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.
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"
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.
Well then you get PR disasters like these, I have moved off of AWS and helped several services that use AWS at atleast 4 companies, who used to pay AWS mid 6 figures, and been paid chump change to do it, but I helped just cause AWS sucks I didn't spend much time really, 1 weekend each.
Was the pay worth yeah, was seeing AWS's revenue hopefully take a minor hit worth it, most definitely would do it again hit me up if you really need help. If you pay Amazon over 10M I am certain we can bring it down below 1M lmao.
AWS is just unhinged in terms of pricing and costs.
Sometimes! But when the cost of generating pages upon pages of bombastic text is near-zero, I have to apply quick heuristics to decide which text by people I don't personally know is worth my time to read in detail, and this article doesn't pass.
100% agree with this. The irony of this article critical of AI development culture is that the author used AI to write it.
The 'not a, not b, but c' writing style used to be _effective_. If someone wrote that way I paid attention because it was good writing. But because it is everywhere now, it has ceased to be effective, and it has the opposite effect. My mental heuristic sees this and zones out now.
> 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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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!)
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!
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".
The author wanted to thank someone who put real human effort into helping him, and call out Amazon for firing that person and other support staff to replace them with AI.
He decided the right way to do this would be to use AI to generate a post about it.
Personally, the message I get out of this is: "I don't give a damn about others, but others should give a damn about me"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I've mentioned this before, but you want the default to be a dry run and for their to be a --commit, --prod, --for-real, or whatever you want to call it to opt in to the destructive behavior.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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".
| 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.
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.
To the author - mate, you could have written a half-a-page paragraph yourself and we would have loved it. But you decided to disrespect the person you are supposedly honouring, your own readers and people on HN by "writing" X pages of AI bullshit slop with countless bullshit sections. I am not going to bother reading it to the end, but I hope it at least does not end with "Conclusion". Do yourself a favour and delete it from your blog, then have another go writing something yourself. Also drop the crappy generated pictures. Nobody needs that shit, just becomes some GPUs can generate it for you at still subsidized cost. They do not bring new information, insight or whaever. Just fucking remove that shit.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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"
Was the pay worth yeah, was seeing AWS's revenue hopefully take a minor hit worth it, most definitely would do it again hit me up if you really need help. If you pay Amazon over 10M I am certain we can bring it down below 1M lmao.
AWS is just unhinged in terms of pricing and costs.
We’ll look back on 2026 AIs fondly.
"Not X, not y, not z, A!"
The overly emotional paragraph headlines were also off putting.
You know, humans do that sometimes as well. Not GenAI's, not Agents, not automated systems, but actual humans!
The 'not a, not b, but c' writing style used to be _effective_. If someone wrote that way I paid attention because it was good writing. But because it is everywhere now, it has ceased to be effective, and it has the opposite effect. My mental heuristic sees this and zones out now.
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?
This is a very dramatic way to say "because they got so fucking rich they don't have to anymore"
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.
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.
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.
21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.
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!
You mean Claude has this style.
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".
He decided the right way to do this would be to use AI to generate a post about it.
Personally, the message I get out of this is: "I don't give a damn about others, but others should give a damn about me"
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44774474
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.
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.
> Yes, i used AI to resort it [..]
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.
Most LLM copy-paste accounts will deny it when called out.
> Yes, i used AI to resort it,
It may be not "generated", as in it's a true story, but the writing is AI.
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.
> 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.
Excellent candidate for throwing into AI and asking for a summary; if you bother reading it at all.
Would an author come here on hacker news and just post rage-baiting AI slop? For sure not!
> 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.
this could be a heartfelt three paragraph article and have far more emotional impact.
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.
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?
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.
I've mentioned this before, but you want the default to be a dry run and for their to be a --commit, --prod, --for-real, or whatever you want to call it to opt in to the destructive behavior.
If you're in a position like that, better start thinking about plan B cos it isn't getting any better.
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.
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)
This article should be called "the guy who made the best sandwiches in our free staff cafeteria got laid off".
Yes it is and I'm glad someone has said it. I didn't realize it until now.
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...
This construction - how is it called? It is clear "AI speak" - at least I remember Claude talking like that (even if it is code).
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?
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...
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!"