> One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)
The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.
I might have just drunken too much of the koolade and believed in the mythos of lowflyinghawk + customer obsession.
What I meant by this is, in my personal opinion, there were a bunch of half baked products they should have just not mentioned at reinvent because said products never really materialized or had significant usage oncerns for a long, long time after the announcement.
The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.
Sorry kind of on a caffeine high and brain isn't working too well right now. I'm also reluctant to throw shade on the products/teams I'm thinking of because I didn't work on them and I don't want to give them any heat, but I'll say it was in the 2017-2019 era I felt it start to change.
I think it contrasts with the really cool launches like Lambda, Aurora, API Gateway, Sagemaker, etc that has just come out before then.
Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)
The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.