Will Amazon Change Remote Work for Everyone Else? - NC2C019

Um , the future of the show . So , uh , today's episode will actually be Alex Perkins last episode with us today . Um , he's , um , you know , he's , uh , he's got some other key competing priorities in his life that I will let him speak about . Um , so he's going to step back from the show from a little bit .

So , um , alex , it's , it's , uh , it's been a wonderful ride since we've asked you to join the show a little over a year ago now . So can't thank you enough , first and foremost before we get into the show . But yeah , man , I'll toss it to you Anything you want to say .

You know my own personal time , so that was really the main driver here . Obviously , I just want to thank you guys . I think you know we've become really good friends over this last year and a half or so .

Chris , when you brought up this idea , I wasn't even sure that I was going to join the podcast , so I can obviously say that I'm very glad I did and I appreciate everything we've accomplished together .

And thank you to any listeners , anybody that's reached out to us over this time or met me in a conference or something or a meetup somewhere Just really appreciate the community we've built and the friendship I've developed with you two as well . Thanks .

You know , tim and I still plan on running this at the same cadence . Right now . We haven't decided if we're going to bring on another host at a later time or not . We'll keep going for now with just the two of us and we'll still be releasing on a weekly basis .

So we said before the show , before we hit record , that one thing we're really going to miss is explaining things to Alex like pop culture references , that he does , especially pop culture , yeah , so it's .

Oh , when I say that , I'm not saying that I need to explain everything to Alex , but if it has to do with pop culture , there's , there's a you do , absolutely , you need to yeah , so I am . I'm disappointed that I'm going to be able to , you know , reference . I don't know like a , some shitty movie from the 80s , and Tim's going to know what .

I'm disappointed that I'm going to be able to , you know , reference . I don't know like some shitty movie from the 80s , and Tim's going to know what I'm talking about and I don't have to explain it . But you know that's how things go . All right With that , let's hop into the news episode . So , first up , we have a pretty big announcement from AWS .

So we have a couple articles here one from aboutamazoncom , which is , if you're not familiar , it's a site that pretty much just posts all Amazon and AWS-based news . So there was an article that came out , or an announcement . That was a message that was shared by Andy Jassy to basically all the employees of Amazon .

It was a very long winded post about you know where , where things are , where they want to go , et cetera , when they need to , you know , get back to innovating and things like that , and he targeted that .

There was two main things that they wanted to do , One being developing the right org structure to drive the level of ownership and speed that they desire and evaluating whether or not they're set up to innovate or sorry , to invent , collaborate and be connected to each other to deliver the best , absolute best , for the customers in the business .

So the first point that they addressed was all about it kind of balancing the number of managers to to individual contributors , and they said they are going to change that up by I think it was like 15% , like increasing the ratio of ICs to managers by 15% .

And then , you know , slowly beyond that , got into the second point and dropped this major bomb that apparently for all of Amazon , there is a going to be a mandatory return to office order , and this is not only for Amazon but for AWS as well . And yeah , this is . I've already seen quite a bit of people on LinkedIn talking about this .

It's , it's , it's really ruffling some feathers and you know , I think , with COVID and things like that , people have come to this being the new normal and have this new level of productivity and new level of comfort of being at home .

You know , taking care of kids , there's , there's a lot of things that you're able to do working from home and it's , you know , I think we've .

You know I've always been a fan of the hybrid approach , you know , maybe a couple of days in , a couple of days out type thing , but this seems like a major , major change for a lot of people and I wonder what's going to happen to their workforce . So I'll stop there and see if you guys have any additional comments .

Maybe decimated is a strong word , but there's going to be a very large portion of the workforce that has probably already started looking for new jobs , Lots of very talented people that now I'm sure their competition is going to be more than happy to allow to work remotely or much more hybrid than not , than not hybrid at all , than five days a week in the

office , Um , I . One of the things he kept harping on in the message was kind of just going back to how things were before COVID . Um , but that was 2019 . Okay , it is . Yeah , Five years ago . Yeah , so I mean , I get what he's saying , but there are people who have entered the workforce since then that this is all they've known .

We're in a completely new generation of workers and workforce and it's weird to see this , to see a five-day in the office mandate . If it was some kind of split or something like a gradual go back to this , I would more understand . But just straight up , five days just seems crazy .

And , like you hear a lot of people saying , oh , this is like a veiled kind of layoff . Um , but , and maybe there's some truth to that . But this is so much more than that . Like this , the amount of people they're going to lose is probably more than even if they did a above average kind of targeted layoff . So that's all I think about it .

You know Raleigh did it with Apple and Amazon's got a distribution center down in Gardner , so on and so forth . Part of that social contract , if you will , that point of getting the lower taxes up front from a corporation , is that they're going to bring in a ton of people .

They're going to bring in a ton of people to work and live in the city and also to essentially bring business to the businesses around where those headquarters are . That's part of the reason why cities do this . That's a huge reason . Austin is a first example , like austin has absolutely exploded because of this reason .

So what happened when you know we got covet and everything and then most people became either hybrid or or fully remote is a lot of these cities started looking at their taxes , at their tax revenues , and saying , actually we're not , we're not making money right like we , the business that should have come with with the tax breaks isn't .

So I think part of it is just straight up , municipalities are like look , you're not holding up your end of the bargain , you need to bring people in . The other thing is , yeah , I think veiled not even really veiled like it's a pretty . To me it's a pretty clear attempt to do a layoff without having the optics of a layoff .

You know , you said decimated might be a strong word , but I mean technically , if you use the Latin term , decimated is 10% , so that doesn't seem wrong at all . Right , you know , and there's so much tied up in there that that needs to be thought about .

Like you , like you said , there are people who have taken jobs that were remote jobs first and built their life because of that .

They built their life a certain way , or they needed that to be remote in order to live their life a certain way , and now they're just being told oh well , like you know , change everything about your lifestyle or else go find another job , and , of course , the market's not awesome in tech right now anyway .

So I am curious and I am hopeful that there's a that , what you said , that that that there's a lot of top talent that will be able to jump over , but there's going to be a lot of not necessarily top talent that won't necessarily be able to jump anywhere else , because the market just sucks right now and and also , I think a lot of people I think a lot

of big corporations are are paying attention and asking themselves what's what comes . You know , can we do the same thing ? And so this needs to be . You know , this actually needs to be a big bloody lip for AWS , but will it ? I , I don't know . I hope so .

The messaging is is talking about you know , having you know this . The messaging is talking about you know , having you know , work-life balance . But this is really just this really calls for almost no balance at all . There's kind of an opposite of a focus on balance .

Now , I mean , obviously this is for all of Amazon , so it's , it's much bigger than just AWS , but I do wonder how much of this was also related to AWS not being the forerunner in the AI competitive market as well .

Right , it focuses on their you know whether or not they're able to invent and innovate as fast as they can to provide the best for their customers .

We've been talking about this for months , that you know AWS seems to be lagging behind a little bit , not that they're not in the forefront , but they are lagging behind the other major players , and I wonder if they see that as , like now's the time we got to get people , you know , in the office collaborating .

I don't know , I mean , I'm just speculating , just something that came to top of my mind , but it's like I said , it's Amazon as a whole . But yeah , I think I think you're right , tim . I think this is kind of this is going to be the poster child , for can other companies do this ? And I hope it turns out to not be that way .

I hope there's enough of an uproar that you know they're . They maybe adopt maybe like a three days in , two days out or you know somewhere in that , the hybrid model right Rather than the full five day RTO , hybrid model right rather than the full five-day rto .

Um , but , like you said , while people aren't going to probably jump ship immediately , I feel like there's going to be a lot of long quitting involved with this right like yeah , that's right for a long time , um , which that could even have a negative effect on the innovation in itself . right ?

If you have , you know , 10 to 15 percent of your top talent looking for jobs , how committed are they really going to be to their current one , right ? Um so um , I think the fallout could be pretty , pretty rough . Um from this .

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Somebody in a boardroom just saying it is Just saying oh well , logically it makes sense If you get people together they can do this better than remotely . But I want to see some actual data that shows that if you're going to do this much of a heavy lift and up in this many people's lives , you should have some fucking data to back your shit up .

But I'm also in that camp where like I think it was even in the CRN article the term of an introverted extrovert you know what ?

So I do see the value in it being a bit here and a bit there , but the full five day RTO I call bullshit on that .

Of course , I just know how there's other ways to engage with people and I I do agree that there is some amount of value in putting people together that probably would not otherwise interact , but none of this is impossible .

You know , in a I'm with you , hybrid , hybrid , like two , like two days in the office , three days at home , or or , or the opposite would be fine , so people could still live their life for the most part . But like , yeah , going full five days rto , it makes no sense yeah , hybrids answer to everything it really is futures hybrid

We were gonna record the new show two days ago but we luckily had to punt it um for some technical difficulties and , uh , this dropped in that time , which I will say we can't say too much here because this is all speculative at this point . But um , evidently qualcomm has um made um public an intention to um take over intel , which would be quite nuts .

I mean , I feel like every time we have , I feel like every other new show , we're like oh , this is nuts , this is crazy , like this is just another one of those iterations I would say , if it does happen . But I mean , intel's obviously been struggling the last few months . We've seen the share price you know kind of rollercoaster dropping quite a bit .

They're struggling in this realm of AI and things like that . So I'm not exactly surprised . I guess I should say but man , this would be , this would be pretty crazy .

But I guess a few years ago Intel was actually putting in a bid to buy Qualcomm . So it's funny how the tables have turned , how the turn tables . Yeah , exactly the crazy part of this is part of Intel . Ceo Pat Gelsinger , who was at Intel , went to VMware , came back to Intel . He wants to spin out the chip making business arm of Intel .

That makes me really curious . Like I don't think Qualcomm wants to buy the chip making part of Intel , but I could see why they would buy the other part . So I feel like over the next couple of weeks you're going to see a lot more details about who wants to buy Intel , who wants to do what and how they're going to split up their company .

But it's very interesting to watch how all this is playing out . Intel was so big for so long and if you don't move fast enough , things will happen .

Also , I'm thinking about it and I haven't done enough research on this , clearly , but if you took the chip , if you spun out the chip making part of Intel , what's left ? That's making money Like what ? Is that not the bulk of of Intel's actual IP or or revenue generating like material ?

This is I don't remember the exact date I looked this up and I forgot to get the date but we talked about how Frontier was the first kind of ISP to provide Nile , which is the network as a service company on , basically as a , as a service , like a NAS , as a yeah , exactly , nile as a service .

And we had talked about how Frontier is big into providing like full service networking for businesses . So we thought this was like a really interesting angle .

But now Verizon is going to acquire Frontier and I read through I've read through not just the article we have in the notes , but I've read through a couple other ones Not once is it mentioned anything about Frontier's business part of their

organization . This is all about Verizon gaining more fiber networks and more customers . There goes that whole new approach that Nile had , because I don't remember anybody else announcing something like that besides Frontier .

I wonder if Nile looks at this as actually maybe an opportunity to step up , like , hey , well , now Verizon could offer us as a service . It's interesting I got some friends over at Nile . I'm kind of curious now to reach out and see how they feel about this .

But I want to say at one point , frontier was big here in like the Southeast , for example , and I they owned or acquired other companies . It might not have been Roadrunner , maybe Spectrum , or Spectrum bought Roadrunner , I don't remember , but it's a big deal .

It's all kind of hurry up and wait . But yeah , it'll be interesting to see how that plays out Cool .

If , if anybody follows these industries , you know that nvidia basically owns , uh , infiniband , and there's always been kind of a war between InfiniBand and Ethernet , so this is a strange move on the surface . This article is by Futurium and really they're just pointing out .

Like NVIDIA didn't announce this , the Ethernet , ultra Ethernet Consortium didn't really say anything about this , and they got one spokesperson from NVIDIA that said this isn't necessarily a sign that they're moving away from InfiniBand .

It's more like they're just kind of hedging their bets because they have products that do both and they're excited about the innovation that could come from Ethernet . The only thing I wanted to call out on their on the Ultra Ethernet Consortium page , they have steering members and then general members .

Nvidia is not a steering member , they are just a general member .

Probably fully worth it for them to just kind of be like , hey , if we can kind of keep this on the truck in some capacity , let's just keep going and when we need it we'll pull it out . But if not , then we'll stick with InfiniBand , which we know is doing great . But I mean , that's my rub on it anyway .

I don't know , they probably are just like yeah , why not ?

But I don't see them moving their main you know AI networking workloads type stuff to Ethernet at any time soon . All right , let's move on so from ? Oh , actually , hold on . I just realized that this link does not actually have a source . I believe this is a press release from Oracle , though Hang on one second .

So think of like a marketplace offering of like Oracle databases , like the legit Oracle supported and all of that , the real deal , but running on specifically some AWS hardware that's been set aside , essentially so customers can't use it , I guess .

So that's how they're getting into AWS , like you know , not just , hey , you should connect to us , connect your AWS workloads to Oracle and come here and consume our databases . Now they're actually saying to AWS like , hey , you know , let's partner on this and you can offer our database as a service in AWS , on AWS hardware .

And then just , I guess , assume , just pay that as a royalty or marketplace fee or , you know , they'll just charge on the marketplace . So this is a little different than some of the other strategic moves that Oracle has made . Like Oracle has , for example , they have like a backend link between Azure and themselves .

I forget what they're , what they called it , but that's that was announced over a year ago . And then , of course , now you've seen that Microsoft is paying Oracle to run open AI workloads for them , like dedicated compute for them .

So Oracle has really taken this idea that like , hey , we're fourth to the game , so we have to get real creative to be part of this market and , honestly , they're doing some really crazy shit . I don't know . What do you guys think about this ?

I mean , maybe this is my you know dumb brain at work here , but this sounds more like an Oracle offering with AWS than it does an OCI offering with AWS , like we've talked about before , azure and things like that .

They're all talking about like oh oh , we build dedicated connectivity so that you can run your workloads on OCI and have dedicated connectivity , whether it be , like you know , express route or like a private link service , I don't know what they're using under the hood . This just sounds like you're running an Oracle database in AWS through the marketplace .

Therefore , it's almost like they're an ISV or an independent software vendor . They focus on this being a zero ETL integration . So those unfamiliar with ETL is extract , transform and load , so basically the data .

It can natively be put into things like AWS analytics services and things like that , which is like I don't know what I'm failing to see here , but like this doesn't sound like OCI is in the picture or it doesn't have to be in the picture whatsoever . So that's why I'm kind of confused by this and maybe I should pull a little bit more out of it .

But I mean , even if they were to go on to say like , oh well , you know , you can use OCI for this and use AWS for this , this just sounds like people could use it without OCI at all . So I'm wondering what's going to stop customers from doing that .

But Oracle is just the same word for is it OCI or is it Oracle ? But yeah , I agree , this is just . I mean , oracle has always made money off of licensing for database stuff , so for them this is nothing new , it's just another source of revenue . And who cares if it's not directly tied into OCI ? They're still making money either way .

But yeah , the craziest part to me is that they got Matt Garman on stage at CloudWorld , the Oracle CloudWorld conference , because we've talked about this before but AWS wouldn't even acknowledge other clouds existed for years , and I think it was last year . The last reInvent 2023 is where they actually kind of started talking about other clouds .

So , man , how things have changed quickly .

There's no back-end connectivity to OCI . So I don't know . This is just Oracle selling its product on AWS .

So basically , the amount , the absolutely insane amount of power and resources drawn to power , gen AI it's just eating through energy to the point where these global emissions targets that we were all trying to hit to stop global warming have just been forgotten , ignored .

They're getting blown through and there's no sign that that's going to change , and so I think we really need to have , there needs to be kind of a I don't know what you'd call it like a just come together moment where we figure out some efficiencies to be done with this and I realize you know , technology in its infancy is never efficient .

Like , look at the industrial revolution , for example , look at the internal combustion engine , um , but this isn't a scale . That is like dwarfing things that we've done up until now and it's and we don't have . You know , it's like we're on the wrong end of the resource game , to be playing this game Right .

So I don't know what do you guys think about this article ?

I lived there for five years and regularly drove through there and you would just see data centers being built . Like every single month you'd see a giant new data center being built . Um , and that was just when the cloud was getting big . So I haven't lived there since AI started taking off .

But , my gosh , I can only imagine how much even worse it's going to be . And you keep hearing about like these new locations that companies are finding to build out more data centers . I mean , tim , you're right , like I don't know how this is sustainable . I would say this is a great time to be an energy startup .

But that's the thing is like we know this isn not going to grow that fast , but that doesn't negate the the point of the article here , but that's the thing is like we know this isn't going to stop . Um , so is the ?

is the only option offsetting here , like you know , carbon credits and things like that I mean , I don't know how that works but it's like well , what other people say is like oh well , we , we planted this many trees for this many things that we put off to offset all the emissions , and things like that .

I don't know , it could be bullshit , but that's that's what . That's how people you know pretty much say that they want to be , you know , an emissionless company , right .

I think , alex , you and I were talking about this over the weekend Does that change the pricing model for how things are consumed from an AI perspective , like , does open AI increase their price to $50 a month just so they can fund the rest of this shit that they need to offset right To contribute towards zero emissions , or whatever ?

I'm not smart enough to know how to do this stuff , but that's , that's what it seems like the only resolution is to me .

And why aren't there people still talking about this ? Why aren't policies being created to future proof ? Cause this is not going to stop . And yeah , chris , like there's definitely some merit to what we were talking about .

You know about raising the prices , but it's like right now , all these AI companies are just in a race to get , like , the most adoption , so until that slows down , it's not even possible for them to start charging more , because they want as many people as they can to get the value out of it , and then they'll scale back .

It's absolutely fine to raise your prices to cover the because that's all companies do right Is , whenever there's a new regulation or something that needs to be covered , they'll just raise their prices , pass that on to the consumer and then keep pocketing their money , but until there's some reason that forces them to actually do good with that money for the amount

of resources they're burning , yeah , you're just adding to the problem , because then now it's a gold rush , you know , like in addition to everything else . It's always been a gold rush , though .

Um , so look at the show notes if you want to read any of those , and then , um , please engage with us . If you have any feedback , any comments , if you found anything interesting , if you think there's something we really got wrong or you want to offer some additional perspective , we'd love to hear from you .

So reach out to us on social media , email at cables to clouds , uh , at gmailcom , comment on YouTube , anywhere you feel appropriate , Uh , TikTok even would be fine . Um , and with that , I just want to send one one last , uh , heartfelt thank you to Alex .

Um , so , thanks for thanks for going on this ride with us for the last year and a half , Alex , it's been great having you , um , really appreciate it .

Sad to see you go , but I completely understand and , uh , we will make sure to always kind of keep you in the foreground , so we might , uh , we might pull you in from time to time whenever you're available , Cause , uh , we always love to have you and have your commentary .

So with that , I will , uh I will , bid farewell and everyone reach out to Alex as well on social media . Just tell him how much you love him . He would love to hear that .

You can also visit our website for all the show notes at CablesToCloudscom . Thanks again for listening and see you next time .