Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator
I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money"
Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible
It was like empire building at its finest
I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services
And the way amazon works with SOA even what seems like a small feature ends up being a couple services, a pizza team of 10 devs + SDM, the overhead is huge
Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by layoffs that did not surprise me
I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money"
Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible
It was like empire building at its finest
I would joke that the canary tests were the biggest customer for a lot of services
And the way amazon works with SOA even what seems like a small feature ends up being a couple services, a pizza team of 10 devs + SDM, the overhead is huge
Back when it was announced alexa org was being hit harder by layoffs that did not surprise me