Very big day for an engineering team indeed. Can't vibe code your way out of this issue...
Pour one out for the customer service teams of affected businesses instead
There are certainly organizations for which that cost is lower than the overall damage of services being down due to AWS fault, but tomorrow we will hear CTOs from smaller orgs as well.
This will hold until the next time AWS had a major outage, rinse and repeat.
I have three words for you: cascading systems failure
I feel bad for the people impacted by the outage. But at the same time there's a part of me that says we need a cataclysmic event to shake the C-Suite out of their current mindset of laying off all of their workers to replace them with AI, the cheapest people they can find in India, or in some cases with nothing at all, in order to maximize current quarter EPS.
Most miserable working years I have had. It's wild how normalized working on weekends and evenings becomes in teams with oncall.
But it's not normal. Our users not being able to shitpost is simply not worth my weekend or evening.
And outside of Google you don't even get paid for oncall at most big tech companies! Company losing millions of dollars an hour, but somehow not willing to pay me a dime to jump in at 3AM? Looks like it's not my problem!
I believe the rules varied based on jurisdiction, and I think some had worse deals, and some even better. But I was happy with our setup in Norway.
Tbh I do not think we would have had, what we had if it wasn't for the local laws and regulations. Sometimes worker friendly laws can be nice.
What the redacted?
There's a similar cutout for management, which is how companies like GameStop squeeze their retail managers. They just don't give enough payroll hours for regular employees, so the salaried (but poorly paid) manager has to cover all of the gaps.
Having two sites cover the pager is common, but even then you only have 16 working hours at best and somebody has to take the pager early/late.
It is completely normal for staff to have to work 24/7 for critical services.
Plumbing, HVAC, power plant engineers, doctors, nurses, hospital support staff, taxi drivers, system and network engineers - these people keep our modern world alive, all day, every day. Weekends, midnights, holidays, every hour of every day someone is AT WORK to make sure our society functions.
Not only is it normal, it is essential and required.
It’s ok that you don’t like having to work nights or weekends or holidays. But some people absolutely have to. Be thankful there are EMTs and surgeons and power and network engineers working instead of being with their families on holidays or in the wee hours of the night.
But to parent's points: if you call a plumber or HVAC tech at 3am, you'll pay for the privilege.
And doctors and nurses have shifts/rotas. At some tech places, you are expected to do your day job plus on-call. For no overtime pay. "Salaried" in the US or something like that.
I'm glad there are people willing to do oncall. Especially for critical services.
But the software engineering profession as a whole would benefit from negotiating concessions for oncall. We have normalized work interfering with life so the company can squeeze a couple extra millions from ads. And for what?
Nontrivial amount of ad revenue lost? Not my problem if the company can't pay me to mitigate.
Exactly. This time, some LLM providers are also down and can't help vibe coders on this issue.
