Thread regarding Macy's Inc. layoffs

Moving to a public cloud is no longer hard. Many companies have done it. Many tools have been created to make it easier and easier. The problem sets have really nothing new that haven't been solved.

Upton Sinclair has this quote: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"

Macy's Tech has many managers and ICs whose jobs are tied into maintaining the legacy tech stack, IBM contracts, Infosys contracts, etc. The ones who wanted to do the right technical things have left Macy's for the sake of their own career growth.

Lastly, the cost of migration and maintaining public or hybrid cloud is not cheaper than on-prem. However, you'll definitely go a lot faster and product better products. But it is not cheaper. Macy's doesn't seem to have the needs for tech to go faster & better so there's no incentive to do the migration quickly since the whole company overindex of "cheaper" at this moment of time.

I have observed Macy's trying to use Heroku, GCP, Softlayer/Bluemix, and Azure. It's tragic to see talented bi-coastal teams making small wins through heroic efforts knowing that they're being actively sabotaged by their own management who are paid-off by IBM to maintain the huge contracts.

A bit of advise: Don't compare Macy's with companies like Etsy who really believes that their survival depends on being fast and agile by using cloud technologies. Macy's has given up. Your leadership won't say openly, of course, but that's what had happened. If you are ok with that, stay at Macy's. If you're not, find something else. Complaining in this board won't change a thing.

Etsy was traditional data center company till 2018. They undertook GCP migration and went live by mid 2019. Look at their technical CEO and you will understand why they sucreded.

My guess is before holiday 2022.

Already switching to g suite so shouldn’t be too far off

How can they move to the Cloud if they still have processes running on the mainframe or legacy dbs like Teradata and DB2?

I have seen this at Macy's when I was there. Mediocre managers, directors, and VPs chasing the last buzz word (cloud, big data, automation, AI, etc). They had no technical expertise and let Indian contractors run the show with abysmal results.

They need to start from the basis. Get a few qualified all-american software engineers and have them review the system and make it modern. Then, you can start innovating.

One thing at the time.

Etsy was born in the Cloud. No legacy systems to worry about

Migrating a Monolith to the Cloud
Tuesday, March 26, 2019 - 9:00 am–9:30 am by Keyur Govande, Etsy
https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon19americas/presentation/govande

After over a decade of hosting itself in the data center, Etsy.com moved to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2018. In this talk, he will go over:

why the company decided to make the transition
our architectural approaches to migrating a large monolith, and the difficulties we faced gaining confidence in them
the assumptions we never knew about and had to fix: in the application code, the infrastructure tooling, and our processes
cutting over to GCP, safely
things we learnt running there for the last 9+ months

Keyur is the Chief Architect at Etsy. He has led multiple large architectural changes during his tenure, most recently the move to Google Cloud. Prior to this role, he was a key member of the Systems Engineering team helping scale the site and keeping PHP, Gearman, MySQL, Memcached, Redis, and the Linux kernel running smoothly.