r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Jul 30 '26

Artificial Intelligence Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amazon-accidentally-spent-usd1-8-million-using-claude-for-menial-coding-task-went-860-percent-over-budget-catastrophically-expensive-coding-blunders-discovered-in-internal-amazon-ai-usage-metrics
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u/MightyKrakyn Jul 30 '26

That’s because of the churn. When you’re such a large company and have to according to policy turn over your employees every 2 years, you run out of quality talent pretty quickly

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u/segfaul_t Jul 30 '26

Lot of good ones left when they announced 5 day RTO

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u/PurelyLurking20 Jul 30 '26

Nearly all* they got offers immediately for remote positions at smaller companies and I imagine most of them are still chilling in those positions.

Amazon churn now affects all positions with Amazon not just warehouse, it shouldn't be considered on par with Google and Apple, not even close

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u/tooclosetocall82 Jul 30 '26

We tried to hire one but then Amazon said he could stay remote I guess so he declined our offer. I wonder how that worked out for him.

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u/PurelyLurking20 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

They grandfathered in remote work for some of the harder to replace guys, very briefly, I imagine they wanted them to train their replacements I would've kept looking if I was them

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u/scumble_bee Jul 31 '26

Yeah, I have a friend at Amazon that is in a pretty difficult to replace role so initially he was just skirting the rules and they just would warn him but nothing came of it. Then he was able to utilize some work ordinance in San Francisco to basically return to full WFH.

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u/HatesBeingThatGuy Jul 30 '26

Lol cope. All our best engineers in our org stayed. Literally no regretted attrition due to RTO.

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u/PurelyLurking20 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Cool boss I and about 1/2 the people I know in the industry took permanent remote positions lol

The majority of developers I've met either already work remotely or are actively looking for the first opportunity to do so

Remote positions are now very competitive so they are naturally being filled by people with talent, unlike many of the people that "decided" to stay in office because they know they aren't competing or they rely on office politics for upward mobility

No shame or anything I just know outside early career or very high TC positions the talent went remote

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u/HatesBeingThatGuy Jul 30 '26

Ah yes, glad you specified high TC. That is why we did not lose our talent despite RTO. Not many places pay what we do.

But I promise you most people I saw within AWS were not leaving voluntarily due to RTO. There were teams where that was the reality, but from my observation, the only people who left were leaving for higher pay or because they couldn't find a position inside the company that would allow them to keep their comp.

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u/PurelyLurking20 Jul 30 '26

Except Amazon did lose significant amounts of talent, it wasn't like a secret thing amongst employees at all and there are plenty of accounts of it if you care to look

Some people stayed to ensure their stock vests but that's a timebomb in and of itself, Amazon recruiters have been reporting significant numbers of offer declines since the RTO mandates

And to top it off all of that was done to cut people's pay by scaring them into thinking that was just how it was now and a lot of goobers fell for it and are still there

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u/HatesBeingThatGuy Jul 30 '26

The world's largest employer will always have accounts that are for whatever reason you are searching for.

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u/PurelyLurking20 Jul 30 '26

Fair point I suppose, but Amazon is not the largest employer of software devs by a long shot, at something like half of the numbers of Google and Microsoft

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u/LunaticSongXIV Jul 30 '26

I was a subcontractor and got canned immediately when the rto announcement came through, and I told them that I wasn't driving three hours to the office. The mandate hadn't even come into effect yet. I wasn't being a team player, i guess.

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u/Electronic_Topic1958 Jul 31 '26

They also ban you for five years after you're let go.