Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and keeping cloud costs down

Re:Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and keeping ... by taway2012 on Friday November 15, 2013 @02:50PM (#6741709)

Pretty interesting nugget there. I've always thought Amazon cloud services were overpriced. But I thought maybe the software engineering labor is expensive. The comment that "software engineering costs rounds down to zero" was extra information I didn't have that strengthens my gut feeling.

Just my two cents. I don't expect to change anybody's mind. :)

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Re:Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and keeping ... by Patrick_Devine on Friday November 15, 2013 @06:10PM (#6742744)

Everyone gets a raise!

Seriously. I'm not sure how well compensated AWS engineers are, however if the price engineering is just noise, why not pay the best in the industry?

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Re:Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and keeping ... by donavanm on Saturday November 16, 2013 @02:58AM (#6744115)

Assume an SDE/SE/NE costs $125,000 per year on average. Multiply that by 10,000 employees to reach $1.25B per year. A 3% raise costs you $37M dollars. Not an insubstantial amount of profit to give up.

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Re:Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and keeping ... by thinkling on Friday November 15, 2013 @08:59PM (#6743248)

Have you looked at what Amazon stock has done over the past few years?

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Re:Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and keeping ... by Patrick_Devine on Friday November 15, 2013 @11:09PM (#6743579)

Sure, but realistically what's the upside? Maybe your stock doubles if Amazon gets to be as big as Microsoft, but that's unlikely given how razor thin the margins are. Sure, it could happen, but if Amazon is spending several billion on data centers and warehouses every year, that's likely to make a dent in the stock price.

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