Amazon Lab126's Alexa team had following cross-related issues: 1. terrible tech stack. Absolutely poorly maintained pipeline 2. generally unenthused employee

Amazon Lab126's Alexa team had following cross-related issues: 1. terrible tech stack. Absolutely poorly maintained pipeline 2. generally unenthused employees 3. office politicking and broken culture 4. unbelievable amount of penny-pinching and poor budgeting I had a colleague within the Alexa team calling the place some sort of purgatory for people who couldn't join elsewhere. Another colleague went to Google Brain (when it was not as prestigious) and told me it was not the money that made him leave. Individually, they may have been good engineers and researchers, but the team was broken. What is surprising is not that Alexa failed. What is surprising is that it managed to even build a half-decent product that was, at a point, a leading AI product and platform.