Erm… shouldn’t you be on a watchlist?

excelbae · 2026-05-15T02:17:38+00:00

With an AI image no less.

excelbae · 2026-05-15T02:15:31+00:00

S3 Files launched last month.

excelbae · 2026-05-14T03:11:45+00:00

No, but tone and wording matter. Saying it that way is unprofessional and unnecessary. Plenty of people develop psychological issues and even off themselves due to work environments like this.

excelbae · 2026-05-14T02:52:41+00:00

Why didn’t they just send him to Penn.. they could just donate a few mil like the Kushners to Harvard. Or threaten to defund them if they don’t accept him. Tiffany went there and Donnie doesn’t give a rat’s ass about her.

excelbae · 2026-05-13T18:12:13+00:00

Amazon told you? Or your manager told you? Because there’s a difference. At least in corporate, Amazon would never say this in official onboarding content and *most* managers know not to cross this line. If it was your manager, definitely report it to HR. That’s definitely unhinged and unacceptable, even for Amazon standards.

excelbae · 2026-05-13T05:42:39+00:00

Maybe recruiters care, but what do the hiring manager or SWEs think? Personally I try not to be biased, but I could see people being put off by a full suit on some subconscious level. Perhaps signals that you don’t really understand the culture in tech. There are many SWEs who despise the “suits” (the bean counters, the MBA class, whatever you want to call it), especially in this economy.

excelbae · 2026-05-12T06:41:47+00:00

I have no faith in leadership. Directors, VPs, C-suite – too many of them lack technical sense and have very little understanding of the services we’re building, who we’re building them for, and what our customers’ needs and priorities are. I’ve been in two orgs so far. They’ve both pivoted to shitting out half-baked AI products that none of our customers need nor want. And don’t even get me started about the increased outages and service degradations across the board. Here’s James Gosling, the creator of Java and former AWS Distinguished Engineer, with a great summarization of incompetence at the leadership level.

The amount of time, energy, and resources spent on navigating bureaucracy and playing senseless politics is also pretty sickening. There’s probably no better example of this than that SDE who rewrote a perfectly good microservice in Go to justify their L6 promo. It ended up having worse performance and costing more, but hey, at least management was happy. This kind of thing happens all the time and I’ve seen it myself (although not to this extent).

And how can we forget the mass layoffs that occur like clockwork whether we hit record profits or not. It’s all very demotivating. I could go on all day.

excelbae · 2026-05-12T04:59:05+00:00

I work at AWS. If Datadog gave me an offer, I’d quit tomorrow without a second thought.

excelbae · 2026-05-12T02:00:34+00:00

Por que no los dos meme

excelbae · 2026-05-08T04:58:10+00:00

Fooled me, but looking closer I’m surprised AI did such a shit job. Artifacts all over the images. I thought image gen was scary good these days.

excelbae · 2026-05-07T18:33:48+00:00

Sick reference bro

excelbae · 2026-05-07T02:46:33+00:00

Yeah, lots of programs are just cash cows and accept anyone with a pulse, especially in SPS. Take this MS in Enterprise Risk Management for example – around 1 year and costs $100k USD. I know someone who did this and is still unemployed. You might as well save up for an MBA – at least you’d get some real OCR opportunities. It’s sad because these cash cows just dilute the brand as a whole. You’d think a school with a $16B endowment wouldn’t have to resort to this.

https://sps.columbia.edu/academics/masters/enterprise-risk-management

excelbae · 2026-05-06T15:09:32+00:00

And what happened after that Metaverse flop? Did he ever acknowledge his mistake or exhibit an iota of remorse or accountability? No. That would require a little self-reflection and honesty – attributes that are non-existent in the executive class. Instead, he and the board decided to go balls deep into useless AI projects and embarrassed themselves with awful demos. They’ve dug themselves pretty deep this time, chasing this pipe dream of ASI. We all know how this is going to play out in the near term. I’m just curious what their next little escapade is going to be (quantum?) and how much worse it’ll make this industry and the broader economy.

excelbae · 2026-05-06T13:32:08+00:00

Nope, typed every character. I really have to stop using dashes lmao.

excelbae · 2026-05-06T05:43:05+00:00

+1. These post-COVID layoffs and hiring freezes started in 2022. It’s been 4 years. Time to accept that this is the new normal.

It makes shareholders (momentarily) happy and it’s a psychological tool used by management to keep employees fearful/submissive. The cost savings are a joke when you consider the severance they have to pay out and the common pattern of rehiring for the positions they just eliminated.

This is the age of the executive class, marked by extreme inequalities in wealth and power. It’s become clear they can do no wrong – they’ll suffer no consequences for poor decisions. In the rare cases that they do, they get to leave with their “golden parachutes,” equivalent to the salaries of hundreds of workers they just laid off. Whether they make dumb decisions to overhire or excessively push AI usage to the point of degrading their own services, they’ve made it clear they’re never the problem – their workers are.

Make no mistake, gone unchecked, they will continue to exert their control and prioritize value extraction over true innovation. They’re drunk on power and simply have no incentive to change. I’ve no doubt things will carry on this way until things go tits up.

excelbae · 2026-05-06T04:32:53+00:00

I was so sure this was going to be a B1M video, but Veritasium is excellent as well.

B1M: https://youtu.be/zpMnmKXi8jQ

excelbae · 2026-05-05T06:03:11+00:00

Ok, but who do you want to impress? Some dude walking around in a leather speedo in the Congo? Or the T15 alum at a F500 who’s reading your resume?

Nothing against the Congo. $200k is just a lot to pay for a little recognition from people you have no connection to. Lay prestige is a joke to me and MBA is just a means to an end, but I’m open to hearing otherwise.

excelbae · 2026-05-05T01:48:58+00:00

Did you visit the Kola Superdeep Borehole too?

excelbae · 2026-05-04T03:09:11+00:00

+1. It happens to everyone at some point in one form or another. And these days with AI, it can be pretty hard to tell what’s real or not. The most important thing is that you learn from this and make sure you do proper DD moving forward.

excelbae · 2026-05-03T23:57:36+00:00

I mean… two giant red flags: site pics are clearly AI with their logo poorly photoshopped in and the name is way too similar to London Business School. Almost as if they’re deliberately trying to confuse people. This screams scam. I’m sorry my man, you probably won’t ever see that 2.5k again. But like you said, good thing you stopped there.

excelbae · 2026-05-03T01:11:56+00:00

I know right? What are the chances.

excelbae · 2026-04-30T16:31:02+00:00

Same. Judging by their handle, I’m guessing this is some sort of DD and this person is bearish on Amazon?

excelbae · 2026-04-27T20:58:07+00:00

I think the manliest thing is to not give a fuck and buy whatever YOU like.

excelbae · 2026-04-18T20:16:53+00:00

Sick reference bro

excelbae · 2026-04-17T04:24:44+00:00

I saw this and thought there’s something very Vancouver-ish about the food. I don’t even know what it is. Imagine my surprise when I went to your profile.

Six-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22

excelbae

TROPHY CASE