Much of my experience before I left and from what I’ve heard isn’t that Amazon as a whole is losing engineers. They’re losing them from critical services.
Some of those “foundational services” can have some teams that have really brutal on call and ops load. They get to a point where it’s so bad you can’t fix it because you’re constantly in a cycle of spending so much time keeping the lights on that you can’t automate anything (and for those teams leadership will never hear of decreasing work load). And you constantly have a churn of people so you need to spend time training the new guys on top of keeping the lights on.
Then the team fails and directors fold the responsibilities onto a new team and the cycle starts again.
And that’s where the brain drain hits the hardest.
It also doesn’t help that there’s a massive amount of red tape you need to clear to build anything. It’s easier in AWS than retail but it’s still an awful amount compared to other places.
Much of my experience before I left and from what I’ve heard isn’t that Amazon as a whole is losing engineers. They’re losing them from critical services.
Some of those “foundational services” can have some teams that have really brutal on call and ops load. They get to a point where it’s so bad you can’t fix it because you’re constantly in a cycle of spending so much time keeping the lights on that you can’t automate anything (and for those teams leadership will never hear of decreasing work load). And you constantly have a churn of people so you need to spend time training the new guys on top of keeping the lights on.
Then the team fails and directors fold the responsibilities onto a new team and the cycle starts again.
And that’s where the brain drain hits the hardest.
It also doesn’t help that there’s a massive amount of red tape you need to clear to build anything. It’s easier in AWS than retail but it’s still an awful amount compared to other places.