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Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the
by mikert89 1y ago
Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running
Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged
- ajkjk 1y agois this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?
- mikert89 1y agoI worked there for a long time. It’s 100% true. They mostly need low level workers to keep the systems going.
- christhecaribou 1y agoI’ve only been at AWS for seven years, but it’s a completely different company than it was in 2018.
- cyanydeez 1y agoSo much technology is basically a public utility masquerading as a public growth company. It's time to start moving them into public ownership. It's either that or tax the fuck out of their profit centers.
- mikert89 1y agoThe hyper growth in AWS is gone, there’s a lot of clarity on what makes money, and a ton of technical debt that requires never ending support.
- daxfohl 1y agoIt's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.
- anthem2025 1y agoHuge numbers of people being put under stupid amounts of pressure to get small fractions of a percent in increased revenue.
- gaws 1y agoIt's true. Most of the "innovators" are either high up in the company, quit for greener pastures, or sit around waiting for their stocks to vest. Current employees have one job: maintenance.
- jedberg 1y agoThe way budgeting works at Amazon, every team contributes items to lines in a spreadsheet. Those get rolled up at every level all the way to the CEO, who then approves or denies, and then it all rolls back down. There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working). I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.
- synack 1y agoHow do they allocate headcount to different teams? How often is that rebalanced?
- nextworddev 1y agoThat even applies to Meta
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- raincom 1y agoIf that's the case, why they PIP a certain percentage of people every year? Same applies to Meta, too.
- mikert89 1y agoneed to crack the whip even for boring work
- woooooo 1y agoCultural inertia IMO. If youre growing headcount like gangbusters, the PIP quota is arguably reasonable as a forcing function for bad hires. When youre holding steady or shrinking it's much more toxic in terms of incentivizing politics and killing institutional knowledge. But it's "how we do things".