Ex-Amazonian here, so take what I say however you will. The back-ended equity structure (i.e., you only vest 5% of your equity grant in the first 12mo) isn’t g

Ex-Amazonian here, so take what I say however you will. The back-ended equity structure (i.e., you only vest 5% of your equity grant in the first 12mo) isn’t great when you’re comparing it with a standard vesting schedule as an employee. As an employee if you’re given two identical grants for two identical companies with the same future prospects then you take the one that gives you that equity sooner. But the rhetoric is usually that equity is meant to be an employee retention tool. So from that perspective the AMZN vesting structure makes much more sense to me than what is common elsewhere. As for the service dynamic: the whole “2 pizza team” thing is both a blessing and a curse IMO. Once you launch a service at AWS’s scale you’ve immediately got tens of thousands of users. And AWS takes stability/availability/scalability incredibly seriously. I think it’s more likely that team is now in a permanent operations mode fixing weird edge cases you find at scale and keeping the lights on. If it was a staff retention issue like you suggest then you’d see the platform plagued with reliability issues and services being shut down. But that doesn’t happen. Even SimpleDB is still available for use (though well hidden).