column: When your best engineers log off for good, don’t be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works
Pretty common upper management mindset, “Once something is done, its done forever and needs no specialized experience to maintain. So anybody can do it, even young inexperienced newly hired will be able to figure out how to take care of everything without any senior staff around to help them.”
In some cases it’s not even young/inexperienced new hires, just that in a project of any complexity, understanding all/as many as possible of the moving pieces that make it tick becomes more important than just experience or skill. So they hire a few really experienced people to throw at the problem, and manage the young/inexperienced, and they struggle and burn out too
Guess who they’ve been replacing them with
“Foreshadowing is a literary device”-ass headline
It’s always DNS… or us-east-1. Wait, it was both this time? we should hit the pokies tonight!
I’ve never seen work grind to a halt like this where I work
the cloud forgets how DNS works
The D in DNS stands for centralized
There’s a lot of speculation in this article. The author’s main point seems to be that people with experience operating aws systems are leaving and points to the 60% “regretted attrition” number as evidence. AWS is like 20 years old at this point. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect experienced people to stick around forever. Nor does a 60% “regretted attrition” rate really mean anything to me. This is related to experienced people leaving. If you think about it if your company does a halfway decent job hiring people you will not want to lose the people you hire. So almost any attrition will be regretted. It’s not a sign of anything.
One thing I have heard that is the average tenure at Amazon is less than 2 years. I suppose this begs the question “how many experienced people do you need?” and what the distribution of tenures actually is but in any case you would want some senior and experienced people to train some junior people and for those junior people to stick around long enough to gain some experience and become senior and train some more junior people. So if THAT is broken I can imagine it leading to this “brain drain” scenario. But this article doesn’t give any evidence of that.
Nah AWS has been having massive outages around the DNS for us-east-1 for the past decade. This is nothing new. Recovery times around this one were particularly brutal because it was Diwali yesterday and all their Indian support engineers were out enjoying the holiday.
Well it’s down again today and I’ve never had this impact my work like this in the past 6 years so I’m not sure how true that is
