In case it isn’t completely obvious from this, it is indeed hellish to work there. Most of AWS has a 2 reviewer requirement. If AI is writing most of the code (and it is because most Amazon code is copypasta boilerplate) you need 3 developers to sign off to ship anything. But of course due to headcount attrition, managers have ~1.5 developers to a project. Meanwhile the L8 manager is doing nothing except stack ranking each level of engineers according to number of commits merged & customer facing features shipped, and firing 15% of the bottom at the end of each year. There is no notion of subject matter expertise or technical depth, theyre happy to replace whoever with fresh-grads (theyre all just cogs anyway right!). Between that and voluntary departures, teams having 80-100% turnover every 5 years is basically par.
Also while this is happening most developers are getting constantly hammered by operational issues and critical security tasks because 1) the legacy toolchain imports 6 different language package ecosystems and 2)no one ever pays down tech debt in legacy code until its a high severity ticket count in a KPI dashboard visible to the senior management.
The thing is, this management philosophy worked when AWS knew what they needed to build and just needed to execute with top notch operations.
But now with AI, they are getting disrupted. Most AWS services might become obsolete, why does an ai need these janky higher levels abstractions AWS piles on.
So now they need innovation, but the company isn’t set up for it. They are forcing short deadlines for product launches that don’t matter
its not even AI. most of the cloud offerings are commodities now.
the marginal technological direction is determined by middle managers whoes primary motivation is “what new customer facing feature can I launch at this years re:invent and build a little empire” (of course this is a shrinking offering as tech debt and complexity pile up)
junior engineers are burned and churned on execution, seniors are project managers, principals just do high level reviews & high level fire fighting (note not actually leading the tech)
director and above just their spend time on “what to kill” or “who to fire” as priorities change every 6 months