They just launched it. It’s pretty standard practice to have a few employees fill content websites with content to start them up. Let’s see how many of these employees are still at it in a few months.
So, AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points ("Klout", anyone?) that they have been convinced is worth something on their resumes.
Instead of actually providing a real technical support team.
Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars, so I expect it might actually work.
Thing the First:
> Instead of actually providing a real technical support team.
Apparently you've never used their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. Not only technical knowledge but dealing with customers, providing help above and beyond the actual question in front of their face, etc. The only other technical support team that has impressed me this much is Kraken's.
Yes, I have to pay for that support. I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile ("What's wrong with my flugelmesserbeano?"), for my medical conditions ("Is it safe to take these two medications together?"), for my house exterior ("If I don't fix that drainage problem what could happen in five years?"), for my house interior ("How should I Remodel the kitchen to fit my lifestyle?"), etc.
> Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars
and quoting CactusOnFire
> I got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam.
I too used to look down on certification.
I made a damn good living "doing computers" (still do): networking, development, what's now called BI reporting, backup and restores, etc. This for multiple startups, SMBs and $BIGCORPs.
I then wanted to get into training: MCSE, SCSA, LPI, etc. For that, I had to be certified. No problem, I thought, certifications are for fools and children; this will be a cake walk.
Great Ghu! There was _so_ _much_ I didn't know or even know about. Certifications filled in _so_ many gaps and minutiae. (You don't know what you don't know.) Not only did it fill in the gaps, allowing me to better utilize the knowledge I already had it let me make more sense of those shapes I see off in the tech horizon.
Now because I have these certs, should you then treat me as if I was the next coming of Ritchie? :-|
Certs show that you have a _base_ knowledge, not that your the reincarnation of Turing.
Are there people who abuse the system? Sure! Name a system involving humans that isn't/hasn't been abused, corrupted, and twisted beyond what it was meant to do. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I've come to the conclusion that people who sht on people (mostly utes [sic]) for getting technical certifications are the same ones who sht on recent high school graduates: Oh, you have a high school diploma? How nice. /s It says here you took English and math classes. Let's see how good you are. Write a 5,000 word dissertation on the impact of Don Quixote on Western literature, then prove Fermat's Last Theorem. If you can't do that in 30 minutes, GTFO you poser.'
What's that? You don't treat ppl with high school diplomas or bachelor/masters' degrees like that? Then why treat people going after certs like that?
> their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. (...) Yes, I have to pay for that support.
My experience is very much the opposite of what you wrote, both with free support and paid Amazon Managed Services. Their support can often be as helpful and truthful as their piece of crap parody of a services health dashboard[1].
> I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile
When your vehicle is under warranty, you've already paid for checks and repairs upfront. Just like you pay for amzn's services. You can buy additional support for your car and cloud stuff, and better private healthcare, but you don't _have_to_ if you've paid for warranty or insurance. Depends of course on use case and what you need: help building stuff or help figuring out why isn't stuff working as you'd like it to. When you want Amazon to simply fix their shit, paying for support smells like an extortion and pushing you to forums will give them more time to not provide fixes.
Therefore I think that the commenter you are responding to is right: Amazon seems to be attempting to acquire free workforce and pushing their customers to "community support" or whatever shitty phrasing they'll use to set up a barrier between a customer and their actual employees. And they do have a long history of exploiting and even destroying their customers (diapers dot com etc).
I believe that the problem Amazon has right now is that they created certification-based business model which was one of factors raising salaries in the sector but they would still like to pay shit and overwork their staff paid in peanuts.
And while I know what salaries can an engineer expect for working for AWS in the US, I don't remember when was the last time I dealt with non-Indian reps.
> I don't remember when was the last time I dealt with non-Indian reps.
Is it possible you normally deal with support within the same 8 hour window? I believe they have a global rota, I often end up talking to reps in Ireland.
I know it's a scam. HR teams don't. If ponying up $400 every 3 years gets me a more senior position with slightly better compensation, it's worth the ROI.
Really only applicable at certain kinds of company, leaning on certifications usually means it’s a very bureaucratic company or one with not enough competency to figure out if a candidate is any good.
Likewise if a candidate has a lot of certifications there’s usually a question “does this person really know their stuff or are they just good at taking tests “
>"does this person really know their stuff or are they just good at taking tests"
Which is interesting, given that the places that should be able to tell if a person really knows their stuff tend to lean hard on "leetcode" type interviews. Which is basically "is this candidate good at memorization and taking tests?"
There is an aspect of hackerrank-style questions that tests raw preparation, but in my experience interviewing people with customized/twist versions of these problems, nobody is just coding up a solution they memorized either. They’re composing ideas they already know, but this is exactly the skill we want to test them for anyway. I will grant that being a good test taker, calm under pressure and relaxed enough to talk through the solution, working methodically until the end, these skills do make a huge difference in interview performance. In my opinion it is the candidate’s responsibility to prepare for the interview environment as well.
My opinion is that you're missing a lot of good talent with this sort of approach. There are people that are just as good/fast at solving problems in a quiet space with the ability to play around with trial and error in an actual dev environment. They can answer your questions well too, given some time to mull it over quietly.
Being able to do it on a whiteboard with people around you, and answering questions right when they are asked is a skill, I admit. It's a poor analog for what the work usually ends up being, though.
There was a time when candidates would get stuck on a problem and I would tell them "if you want, keep working on this problem and email me tonight with your work." Most people didn't follow up, but some people did, and we usually hired them. They usually had very high grit and follow through, but were unfortunately (as a rule) slower and generally worse at their jobs than other hires. We had to let one of these people go despite his excellent communication and organization skills. Today I can rely on a stronger recruiting pipeline so I don't need to make exceptions like this, but I'm not really sure if I would go back given the chance.
No matter how much grit you have, if it takes you 10 hours to do what everyone else is doing in 1 hour, you will struggle _a lot_ at your job.
Perhaps the working environment just isn't what I'm used to. Assuming the interview is closed book, no internet, you're measuring recall against whatever random questions you ask. It's hard for me to picture that really mapping against the real work at hand.
I say memorization because they don't allow you to look anything up. I can, for example, look at a problem and remember vaguely that there's an algorithm and/or data structure that's ideal for solving it and some of the high level concepts/keywords I would need to find it. I also know the right google foo to find it again, see if it's still current best practice, find a decent implementation of it, where good documentation is, and so on.
I can't always bang it out on a whiteboard from memory though. If I could, I don't think that would somehow make me a better developer. It might make be a better T/A in an academic environment, but that's not typically what these kind of interviews are hiring for.
In a lot of organizations, the people responsible for identifying if a candidate is "good" and the people who are responsible for calibrating their offer, and where they enter a ladder in terms of seniority, are entirely different groups. Certifications are justifiable insofar as they're aimed entirely at the latter.
And those are precisely the organizations I avoid like the plague. I’ve gotten to offer stage before and sensed this type of disconnect and promptly declined to continue in the process. It’s a huge red flag if the finances of a technical organization are controlled by people who don’t understand technology and consequently that unable to ascertain and appropriately appraise value.
all AWS certs are paid for by my employer through exam vouchers -- who in turn gets free/discounted exam vouchers from AWS through their partnership either directly or indirectly discounted through partner credits worth hundreds and thousands of dollars of AWS usage that we as an org definitely use up to offset our consumption bills.
I personally never paid a single dollar for AWS cert exam.
I did pay for a few AWS exam prep courses and study resources -- and some of them were reimbursed by my employer.
You don't have to renew all your expired certs if you don't see the need and you have moved on to bigger/different things in your career.
In my experience studying for a cert exam fills in gaps and brings you up to date on best practices and newer features.
I don't believe anyone's job is so broad and deep at the same time that their hands-on experience makes the certification completely redundant.
EDIT:
Here is a person sharing their experience -- he/she may be overdoing it with the number of certs but they are looking at certs as a means to learn more beyond their current job role and look for career growth
If nothing, the knowledge from the certs give you the necessary footing to approach your next project/job with the right mindset in areas your previous experience may not have exposed you to.
I had one of their certifications. It expired a few years back and I don't intend to renew it or acquire a new one. Below position presented to HR or tech hiring people usually works:
"I used to have AWS certification. Amazon even prolonged it from 2 to 3 years but I had no reasons to renew it afterwards. I still work on this stuff and my practical knowledge isn't outdated. I won't remember what pricing tricks every single service has but I'm able to quickly set up or fix things"
Sure, there are businesses that require you to have a shiny, fresh certifications. There are also companies that value their employees' and contractors' ability to choose what is worth doing and what seems to be a waste of time and energy.
It hasn’t been free, but I’ve regularly used AWS support. My experience has been nothing but very positive.
Meta comment — It’s disappointing the top voted comment does nothing but spread negativity. I see attitude like this that automatically assumes the worst in anything ever happening and tries to poison the well for others. I’m grateful and incredibly lucky that my co workers aren’t like this.
AWS enterprise support is amazing. Everything from calls and emails to multi-day workshops with the product team. You get more than you pay for with them.
I'm also a fan of the AWS certifications from the employee side. Not everybody is pulling X00K at a FAANG. If you want a cloud job at regular enterprise, it's a good way to get your foot in the door.
Because if you rate 1 star that is going to their annual performance, it is very stressful job to work at aws support, in an year you would have to be get 4.8 overall rating which is very hard to get because for the most part customers doesn't rate when they had good experience.
Any contact I've had with AWS support has been excellent, but we also pay for premium/enterprise/whatever. Had a bug with a recently released API and got attention from the engineering team to fix it.
If they do it right, they’ll treat this internally as a user feedback forum. If a question about a service has hundreds of upvotes that almost certainly means the service itself should change so that either the answer to the question is obvious or (better) the question is no longer meaningful. Here’s hoping!
AWS actually has fantastic support, especially for a tech company. My previous company was tiny, and super cheap (they wouldn't even pay for Slack), and even at that level we never had a problem talking to real, live support people, and they were always pretty helpful.
I created brainpick.co.uk, where people who have given up hopes to resolve the issue, could sponsor a question, so people could work for money, instead of reputation.
I think the certifications are worth it, at least the pro level ones. Because they do give you a full picture of good AWS architecture and what services are a good fit together.
I've seen what some developers without certifications put together on AWS and it's a mess.
But this re:Post thing I don't believe in personally. I'm so tired of these giant tech companies building walled gardens and censoring and controlling anyone inside.
> Instead of actually providing a real technical support team
You sound like someone who has exactly zero dealings with AWS support. They set the bar in this industry. The first thing I do when I join a new employer is reach out to our Account Manager or Technical Account Manager at AWS to set up bi-weekly cadence meetings and ask for specific criticism from their Solutions Architects on whatever I'm thinking of implementing. They will ask my team for feedback on next features they're thinking to implement.
They have been the finest design partners I have ever encountered. I consider my last AM a friend.
Your comment is of such poor quality, it should be flagged for misinformation, and I almost never flag here on HN, even on politically divisive subjects.
The flip side is that I’ve had such negative experiences with Amazon across all of their services that the people in this thread talking about how wonderful support has been seem like shills.
I think it’s possible to damage your reputation beyond repair, making even ridiculous claims sound plausible.
At AWS support has a direct line to product and engineering service teams so if support can’t resolve it, there is an engineer on call who can help out depending on the need. Worst case they don’t support what is needed and it goes on the backlog.
Right, but that is a problem you should work on once you identify it. It’s not good that low quality speculation is believable; there isn’t really any justifiable motivation to reflexively support it.
There's this mistake people make, especially in tech, where if someone says "X is bad" people think "Wow, they must really know about X". There's tons of 'hot takes' and criticism because it's really easy to look and feel smart when you're the person levying those.
Because you can't downvote an HN post, and shouldn't downvote when you disagree, so people end up upvoting contrary opinions they agree with. The sequence is usually [Post with a position A] -> top comment (disagrees with position A) -> top child comment (disagrees with top comment, usually focusing a single, least-significant point raised by top comment)
Any solution which sufficiently explains the jungle of AWS services efficiently, will be a big win for the community.
I see the whole point of certification driven approval & self-styled AWS ninjas/ gurus/ experts as the failure of a system to efficiently provide its services to a commmon consumer. You shouldn't be needing a microdegree to run a service that you have taken up by own volition to build projects on
And people will keep using StackOverflow for AWS questions anyway.
As long as StackExchange keeps publishing under Creative Commons, I don't know why anyone would bother making their own Q&A forum, even a platform as big as AWS. Programmers would rather have a one-stop-shop for all their questions, which often cut across multiple topics anyway.
As a StackOverflow consumer who only lands their from search engines, I am tired of seeing what seems like legitimate questions closed for being opinions/already asked in prehistoric times/etc. If Amazon owns a platform, they can enforce their own standards which might allow for more relevant posts.
Can’t Amazon just pay Stack Overflow and use the tool they’ve built and license instead of stealing their design and UI and workflow for probably more money?
LibreOffice also runs a Stack Exchange clone, actually a fork of the older open-source SE codebase I believe. It's horrible - no real experts frequent the forums. But the lack of some SE features highlight them. For one, I don't ever see if anyone replied to my questions or left a comment on my answers. I do get an email, but that is easily missed and destroys the ability to have a conversation. Because I'm always checking some site on the SE network for other things, I always see notifications there.
Another missing SE feature is the Hot Network Questions. I used to hate that feature, it would distract me to no end. But now I see how it attracts people to new SE sites that they might have expertise in but otherwise not know about. I do see the need that it fill now.
The answers on Stack Overflow are frequently dated, and the most interesting questions and content gets locked.
I go to stack overflow if I want to read the workarounds and fixes that worked for the problems of 2014, and similar questions from today that get locked for being duplicates.
The AWS console UX is so bad that I would strongly prefer not to spend more time using similarly-designed products. To be fair, good design isn’t easy and it makes you appreciate the real Stack Overflow more.
The AWS console is designed so that you won’t use it at scale, since the “right way” is through terraform/cloudformation etc. This is the only explanation I have at this point for the lack of basic stuff like visualizations of running infrastructure. “If I were running it”, the console would have an entirely visual mode where you can drag and drop infrastructure that’s fully interoperable with a tabular view. It would allow you to see at a glance what you’re running and what it’s doing and what is costing money. The current manifestation as a bunch of tables listing individual items that have secret cross dependencies is just, so much less than what it could be.
> the lack of basic stuff like visualizations of running infrastructure
But... this would help Amazon's customers save money.
> “If I were running it”, the console would have an entirely visual mode where you can drag and drop infrastructure
Honestly, I'm glad that you're not running it.
My main issue with their web console is that it forces you to close repeating modals/popups multiple times a day, even within the same account. Like when you open EC2 console and you have to click on a top modal praising new interface. Every refresh gives you this modal to close. Giving in and forcing yourself to use the new interface won't help much, as you'll have to start closing modals asking you to comment on its usability. This one won't reappear within same account when closed but this is just EC2. Enter billing console and you may find 3 modals on top on every sub-page: red one stating that you have payments past due, green one stating that you have no payments past due and blue one being an ad for a new Payments interface. All at the same time. Other services will nag you and force you to close more and more modals and popups every time you open some service's console.
When I found myself mindlessly closing console[1] modals and popups without reading, I've got a strong "this is not right" feeling.
I would need to login to my account which I haven’t done in about 2 years. But the thing that bothered me is I always feel like I’m navigating back and forth. And I end up lost where I am.
It’s not to say AWS is flawless because it absolutely could be better. But I don’t find myself getting lost. I just get frustrated that it’s slow.
There’s many really annoying bugs in AWS tho. Like if you use event bridge and you use the UI. You create a target to a lambda. Then go delete the lambda. The event bridge UI breaks due to not being able to load the lambda.
And if you create a target to a lambda and you have 400 lambdas. The page lags while it loads all 400 lambdas in the background before it renders.
But navigating around i don’t feel like I end up somewhere else.
> For users who do choose to sign in, using their AWS account, there is the opportunity to create a profile, post questions and answers, and interact with the community.
Which account? My org root account? Dev account for some product? Doesn't seem to support AWS SSO.
The multi-account story is one of my least favorite things about AWS. It all just seems so kludgy.
Can confirm I cannot use my personal account I use to publish my Alexa skills. It says I need to give billing information to be fully registered with AWS. They have pretty much all my information because I gave them a lot of my personal information when I signed up to publish Alexa skills.
Maybe this place isn't for random people like me to answer random questions we find but rather for AWS staff to not have to repeat the same answers a thousand times.
» There is no requirement to sign in to AWS re:Post to browse the content. I wish they extended this to asking questions as well. Like I don't want to associate asking question to my work$. Why would I if questions are public?
Contrast with the horror stories which show up here every now and then about Google, how a random post on YouTube leads to being locked out of email and the cloud hosting used to power your side-gig (or full time gig).
Why should my on-line shopping account be linked to the work I do for client #1? Or client #2? or to (one of) my hobby and remote back-up solutions?
One account for each use-category. Clear and clean firewalls.
It’s a little bit weird to call it part of the free tier in the post—I’d certainly hope a crowdsource, no SLA forum for their own product support is free!
I know this argument doesn't work well in this example since it's Amazon. But in principle, centralizing data on the internet around a few big services is not a good thing.
These days forums and IRC channels are replaced with Facebook and Discord. An untold amount of code is hosted on GitHub. And now Stack Exchange is the go-to platform for Q&As.
I understand it's convenient and those services have a network effect behind them. But something is lost. Something that made the internet great, where everyone hosted and shared their own content.
I agree with your general point about avoiding centralized data, but StackExchange definitely stands as unique since all of its posts are in the creative commons. Due to that, I think SE is one of the few bastions for sharing knowledge since it doesn't own its users answers.
Not saying that SE is the end all be all of QA forums, just that it's a much better centralized system than you are giving it credit.
Stack Exchange - or more precisely their moderators and power users - gets to decide which content is allowed and which isn't. For example which questions are marked duplicate (even if they aren't) or which questions are off-topic (even if it's not clear). And yes, theoretically the community can change the guidelines. But at one point the organizational inertia is so big, the proposition becomes "take or leave it".
And it's not just Stack Exchange that has this problem. Wikipedia too.
I have about 5k rep points on SO. Almost all from answering questions. Not a lot - but enough to know how to appropriately ask a question. My $0.02 is that the only questions that seem to get traction on SO are the questions that have been asked a million times in slightly different variations. I never get meaningful answers to novel questions even when the question is absolutely specific and reproducible
Control of content moderation, usage policies, and integration with their own internal support APIs I would guess.
Personally, I don't understand why they don't have an open-source documentation repository, given that a lot of their docs are garbage or hard to find... It's pretty well known that the boto3 / terraform etc. docs are a better place to find API documentation than AWS
As someone who does not understand why StackOverflow is so popular, find many of the posts there to be low quality, and believes that internet should be decentralized I think it is better for platforms to host their own communities instead of outsourcing it to places like StackOverflow, Discord, Reddit, etc
The thing I'm wondering about is why they didn't make use of StackOverflows bew Collectives feature. Yes, launching your own thing gets somebody promoted, but in this case I think collaborating with SO could have made sense.
lol poor guy who launched it slaving for the whole year thinks it will get him promoted. Wait till he goes through a cycle, gets shot down, demoralized, leaves AWS and they backfill with fresh meat.
I find AWS documentation to be one of the best out there. Consistent across all their products, very detailed and easy to navigate. I am curious what you found to be lacking in their docs.
sample output/responses is almost always lacking, I usually need to perform an a cli call to see what the output will be.
Their error messages/codes seem to vary with time / aren't consistent / aren't documented. There are about five different messages I get if my token has timed out I've seen.
And I'm mostly an ec2/s3/r53 user, aka the oldest apis. What are the other ones like?
For example a document explaining how to implement the least privilege principle for what any customer wants to on their platform. Well, I know the answer, there is no way for a customer to achieve this, so you have to engage the support.
It's been a while and I don't have the frustrations written up. However, implicit in "we're starting our own SO" is the recognition that the docs aren't enough.
In a world of suspended accounts and banning with no recourse, that seems like a setup. Say the wrong thing and you and all your EC2 instances and all the rest of your AWS usage is suspended? Hopefully they've worked out a workable policy for this.
One wrinkle though is NDA'd information. It becomes very difficult to help with certain AWS issues without access to implementation details which they hide behind NDAs. This information is critical for dealing with a certain class of problem. Some answers will have to be very circumspect to the point of being unhelpful without access to the NDA'd information.
> Help my Redshift loads aren't working because <details>!
> Umm... yeah don't do that, do <fix> but I can't tell you why that fixes it or any information to help you reason about the system to avoid similar problems in the future. (But you can hire me as a consultant!)"
I think AWS has become the walmart of tech, or at least how I view walmart via popular media as an outsider of America. I don't know exactly what it is, but the vendor lock-in (in this case community lock-in), the extravagant and insular corporate events and tiers of users, the endless attempts at making everyone into a cog for their machine, the complete lack of self-awareness (from them and their evangelists) at how corporate-dystopian and drab they come across.
In my opinion, don't give Amazon a second of your free time unless they're paying you.
Dump question I guess, but I would like to follow what is said in the security & compliance section. There is a button "follow" that redirects me to a login page.
I am supposed to provide credentials to either a "root" account or an "IAM" account.
Assuming I have neither, I do not use AWS by myself and just want to take part in the discussion forums, should I create a root account or an IAM account?
This is good, hopefully it makes it easier for internal team members to communicate with customers to resolve issues - the internal system has been very cumbersome
What's bad for the community? If people are building things with AWS I prefer that they're productive with it. If this helps developer productivity then that seems like a win.
You said that it will act as a funnel for AWS services, you mean that it will encourage people to use AWS? If people feels that it gives them value then I don't see the issue. Although I don't think this would be a major factor in choosing a cloud provider (anyway I can ask any questions on SO).
I got a confirmation from AWS staff in just a few minutes:
https://www.repost.aws/questions/QUTPxjIgdcSWm6tTCacifdDg/is...
So, one thing it has going for it is official AWS staff answering questions.