>AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time
They never released anything innovative, ever. Amazon creates value through optimization. The original AWS came about because they had extra servers lying around that they needed for holiday traffic, and they decided to rent those out.
The problem with Amazon is that its too bloated, which goes against their optimization bread and butter.
The cycle goes like this. First you have an entry level engineer, that hasn't been taught really how to solve problems algorithmically - instead its basically just education in the form of memorization about problems and how to solve them, without anything more fundamental.
Then, companies like Amazon need engineers to actually build the products, so they are forced to tailor the interview process to them, thus the prevalence of leetcode style questions, because they know that the engineers are studying those for other companies.
So the candiates get selected are basically those that have shown that they can memorize processes better than others. When these candidates work, they do the exact same thing internal to the company, focus on doing the existing processes in hopes to get promoted.
As a result you get lots of bloat both time and technology spaces. So no, promoting them into decision making positions is not the right thing to do.
The best thing Amazon can actually do long term is to focus on more automation, and reduce headcount. You want fewer, more talented engineers who are able to solve problems autonomously without barriers in the way, who don't need handholding or don't need to handhold others.
AWS itself was one of the biggest innovations in technology, of all time. Cloudformation, IAM policies, and creating these services as independent composable blocks was revolutionary. S3 was completely new, and is still a dominant force in cloud computing. But my point was that all of the best ideas in AWS came long ago.
There are newer companies, like temporal.io, whose platform capabilities make AWS look outdated at this point.
I think your understanding of leetcode is not correct. It filters for:
Can learn computer science concepts
Is willing to sit in front of a screen and learn said concepts for a while
Is willing to follow directions and recipes
Is willing to follow the rules
Has some minumum bar of intelligence
Unfortunately, these interviews do work. Some percentage of people that pass the interview are actually very good. The amazon firing process will weed out the rest.
Meta has released the best open source software in the last 20 years, and their hiring process is all leetcode memorization
I guess we disagree on what innovation is. I define innovation as technology that either no one has, or capability to do things for a lower material cost.
For example, lets say I have a server rack at home. There is nothing in AWS that exists that I can't replicate on my server rack at home. The only difference is that time required to implement all of it on my server rack vs in AWS, which is optimization.
If AWS comes out with some closed source ML model that is good at doing something, thats innovation - i can't replicated that at home without knowing specifics. Likewise, if they have super cheap EC2s with RISC or dedicated ML hardware that are cheaper per hour to run than anything I can build at home with power costs, thats also innovation.
The interviews aren't fully useless, I agree that leetcode provides valuable insight. However IMO it should be the bare minimum.
> The original AWS came about because they had extra servers lying around that they needed for holiday traffic, and they decided to rent those out.
This isn't true, it's a bit of marketing nonsense.
There was a paper proposing to create the service, it got workshopped quite a bit, and got funded. The servers used weren't extras, it was dedicated capacity from day one.
At the time, Amazon was not using the same hardware (or anything) as AWS. Even today, there are still critical Amazon services running on the older corp fabric, because the Native AWS migration isn't 100% complete.
The other key parts of AWS were also innovation, and not mere optimization.
You have demonstrated that you have a near complete lack of understanding of how AWS innovates. Your ignorance is thorough, and that gives you confidence; but it's unwarranted. You're just another Dunning-Kruger twit.
The actual AWS product yes, but the initial idea came from what I said. Perhaps I wasn't clear - its not like they started renting out servers right away, but saw the potential. As such SQS was the first service that was created.
The corp fabric does run on AWS. Its just the legacy tools that are used to manage the virtual machines instead of them being liked to the AWS account. The hardware is in the same data centers, and legacy tools wrap AWS stuff under the hood.
But yeah flagging for unnecessary personal insults.
Firstly:
>AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time
They never released anything innovative, ever. Amazon creates value through optimization. The original AWS came about because they had extra servers lying around that they needed for holiday traffic, and they decided to rent those out.
The problem with Amazon is that its too bloated, which goes against their optimization bread and butter.
The cycle goes like this. First you have an entry level engineer, that hasn't been taught really how to solve problems algorithmically - instead its basically just education in the form of memorization about problems and how to solve them, without anything more fundamental.
Then, companies like Amazon need engineers to actually build the products, so they are forced to tailor the interview process to them, thus the prevalence of leetcode style questions, because they know that the engineers are studying those for other companies.
So the candiates get selected are basically those that have shown that they can memorize processes better than others. When these candidates work, they do the exact same thing internal to the company, focus on doing the existing processes in hopes to get promoted.
As a result you get lots of bloat both time and technology spaces. So no, promoting them into decision making positions is not the right thing to do.
The best thing Amazon can actually do long term is to focus on more automation, and reduce headcount. You want fewer, more talented engineers who are able to solve problems autonomously without barriers in the way, who don't need handholding or don't need to handhold others.