably much rather have read the prompt for this article than whatever this is.

Anyway, I use my `buzzoff.wtf` slop site for this kind of thing. Originally built so I could figure out what startups actually did behind all their buzzword landing pages, but now also to get a summary of articles like this to decide if it's worth reading or not

https://buzzoff.wtf/https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-fired-th...

jms703• 2 months ago

Companies are not loyal to the employees. When choosing people for layoffs, I don’t believe anyone cares about the things this person did or was known for. As long as the site stays up.

squeedles• 2 months ago

Every corporation of sufficient size turns into a blind elephant, walking in one direction and trampling everything in its path. This is just the nature of bureaucracy, but there has always been someone somewhere within the organization that could tug on the elephants ear or whack it with a stick in the right place, to make it avoid an obstacle now and then.

The trick was always finding the person, but now the elephant has no handlers because all of the people are gradually being removed. It's like all the tech bros watched "The Matrix" thirty years ago and said "What a great business model!"

hansvm• 2 months ago

a -dry vs --dry flag

I've mentioned this before, but you want the default to be a dry run and for there to be a --commit, --prod, --for-real, or whatever you want to call it to opt in to the destructive behavior.

SG-• 2 months ago

fired or laid off?

jmclnx• 2 months ago

Your management not caring about 1 user's satisfaction in Computing is as old as multi-user systems. Nice to see someone in this day and age still cared to help out a user.

krinne• 2 months ago

Amazon has this thing of stack ranking and firing the lowest performing employees - its just a pattern that works for them as it creates urgency with all the employees who remain. This is probably all there is to it.

mawadev• 2 months ago

The article is clearly AI generated and I was assuming the author was using AI to write from the perspective of the guy Tarus helped out. Seems like it is a real story, but using AI to write this article over dramatically is a very odd delivery and put me off initially.

I just hope the guy rewrites this post to be less AI and drama and more about the human essence of what just happened here. It is a very human story and an interesting discussion nonetheless.

mlinhares• 2 months ago

I'm surprised these companies still have people on devrel, it always felt like the easiest layoff to do as its very hard to tie direct results to devrel work.

If you're in a position like that, better start thinking about plan B cos it isn't getting any better.

benterix• 2 months ago

I'm torn these days. The subject matter is interesting, but the LLM writing cliches just make it unreadable, I gave up after half a minute.

nunez• 2 months ago

100% AI generated according to Pangram.

roncesvalles• 2 months ago

Also, can we normalize calling layoffs "firings" because that's exactly what they are?

You weren't "laid off", you were fired, because the company doesn't need you anymore. Calling it a "layoff" exonerates the company, as if it was something unfortunate and outside their control.

dzogchen• 2 months ago

Why use an AI slop image in an article that complains about AI?

obieonek• 2 months ago

I found this article looking for one or any of employees speaking out just like I found one title Google Employees Say Stop Selling Technology to Cops.

The following will give an idea of my concern. The problem that nobody addresses is that police have overtaken FBI in authority because of their ability to commit espionage. The courts and all agencies have been accessed in every way possible by AWS "highly available" services "mission critical". So an agenda is there given by unelected officials. It looks like the WTO is Firstnet Authority and has created a network under the secrecy of DHS fusion centers run by a version of "Nazified Police."If we treat this like a coup and the fraud, which you have no idea how extensive it is thanks to AWS, as a bounty, we would be better off.

From their site . aws

Government

Improve public safety and justice outcomes with the AWS Cloud

Justice and Public Safety (JPS) agencies are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy cost-effective and highly-available mission critical services to serve their public and protect their employees.

costa_fot• 2 months ago

I am sorry this is such a slopfest how did it even get this high on HN

AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn

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