When I was at AWS over a decade ago, there was endless complaints about the elevator algorithms by engineers, with the usual egotistical tech-bro insistence that they could do better. Things used to really suck at lunchtime when folks would flood to the elevators and be stuck waiting for ages. Those same geniuses could never figure out the benefit of staggering lunch times.
Someone got really tired of it, and somehow organised a hackathon weekend, with the elevator company, and let teams of engineers have at it.
Every single team failed to come up with better algorithms. All the complaints stopped dead.
Is AWS an environment where attempts to discover improvements are commonly mocked?
I don't think the disdain was for seeking improvements. It was for the techbros thinking they can solve any problem, even in domains they have never worked in, better than anyone actually working in said domain.
The disdain on my part was very much towards the egotistical tech bros who were convinced they could do better in fields they had no background in.
It used to get really tiring seeing the rhetoric about every single field of expertise. So many tech bros that were simultaneously experts in law, geopolitics, elevators, building codes, architecture, sports, transportation, finance, global logistics, and beyond. Literally from one second to the next. Any time anything wasn't 100% perfect, it was because the people working in the field were idiots and they could have done it so much better.