There is a massive amount of overhead in any big company. Each person can manage only so many people, and so that really puts limits on how much you can flatten the middle management layer.

Combine that with each company having effectively invented “Not Invented Here” before anyone else in the world had heard of that term, and you have massive amounts of bloat.

Two jobs ago, I was working at AWS on the EC2-Chronos team that was responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all Amazon and AWS regions, availability zones, and data centers. Including the classified and isolated regions. The people I worked with were some of the best I’ve ever known, and I thought we had really good managers. I even liked my skip-level manager. And I knew some of the others as well, and had even spent a fair amount of time listening to Peter DeSantis and other internationally known luminaries on the weekly ops calls.

From Peter on down, I never saw anything or anyone that I would call bloat. If anything, I felt that his organization was too lean.

Problem was, while I had extensive experience with the NTP protocol going back to 2003, it turned out that > 99.999% of the daily job involved dealing with ancient proprietary build and deployment tools that were created twenty years ago, and had done nothing but accumulate cruft since then. And I think that was true for just about everyone who worked at AWS. There are much more modern tools and methods that have been created in the decades since, but people in AWS weren’t allowed to use them, because they weren’t the blessed proprietary tools.

And RTO had to come from somewhere. And after that, it was mandatory co-location with your boss.

And then some person thought it would be a good idea to start measuring performance by lines of code committed per developer per week, and everyone had to commit code. Didn’t we kill that idea like nearly twenty years ago, too?

Anyway, I got out of there as fast as I could.

There are things that are deeply, deeply wrong at Amazon. And AWS. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the low-level technical people.