I was at Amazon for over a decade. Show YoY growth in terms of revenue, you’ll get a bigger empire. Sr. Managers become Directors. Directors become VPs. The senior engineers who worked on the low latency performance optimization becomes principals. The tech program managers become principals as well.
All the other cogs in the chain either get burned out, managed out, or they bounce to AWS, maybe Alexa.
All the analysis and commentary in this thread is interesting, but there’s nothing complex here. It’s basic incentive structures incentivizing undesirable outcomes.
What misbehaving do you mean? If traffic is what you mean, it's okay since at the first stage of the software we have time to test/scale accordingly. Therefore in that stage it might make sense to change the architecture to per-tenant database.
One tenant sends you a flood of traffic, that you might not be scaled to handle. Let’s say your application servers are scaled for this traffic, but your single, shared database is not. All that traffic could cause an outage on your database. If this happens, the impact won’t necessarily be on one tenants but all tenants.
There are ways you can mitigate this. Strong isolation is one. Throttling tenant calls could be another.
We don’t know your specific use case enough, but it’s something to think about now.
This is generally referred to as the noisy neighbor problem.
As you mentioned there are easy workaround for this issue on both application and infrastructure level:
implementing rate limiters, monitoring/alerting systems for DB resource usages, putting quotas for tenants, etc.
After all a postgreSQL instance in 16GB ram and 8core cpu can handle pretty much of the traffic for most SaaS products at their first stage.
What do you have to keep synchronized across tenants?
And is consistency across tenants really a hard requirement? Would an eventual consistency model work?
How does migration factor in? Do you mean migrating one database vs multiple databases?
What exactly would you be migrating? And if it’s written in code, migrating individual tenants one at a time, at your pace or when a particular tenant is ready to migrate, might be a feature and not a bug.
2. Everyone else in my family and their good health. My children are happy in the marriages. Spouse is as energetic as ever and still has the enthusiasm and love when we met back in college
3. Quitting my last job before my physical and mental health completely shattered. Tell you what, if you’re also in the Amazon rat race, get out before it eats you.
4. Not doing too much over the past year, aside from reading, light travel, and participating in some online communities
I don’t know enough about twitters infrastructure, so I’m only speaking at the application layer.
If the code isn’t changing, things should be extremely stable and resilient. Presumably, Twitter had already made significant investments in resilience, fault tolerant services that function independently at scale.
I’d think the more risky parts are server/hardware failures, hardware load balancers, etc.
One of the key services my big tech org owned was in support-only mode with no active feature development. Despite 500k requests per second, it had just a one person on pager duty.
The majority of support issues were OS level updates and application level dependency updates/fixing vulnerabilities. But not doing that work wouldn’t take the service down, so much as be corporate policy violations for not keeping software up to date. You could also definitely swing by exceptions.
> The people in small town Northern Germany went so far as to criticize and attack you for your achievements that far surpassed what they have accomplished.
Isn’t this a salient feature in US culture? We attack the wealthy, celebrities, politicians. I’m not saying these people are saints by any means or it’s completely unwarranted, but the US seems to have an increasing victimhood culture. It manifests in different shapes and forms, but the outcome is more or less an attack on some person or group of people who we consider to be relatively more “privileged”, and we use that to dismiss their actual accomplishments or whatever good they may have also done. The root of the issue is always about comparing yourself to someone or some group and their accomplishments and justifying one’s or short comings.
Many of the diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, regardless of good intentions, are spin offs from this.
To be clear, I’m not taking a swing at the social justice movements. But what I am saying is that in US culture, there’s definitely massive resentment of those who are successful.
> Many of the diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, regardless of good intentions, are spin offs from this.
I agree. Especially equity (as opposed to equality of opportunity) I think is very closely related to the extreme “egalitarianism” we have in the Nordics. The Law of Jante [1] is a great summary of our particular variety.
I see lots of conjecture on the nature of voice assistants, or why they haven’t taken off.
As someone who was at Amazon, and close to this area, let me offer a simpler explanation.
Alexa has stagnated because its leadership has little to no direction. The incentive structure driving the product teams and tech falls under two categories: 1. rest and vest 2. or write documents to build your promotion portfolio and get promoted. Then leave the org to find a job in AWS.
In fact, Alexa could be used as a text book study in empire building.
* Myriad teams that maintain or increase head count each year, with absolutely no meaningful deliverables.
* Services that could be maintained by a 2-3 person on call that have an entire team of 6-8 engineers.
* Tech directors, Sr. SDMs, and SDMs in a race to build their empire to get promoted to the next level. SDMs solemnly hiring head count for the sake of having more reports. Other SDMs hiring SDMs below them, even though there’s no need for additional management (team is idle), so they can show a larger footprint and get promoted to the next level.
Voice assistant tech may as well be hitting a brick wall for technical or human computer interaction gaps that need to be thought much more in depth. But saying this was just an insanely hard technical problem is misleading and missing the bigger picture.
If you build an organization as a pet project and then throw money at it to do whatever the hell it likes, with practically no accountability, of course you won’t get meaningful results.
In recent years, Alexa became a place to chill and wait for your RSUs to vest. I personally know great engineers in Alexa, who are now stressed out of their mind about their work and visa situation because of the layoffs. But look - you decided to join a team where you basically just hang out at work, have a series of useless meetings, or half the time, your manager is complaining for some reason that his team doesn’t all show up to daily stand ups. A ton of extremely talented folks became extremely lazy, and so here we are.
To root cause: misaligned incentives, lack of accountability and a poor work ethic, shockingly poor given at least some other parts of the company are still on the other, opposite extreme.
> As global sales for new cars have fallen in recent years, car manufacturers have pivoted toward selling software updates and features as subscriptions to generate a continuous revenue stream long after a car has been purchased.
Are we surprised here? MB’s leadership has one primary goal: satisfying shareholders and the broader market.
We’ve been in a race to the bottom for a long time now. Inferior construction, cheap parts, overseas labor (or for the car market, labor in the US, Canada, or Mexico but also because of cost optimization).
This is the latest in a long line of cost cutting measures and patterns where the customer ultimately loses. I’m not even mad at Mercedes Benz. They know the game they’re playing, and this is what it takes I suppose.
My son in law bought a new C Class a few months ago. He and my daughter were very pleased. Now me, I’m an old goat, and so when I saw a massive iPad on the center console instead of buttons, I’d tell you that car wouldn’t be my first choice. And they had me sit in it and try it out. It is certainly a nice looking interior, but I pressed on the passenger side dashboard area and on the armrest between the front seats. I heard plastic crackling noises. It’s all plastic, even though it looks like some much superior metallic material. It was just some skin/vinyl on top of plastic.
How well will it hold? Time will tell, but it goes to show you the generation gap. I think he said he paid upwards of $50k for the car. With all the plastic, I can never see myself paying that much money for a vehicle. But hey, Mercedes Benz has a market for these things, and so it’s reasonable to believe that no matter what I think of the $1,200 subscription, there’s a market for that too.
I used to feel the same way as you about large touch screens in cars as the main interface in place of physical tactile buttons but I've come to accept that's just the way it is now and if you're looking to buy a new car it'll be hard to avoid. I think some cars (like bmw) have found decent compromise with physical buttons for frequently accessed things like climate or seat warmers.
Don't even get me started on Teslas which is essentially a tablet with a large car-shaped case around it.
bmw has also removed physical buttons for climate and heated seats in idrive8. it's an unfortunate step backward, but it's also not as bad as people on the internet will tell you.
> The other striking news of the week is Elon Musk's epic flaming death spiral at the helm of Twitter.
I am old, and admittedly, my oldest grandchild cares more about Twitter than I do.
Maybe one of you here can enlighten me. Why does Musk get so much attention? Why is Twitter so important? Perhaps this is incredibly ignorant to say, but why not let people who want to use Twitter use it, and those that don’t, don’t use it?
I keep hearing about freedom of speech, toxicity on social media. Is it unreasonable for people who don’t like Twitter to just not use it anymore?
I feel the loudest voices are anti Twitter. Or they hate Musk. And Elon Musk seems to rather enjoy trolling these people.
Mainly, it feels like Twitter and FB have somehow become the defining issues of our time. Maybe I’m just stupid, but I don’t understand why. Why this obsession with Musk?
I’ve gone through layoffs several times in my career. As has my older son, as has my sister, my wife. So Musk bought a company, took it private, and fired a ton of folks. Has corporate America never had layoffs? Have we never had layoffs where honest, hard working people were needlessly fired, because of market conditions, short sightedness and greed on part of their business execs, or some combination of both?
I worry that this country is hyper addicted to needless drama, and it’s self imposed and obfuscating bigger challenges we have as a society.
I saw a Twitter conversation between Democrat and Republican House members. Absolutely shameful how these people hurl insults at each other, try to respond with sly, “witty” insults. Maybe I’m the one being the drama queen, but it feels like Rome is starting to burn and we have no one to blame this time but ourselves.
Musk is getting attention because unlike many people who take over a company he doesn’t seem to have a good plan for what to do, or rather he had plans (charging for the verified tick etc.) which people told him would backfire, and they did so he has had to reverse them with extraordinary speed.
So now he needs to work out what to do with a vastly reduced engineering team, and loss in confidence from some advertisers because of the fall out from his first plan, and his communication style isn’t really helping him through all this.
Whether Twitter is a good thing overall I can’t say. It has many interesting groups of people on it in both my professional life and in my hobbies outside of that, and if it goes down I think it will be the first time we’ve seen a social network fail while still large and active.
Despite all of the drama and toxicity, there is still no place like it. It's the first place to turn for realtime analysis and updates for unfolding events. It's the only credible global town square where you can see your favourite sci-fi author interact with an infectious disease specialist, a machine learning expert and an independent journalist.
I have a complicated relationship with it - often leaving for months to years at a time, but usually coming back in some capacity. It's messy and reflective of the full breadth of human discourse, positive and negative.
Anyone who entered the tech industry in past decade+ has never experienced layoffs at this scale before. Young techies have experienced good times and high salaries. And the transition was quick -- just two quarters ago big companies were hiring techies by the hundred, now they're laying them off by the thousands. A lot of posters here assumed that in the worst case if their current gig failed they could go work on boring software for a year or so before finding something new, but now there's a lot more competition for that plan B job. And heaven help you if you're on a visa, have a health problem, or have a family -- could you be laid off next, and if so where do you go?
Given Musk's actions WRT buying and owning Twitter over the past few months, I think this is one set of layoffs that are solely due to the actions of one person. He agreed to buy Twitter for a high price (because he thought it would be funny to buy it for a price with a weed reference), and now other people are having their lives turned upside down because this guy is not as smart as everyone thought.
> Why does Musk get so much attention? Why is Twitter so important?
I see it as an established group who mostly benefited from Twitter (think journalists and traditional media who had great reach and influence through the platform) fearing that their power will erode under the new regime.
This is already playing out. Anyone who pays a small fee can be “verified” (a privilege previously reserved for the elect few), opposition/critical voices are returning from banishment, and Twitter is reconsidering which people/tweets/views are amplified or suppressed.
The reason why Musk/Twitter are “so important” is because those who stand to lose want us to believe so.
> I worry that this country is hyper addicted to needless drama, and it’s self imposed and obfuscating bigger challenges we have as a society.
Agreed. There are players and fans. The players (Musk, media) have stakes that matter. The fans (you, me, anyone who roots for one side or the other) may have ideological stakes, but it’s mostly tabloids for nerds.
Musk is considered the wealthiest person in the world. Watching someone wealthy fail or perhaps pull it off against all odds is a pastime usually reserved to TV dramas.
He's also an eccentric, with a considerable ego and a well-known internet troll. He's easy to make fun of. Given how freely he distributes insults and snipish takedowns, he's someone many people want to make fun of, for better or for worse. Oh, and his communication style, which could be described as straight to the point or impressively naive, has as many fans as haters.
> Why is Twitter so important?
Because a non-negligible fraction of the world gets their news from Twitter, directly or indirectly. Also, because Twitter has become a vector for propagandists of all sides and that this propaganda, by all signs, works very well.
> Perhaps this is incredibly ignorant to say, but why not let people who want to use Twitter use it, and those that don’t, don’t use it?
I don't think anybody disagrees with that.
> I feel the loudest voices are anti Twitter. Or they hate Musk. And Elon Musk seems to rather enjoy trolling these people.
> [...]
> I saw a Twitter conversation between Democrat and Republican House members. Absolutely shameful how these people hurl insults at each other, try to respond with sly, “witty” insults. Maybe I’m the one being the drama queen, but it feels like Rome is starting to burn and we have no one to blame this time but ourselves.
I don't know about other people. The reason I loathe Twitter is exactly because of that. The medium itself is not the problem but the algorithms employed by the former direction of Twitter increased engagement by encouraging flamewars and access to addictive content.
Could Musk do something good about that? Anything is possible, but none of the signs are encouraging at this early stage.
Musk rightly draws attention because he's in control of a lot of money and companies that are significant players in important industries (including defense). Some of the interest is prurient, and he plays games with it, but he is a legitimate subject of inquiry.
As far as the members of Congress go, sly insults is an upgrade from a lot of what has happened the last few years.
It's easy to dig up any number of these, which used to be buried in the back pages of a newspaper rather than playing out and being memorialized on the web.
Is your goal to turn your calculators into web interfaces? Are you wanting to learn how to do that?
If the goal is purely providing something functional to others on the internet, just create a simple page. Describe your calculators. Add links to download your calculators as excel spreadsheets.
No need to over complicate and build a spreadsheet in a browser.
If you don’t want to do that, just create some HTML pages with forms and use some JS to chain together input boxes and spit out a calculation.
Many of the suggestions here will take you the route of complicated layers of abstraction. Unless your goal is to learn these abstractions, you can avoid that complexity.
I was at Amazon for over a decade. Show YoY growth in terms of revenue, you’ll get a bigger empire. Sr. Managers become Directors. Directors become VPs. The senior engineers who worked on the low latency performance optimization becomes principals. The tech program managers become principals as well.
All the other cogs in the chain either get burned out, managed out, or they bounce to AWS, maybe Alexa.
All the analysis and commentary in this thread is interesting, but there’s nothing complex here. It’s basic incentive structures incentivizing undesirable outcomes.