HR swore it wasn’t on purpose and I was somehow measuring pay “wrong” by looking at money in my pocket over time; but knowing their HR, I’m sure the valleys in transition from signing bonus to vesting are intentional.

.. and then got let go at 22 months in favour of the AI budget.

Gotta respect the hustle.

When I was at AWS, we had data access locked down very tightly. I was trying to train a model to predict how long various dynamic workloads running on behalf of customers would take. Just getting access to anonymized production data from a DB that my team owned took well over a month and had me compromise heavily on what attributes I could access. I also spent a decent amount of time in meetings with lawyers and compliance folks to explain and justify all our data classifications for PII, retention, access controls, etc. We would review our data policies quite frequently. We needed break-glass procedures to access prod data in our own systems, and it was uncommon to need to resort to that. Even when you broke glass, certain classes of sensitive data would still not be visible to you. On the plus side, We did get quite good at operating and maintaining systems without needing to see sensitive info.

If you contrast that with Meta's disregard for privacy or the way frontier labs disregard the law, it's easy to see why Amazon would struggle in this space.

They're a good data point on where the robotics labor frontier is.