Tim Bray, now formerly a key part of Amazon Web Services:

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue.

And:

VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

Patience loading the page. Tim’s post made it to the front page of Hacker News over the weekend, big demand. It’ll load though.

A few additional links:

• Tim Bray’s Wikipedia page. Note the mention of Tim as one of the co-authors of the original XML specification.

• The Hacker News comments on this post. If you found the post interesting, you’ll no doubt appreciate the comments, likely representing some of your own thinking.