> In a company the size of Amazon, I'd think they could afford to hire at least one person who had all the knowledge of a programmer, but who did no coding of his/her own
You're assuming such a person could actually produce any answers. I think the big problem in situations like this is that internally they actually don't know for sure what is going wrong. You could probably talk to 5 different engineers and get 5 answers with viable theories. They have ideas, good ideas, but they aren't 100%, the answers are being determined by experiments. I think having a person running around communicating lots of possibly incorrect ideas about what is going on could easily make things worse.
One big issue, I think, is that Amazon's own status page appears to have been incorrect - it's had a lot of green ticks against things that people have reported as being completely down. There's going to need to be some follow up on this sub-issue down the track on top of everything else.
I really don't envy Amazon at all in this situation. In many ways they are doing things with AWS that nobody has ever done before, and they are probably hitting classes of problem that nobody ever anticipated. Of course, they promised more than they could deliver so it's their fault in the end, but I still think the nature of what they are doing is under appreciated.
You're assuming such a person could actually produce any answers. I think the big problem in situations like this is that internally they actually don't know for sure what is going wrong. You could probably talk to 5 different engineers and get 5 answers with viable theories. They have ideas, good ideas, but they aren't 100%, the answers are being determined by experiments. I think having a person running around communicating lots of possibly incorrect ideas about what is going on could easily make things worse.
One big issue, I think, is that Amazon's own status page appears to have been incorrect - it's had a lot of green ticks against things that people have reported as being completely down. There's going to need to be some follow up on this sub-issue down the track on top of everything else.
I really don't envy Amazon at all in this situation. In many ways they are doing things with AWS that nobody has ever done before, and they are probably hitting classes of problem that nobody ever anticipated. Of course, they promised more than they could deliver so it's their fault in the end, but I still think the nature of what they are doing is under appreciated.