[ayberk]

Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but I have no ties to Kinesis. Opinions are my own.

AWS has more than enough learnings to avoid these "events". The problem is the whole culture is focused on delivering new stuff instead of preventing problems and improving existing systems.

Some folks made these decisions with best intentions. I'm pretty sure they all got promoted and then moved on. Now, people who inherited these systems have no incentive to fix these, because at most you'll receive a pat in the back. I'm also pretty sure that those teams talked about the shortcomings of the current architecture. TODOs must be present somewhere in the backlog.

I don't think this is an AWS specific problem, but we have to start treating people who prevent problems like the heroes they are. Everyone congratulates when you put out a fire. No one gives a damn if you prevent the fire in the first place.

[toomuchtodo]

> I don't think this is an AWS specific problem, but we have to start treating people who prevent problems like the heroes they are. Everyone congratulates when you put out a fire.

This is sort of comforting to hear that Google’s same problems have reached Amazon, in that no tech behemoth is immune to prioritizing promotion and glitz over the maintenance grind.

> No one gives a damn if you prevent the fire in the first place.

Amen.

[mooreds]

> This is sort of comforting

I would personally put emphasis on the "sort of" clause.

If bigcos with tons of resources can't align incentives to build solid software instead of deliver new features, who among us has a chance?

[nvader]

The GP derives comfort from exactly that point--at some point, the behemoths calcify, and the incentives that come with size lead to a slower growth, if not outright decline.

This gives the rest of us a chance to one day have our day in the sun. We can deliver solid software, precisely because we are not big. And then, perhaps one day we may have the choice of growing into a bigco ourselves, or staying small.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "The problem is the whole culture is focused on delivering new stuff instead of preventing problems and improving existing systems."

The same disease exists at other FAANGs and large tech companies. Nobody ever gets a promo for maintenance work and being on a sustained engineering team is seen as a career dead-end.

[schoolornot]

Another reason to have technical PMs & managers... because even if they don't have meticulous understandings of underlying systems, they can make cases for additional headcount/funding and recognize efforts that will affect tomorrow's bottom lines/issues.