My Visit to Amazon Santa Monica

I was invited to a conference at the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Santa Monica office. I spent the day there and I found it very interesting. With some revelations about Amazon and the local LA Tech scene.

First, traffic up to Santa Monica from Orange County was heavy, even leaving a bit later (around 9 am). The protests and illegals hiding have died down, so unlike the first week when traffic was COVID-19 empty (and awesome) that first week or so, everything was back to gridlock normal.

Exiting off the 10 Freeway to the AWS office, it was gargantuan. AWS, for those not familiar, is the real profit center for Amazon. The streaming services lose money as a vanity project for Bezos, the store itself is mildly profitable. However building out services for themselves, Amazon found that they could resell their computer services at a profit, and pretty much everyone uses AWS, or to a lesser extent Microsoft Azure or (third place) Google Cloud. They have pretty much everything you can think of as a service, including build your own to turnkey AI services, call centers, satellite ground centers, “drawers full of devices” for testing, and all the traditional disk storage, compute by the whatever, and more that cloud services offer.

Bear in mind that the Santa Monica offices were just regional for Southern California, not in any way HQ. AWS there took up the whole business complex, the “Water Garden” office complex was taken up almost entirely by Amazon. The parking garage was massive, and the inner courtyard had smooth jazz piped in and upholstered recliners and chairs and sofas scattered around. There were people on laptops doing whatever, but not very many.

Access to the office was very strictly regulated. We had to get passes, and get escorted by security which was 100% vibrant and diverse, basketball-American. They rode in the elevator with us to get us to the correct conference room and floors. The older ones (past fifty) all wore masks, for whatever reason. The younger ones did not bother with masks.

So, there is the diversity goal met. Security, much of it as far as I could see, makework. Amazon has plenty of money judging by what I saw. My office is your standard cubicle farm, not that I’m complaining. I like my job, my boss, and my co-workers. All of whom are very, very nice. Lunch room is nothing special, we do have Starbucks on hand, that’s about it. The Amazon people had a cafe, very fancy, we were not allowed to go in. There was a catered spread for us, very nice. It had been prepped by the Amazon culinary staff, who by a hurried glance also seemed to be 100% diverse, basketball-American.

I saw one older White guy while I was there, he was part of the Amazon staff. Everyone else, both attendees/presenters (either from Amazon or partners), and Amazon staffers I could observe walking around, were Indian or East Asian. [Save for the one White dude in his twenties I observed on a couch talking to an Indian female co-worker, and the one they/them female, I think, AWS person. Much like Saturday Night Live “Its Pat” I was not sure.]

Santa Monica seemed to marginally less overrun by the homeless than a few years past. I did see those robot delivery vehicles rumbling around. I assume like the Lime scooters that plagued urban centers until the homeless stole all of them and dumped them in the LA River, or local equivalent body of water, this is another tech-scam that will dupe yield crazy investors and turn out a giant bust.

Nevertheless, I did not see any homeless or criminals taking the things for scrap or the food inside. So there was that.

AWS however was the only tech company I saw driving through Santa Monica and Venice. It being rush hour when I left (no sense in networking with a bunch of subcontinentals and Chinese as a White guy), I drove through Santa Monica and Venice to get to Lincoln Highway / US 1, and then south via Jefferson to Vista Del Mar, site of the most romantic drive in Los Angeles. On the one hand, the demolished homes for the Airport Expansion, and on the other Dockweiler State Beach, with the Hyperion Sewage Treatment plan, and oil tankers and bulk shipping carriers anchored off shore waiting to enter the port of Los Angeles or Long Beach. Lets not forget the jets screaming overhead as they climb after take off. If that is not romantic, I don’t know what it folks.

At any rate, I drove through a good part of Santa Monica and Venice where there were just ten years ago lots and lots of tech companies, wanting to still be in California but escaping the Bay Area blight and costs. There was just nothing. Boarded up and vacant buildings, almost no place not even the tourist stuff open any more.

The sun is setting on California’s tech ventures. Amazon certainly has money, and a fairly large staff. But how long before they start laying off more people? A lot of the tech ventures in Santa Monica and Venice were focused on doing things for Studios: movie and TV websites, games, promotions; longer term tech ventures, and so on. It would seem that Amazon and Apple are just eating up that space, at the expense of smaller firms that actually can sometimes hire our guys.

For a lot of White dudes, myself included, tech was the new Wild West Frontier. Not so gatekept that people of modest backgrounds without “who sent you” being someone powerful, and a place where hard and smart work could pay off. That has come to an end, for now. Certainly in Socal, where it is a closed Indian / Chinese shop only. It is really astonishing to see how quickly Indians have taken over in the tech industry, backed by endless amounts of cheap and shoddy manpower. No one who has ever had the misfortune of working with Indians on a tech project is happy. It is mostly: have them build it, and then spend a few years or more fixing everything.

Where are White dudes going to go? I don’t know. There currently does not seem to be any place for us to go. What opportunities are there, when we are not tribal and don’t gatekeep our own spaces and every other group does just exactly that?

Your thoughts are welcome.