I'm a long time Amazonian. The big problem is legacy employees run every part of the company. Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years. In Alexa, the people running the core ML teams have been in Alexa since it started. Most people in decision making positions just got there first (10-15 years ago)
The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team.
The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets.
If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions.
AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time
The software engineering paradigms used within the company create brittle rube goldberg machines of events flowing everywhere in the company. Almost all of them are on maintenance mode, where the oncall burns out the engineers and prevents them from creating new products. There is no knowledge sharing between team members. Legacy team members guard their technical platform knowledge to solidify their place on the team.
The engineers themselves are not students of computer science, but just crunch out tickets.
If Amazon wants to change they need to remove a significant amount of tenured employees, and actually promote young engineers into decision making positions.
AWS hasnt released an innovative product in a really long time