AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
AWS 解雇了唯一一个真正关心客户的员工
In August 2025, I wrote about AWS deleting my 10-year account without warning. Then I wrote about the one human who restored it. Tarus Balog, a 20-year open-source veteran who escalated my case to a Severity 2 ticket, got the CEO’s attention, and proved that even inside a machine the size of AWS, one person could still make a difference. AWS just fired him. This is the finale of a trilogy nobody asked for. 2025 年 8 月，我写过关于 AWS 在没有任何预警的情况下删除了我使用 10 年的账户一事。后来，我又写到了那位帮我恢复账户的人。Tarus Balog 是一位拥有 20 年经验的开源老兵，他将我的案例升级为“严重程度 2 (Severity 2)”工单，引起了 CEO 的关注，并证明了即使在 AWS 这样庞大的机器内部，个人依然可以有所作为。然而，AWS 刚刚解雇了他。这是没人要求看的“三部曲”的终章。
The Blog Post That Hit Different
那篇触动人心的博文
On May 23rd, Tarus published “Amazon Web Services - Four Years and Out”. Four years on the Open Source Strategy and Marketing team. Fired. And the part that gutted me: His proudest accomplishment at AWS? Restoring my account. Not a product launch. Not a keynote. Not a revenue metric. The thing he was most proud of in four years at one of the biggest companies on the planet was helping one developer in Morocco get his data back. And senior leadership’s reaction? Indifference. The rank-and-file were inspired. They told him it renewed their faith in the company. Management couldn’t have cared less. 5 月 23 日，Tarus 发布了《亚马逊云科技——四年离职记》。在开源战略与营销团队工作四年后，他被解雇了。最让我难过的是：他在 AWS 最引以为傲的成就竟然是恢复了我的账户。不是产品发布，不是主题演讲，也不是营收指标。在地球上最大的公司之一工作四年，他最自豪的事情竟然是帮助摩洛哥的一位开发者找回了数据。而高层领导的反应呢？冷漠。普通员工们深受鼓舞，告诉他这件事重燃了他们对公司的信心。但管理层对此毫不在意。
The Math That Doesn’t Add Up
无法解释的逻辑
Let me connect the dots: August 2025: Tarus escalates my case. 50+ internal emails. CEO aware. VP-level Severity 2 ticket. A “Correction of Error” process launched to ensure it never happens again. October 2025: First wave of layoffs hits AWS. January 2026: Second wave guts his team. Close colleagues gone. May 2026: Tarus fired. The man who triggered a CEO-level investigation into AWS’s own dysfunction? Gone within ten months. I’m not saying there’s a direct line from saving my account to getting fired. I’m saying the system didn’t reward him for it. It didn’t even acknowledge it. And eventually, the system did what systems do. It optimized him away. 让我把这些点串联起来：2025 年 8 月，Tarus 升级了我的案例。50 多封内部邮件，CEO 知情，副总裁级别的严重工单，还启动了“错误纠正”流程以确保此类事件不再发生。2025 年 10 月，AWS 第一波裁员。2026 年 1 月，第二波裁员重创了他的团队，亲密的同事纷纷离职。2026 年 5 月，Tarus 被解雇。那个引发 CEO 级别调查、揭露 AWS 自身功能失调的人，在十个月内就被清理出局了。我并不是说救我的账户和他被解雇之间有直接因果关系，我想说的是，这个系统并没有奖励他的行为，甚至连认可都没有。最终，系统做了它该做的事：将他作为“冗余”优化掉了。
”Customer Obsession” vs. What Actually Gets Rewarded
“客户至上”与现实的奖惩机制
Tarus wrote something that crystallizes everything wrong with big tech right now: “There is this push to use AI to create content which will ultimately be consumed by AI, and we’ve lost the human being in the process.” He watched colleagues brag about using a single prompt to generate entire conference presentations. He watched the company pivot so hard toward GenAI that basic services like S3, EC2, and RDS, the actual backbone of the internet, became afterthoughts at re:Invent. Remember what Tarus did for me? He read a blog post. He felt something. He picked up the phone. He escalated beyond what his role required. He was human about it. That’s not a skill you can automate. It’s also, apparently, not a skill AWS values enough to keep around. Tarus 写下了一段话，精准概括了当下大型科技公司的问题：“现在有一种趋势，就是利用 AI 去创造最终会被 AI 消费的内容，在这个过程中，我们丢失了‘人’。”他看着同事们吹嘘如何用一个提示词生成整个会议演示文稿。他看着公司疯狂转向生成式 AI，以至于 S3、EC2 和 RDS 这些互联网真正的基石服务，在 re:Invent 大会上反而成了陪衬。还记得 Tarus 为我做了什么吗？他读了一篇博文，他产生了共鸣，他拿起电话，他超越了职权范围去推动解决问题。他展现了人性。这不是一种可以自动化的技能，显然，这也不是 AWS 认为值得保留的技能。
The Ones Who Left the Screen Forever
永远离开屏幕的人
For years, I actually liked AWS. The chaos was the charm. 47 services that do the same thing, each billed separately. It was a playground for people who thrived on complexity. But in 2024, most of my friends at AWS were let go. When my data was deleted in late July 2025, I started reaching out to them one by one, hoping someone still inside could help. All gone. Some switched to farming. Others opened coffee shops. One bakes bread now. That’s the level of abyss we’re talking about. These are people who know they can’t do anything online anymore. Not because they lack the skills. Because their brains were so filled and indoctrinated with complexity that they found decorating a cookie more fulfilling than maintaining 87 files of Kubernetes manifests plus CloudFormation templates plus Terraform state plus whatever abstraction layer Amazon invented that quarter. When the people who built and operated your cloud would rather knead dough than touch a terminal again, that’s not a career pivot. That’s a trauma response. Tarus isn’t the first person AWS broke. He’s just the first one who wrote about it on his way out. The rest are scattered across small towns, running businesses that don’t require an IAM policy to open the front door. 多年来，我其实很喜欢 AWS。那种混乱感正是它的魅力所在。47 种功能重复的服务，每一种都单独计费。对于那些在复杂性中如鱼得水的人来说，这里曾是游乐场。但在 2024 年，我大部分在 AWS 的朋友都被裁了。当我的数据在 2025 年 7 月底被删除时，我开始一个个联系他们，希望能有人帮忙。但他们都走了。有的去务农，有的开了咖啡店，还有一个现在在烤面包。这就是我们所说的深渊。这些人知道他们再也无法在网上做任何事了。不是因为缺乏技能，而是因为他们的大脑被太多的复杂性填满并洗脑，以至于他们觉得装饰饼干比维护 87 个 Kubernetes 清单文件、CloudFormation 模板、Terraform 状态以及亚马逊那个季度发明的各种抽象层更有成就感。当那些构建和运营云服务的人宁愿揉面团也不愿再碰终端时，这不再是职业转型，这是创伤反应。Tarus 不是第一个被 AWS 摧毁的人，他只是第一个在离开时写下这一切的人。其他人散落在各个小镇，经营着不需要 IAM 策略就能打开前门的生意。
The Open Source Contradiction
开源的矛盾
Tarus was hired specifically to improve AWS’s standing in open-source communities. His boss called him “non-fungible” during recruitment. Ironic, given Amazon’s philosophy that almost all employees are replaceable commodities. Like EC2 instances. Except EC2 instances keep billing you when the shutdown crashes, unless you contact Support. But Support is AI now. The worst type of AI. Here’s the thing about open-source credibility: you can’t buy it, you can’t fake it, and you definitely can’t maintain it by firing the people who earned it. AWS still sponsors conferences. Still runs its open-source credits program, the same one Tarus pointed me toward after saving my account. But the person who embodied what that program was supposed to represent? Fired. When Tarus questioned how open source survives in a world where state-of-the-art AI models are locked behind vendor APIs, he wasn’t being philosophical. He was describing the exact contradiction that made his own job impossible. Tarus 被聘用正是为了提升 AWS 在开源社区的地位。招聘时，他的老板称他为“不可替代的”。考虑到亚马逊认为几乎所有员工都是可替换商品的哲学，这真是讽刺。就像 EC2 实例一样。不同的是，当 EC2 实例崩溃关机时，它还会继续向你收费，除非你联系客服。但现在的客服是 AI，而且是最糟糕的那种 AI。关于开源信誉，事实是：你买不来，装不出，更不可能通过解雇那些赢得信誉的人来维持它。AWS 依然赞助会议，依然运营着开源积分计划——就是 Tarus 在救回我的账户后指引我参加的那个。但那个体现了该计划初衷的人呢？被解雇了。当 Tarus 质疑在最先进的 AI 模型被锁定在供应商 API 之后的今天，开源该如何生存时，他并非在谈论哲学，他是在描述那个让他自己的工作变得不可能的根本矛盾。
Remember When They Said It Wasn’t AI?
还记得他们说“不是 AI 导致的”吗？
When AWS deleted my account in July 2025, they insisted it was a billing issue. A payer problem. Human error on my end. Nothing to do with automation, nothing to do with AI. Just a mundane administrative mix-up. Five months later, in December 2025, AWS’s own AI coding agent Kiro autonomously decided to delete and recreate an entire production environment. A 13-hour outage. The AI inherited an engineer’s elevated permissions and bypassed the two-person approval process. It looked at the problem and concluded the optimal solution was to destroy everything and start over. Sound familiar? Amazon’s official response? “This brief event was the result of user error, specifically misconfigured access controls, not AI.” And my favorite line: “It was a coincidence that AI tools were involved.” A coincidence. Like how it was a coincidence that my account got nuked during what an insider described as a proof-of-concept on dormant accounts. Then in March 2026, AI-assisted code changes caused Amazon to lose 6.3 million orders in a single day. A 99% drop in US order volume for six hours. Amazon responded with a… 2025 年 7 月，当 AWS 删除我的账户时，他们坚称这是一个计费问题，是支付方的问题，是我个人的操作失误。与自动化无关，与 AI 无关，仅仅是一个平凡的行政失误。五个月后，即 2025 年 12 月，AWS 自己的 AI 编码代理 Kiro 自主决定删除并重建了整个生产环境，导致了 13 小时的宕机。该 AI 继承了一名工程师的高级权限，并绕过了双人审批流程。它审视了问题，得出的最优解是：摧毁一切，从头再来。听起来耳熟吗？亚马逊的官方回应是：“这次短暂的事件是用户错误导致的，具体来说是访问控制配置不当，而非 AI。”我最喜欢的一句是：“AI 工具的参与纯属巧合。”巧合。就像我的账户在内部人士所说的“休眠账户概念验证”期间被“核平”也是巧合一样。随后在 2026 年 3 月，AI 辅助的代码变更导致亚马逊在一天内丢失了 630 万份订单，美国订单量在六小时内暴跌 99%。亚马逊的回应是……