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?
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?
You mean Claude has this style.
We’ll look back on 2026 AIs fondly.
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?
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"
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.
21% of Americans are functionally illiterate according to the University of Alabama.
"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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
this could be a heartfelt three paragraph article and have far more emotional impact.
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...
> Yes, i used AI to resort it [..]
> Yes, i used AI to resort it,
It may be not "generated", as in it's a true story, but the writing is AI.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Would an author come here on hacker news and just post rage-baiting AI slop? For sure not!
Excellent candidate for throwing into AI and asking for a summary; if you bother reading it at all.
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.
This construction - how is it called? It is clear "AI speak" - at least I remember Claude talking like that (even if it is code).
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.
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)
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.
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...
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!"
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.
> the system fixed itself by removing the person who exposed the problem.
Social norms require everyone to say "how cute" whenever you see an infant baby. AI is the super richs baby, the execs spent trillions of dollars of 'fertility' treatments to come up with this baby, don't say anything bad about it!
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.
If you're in a position like that, better start thinking about plan B cos it isn't getting any better.
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