Read this article yesterday about the AWS DNS issue. You don’t have to know anything about cloud computing or DNS for this to make sense, it was just my starting point.
And so, a quiet suspicion starts to circulate: where have the senior AWS engineers who’ve been to this dance before gone? And the answer increasingly is that they’ve left the building — taking decades of hard-won institutional knowledge about how AWS’s systems work at scale right along with them
The basic problem laid out in the article is Brain Drain. Between layoffs and people leaving by choice, the domain knowledge specific to an organization’s inner workings slowly and quietly leaves, and no one notices.
Until they do.
And here’s where I think this could be a big problem. What if all the IT people organized their own boycott day? No IT people in office. No IT people working remote. No IT people answering the phone when the on call lists get activated. What would happen.
I predict things would likely start collapsing a few minutes after midnight. Slowly at first, but those issues would cascade, and we probably wouldn’t have to worry about the automated on-call systems because those would crash before they were even activated.
I can’t help but wonder if corporations have left out an important factor in their calculations. The good-at-math, pragmatic, steadfast people they relied on to build all this stuff over the last 30-40 years managed their money pretty well for a few decades.
They don’t need the bad culture and stress anymore.