[shermantanktop]

It is absolutely true that some devs have the AWS product set as the tech toolkit they know best.

Whatever their fundamental skills are, the most important way they add value is by optimizing things like lambda startup time or EC2 CPU utilization. Does this allow them to mask deep problems with fundamentals? I guess it could, but that sounds a bit gatekeep-y to me.

[photonthug]

Sort of, but IDK, If you have specific needs this might be a somewhat reasonable heuristic for hiring.

Devs who came up building software more or less from scratch really do have a different skillset than ones who stick to working in service-rich environments because there's a significant difference between glueing services together vs building out those same services. For example something like using a paginated API is quite a bit easier than designing/implementing one. A developer who is skilled and methodical about reading and understanding service-level documentation may not actually be able to step through debugging in a REPL, and vice versa. (Not to say that either kind of person cannot learn the other persons tricks, but as far as the differences in what they already know, those can be pretty significant.)

Assuming someone only has one of these skillsets, the most valuable one totally depends on the situation. On the one hand it's pretty cool that service-familiarity tends to be language-agnostic, but it's less cool when your S3-API expert barely understands the basics of tooling in the new language.

[shermantanktop]

Paginated api is a great example. For me, I learned C from K&R and producing a.out files that would default and leave a core file in $HOME. If I wanted a list structure, I had to build it out of resizable arrays of pointers, etc.

I ended up years later at AWS, and while I was there I built internet-facing paginated APIs over resources which had a variety of backing stores, each of which was had some behavior I had reason about.

So I don’t doubt the difference between API builder and API user, I’ve been both. I think it’s less about what you are doing and more about how you do it (with curiosity about how things work, vs. as an incurious gluer).

That said, looking at the code inside MySQL is highly instructive for the curious; AWS doesn’t provide that warts-and-all visibility into their implementations, which cuts off the learning journey through the stack.