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