I was also at Amazon. We used a slightly modified version of scrum in that at least my team wasn't afraid to push back on ceremonies we didn't think we needed

I was also at Amazon. We used a slightly modified version of scrum in that at least my team wasn't afraid to push back on ceremonies we didn't think we needed. Sprint planning? virtually always. Sometimes without the planning poker deck. Daily standups? virtually always. Retrospectives? not as often as you might think. But... was decision making authority devolved to the team, SDM or TAM? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Our code was nothing but a series of queries to config settings and simple math. And even then it took weeks to get a decision on how things should work so we could tweak the config settings used in code that was now difficult to understand. Refactoring? pish! Unit tests? who wants to test every class? (i.e. - management didn't understand what unit tests or TDD were.) My experience with Amazon was we toed the line for the easy bits of Scrum (ceremonies, etc) but the stuff that seems to matter where wildly different between teams. If someone asked me "Does Amazon use Scrum?" I would say "in theory, but not really in practice." In 2016 when we all moved to the new issue tracking system, I sort of wished we could use Jira. For most of that year my team put Todos and Issues in the GIT repo along with the code because we were tired of losing days of info in the system as they kept reverting to known good versions and losing issue tracking data (because the format of the data was dependent on new code that was just reverted.) Though I do know that parts of amazon (AWS, Studios, etc.) were able to avoid the majority of the problems. I had hoped when Andy took over the whole shebang, things would get better. But after poking my head in last month, things as the bit-A seem to have gotten a bit worse: interns and SDE II's still do all the coding (one of the reasons i left; i'm not an intern and i like coding), but no-one on the team I was called in to help still hadn't read any of the TDD books and just assumed a unit test was a test you wrote to test a single class, because a class is a unit. But let me stop bitching about a company I don't work at anymore and say I don't disagree with you but it brings up a point I should have mentioned: "Scrum" probably means different things in different teams. Big companies have a lot of teams that might all say they're doing "Scrum", but they're doing it in a very different way. Some will ignore the intangible aspects of Scrum and Agile, and only use the tools (like Jira). Others will be adamant that every ceremony must be performed at exactly the right time. Most will try to do the best they can even though product management has their heads so far up... hold on... i should be nice... i have worked with product managers that are excellent, i just wish there were more of them. Yeah. Amazon is a big place with a lot of teams. They're probably all doing a version of scrum. And they're not using Jira. So we have an existence proof that it happens with at least big companies.