Former Amazonian here. The learning is unmatched. I've been in different FAANGs but the way that Amazon pushes one to learn and challenge the status quo is unthinkable. I never saw "no, you can't do that, that system/business/area is sacred". Everything is up for grabs all the time. While there are pathological side effects to this (AWS promotion-per-launch, constantly battle for scope), the amount of knowledge one can gain in different areas from world-class people is pretty incredible. One of my systems at Amazon had more traffic in one day than my system at another FAANG had in 5 years. Working on a system that needs to support 5, 6, 7 MILLION TPs to perform complex operations was a great lesson for me.
Yet the internal tooling has been cited by several here as being one of the major time wasters and reasons they don't want to work there. It seems sacred to me...
I've been at AWS for almost 6 years now. It depends on what you mean by "internal tooling". But considering all the tooling I've used over the years at least 75% of the internal tooling that was in use when I joined is no longer in use as it has been replaced by newer, better versions of what came before.
Things definitely move at a slower pace than at new startups, but systems within AWS still change at a pretty fast pace for such a large organization. A fair number of employees don't stay past two years because of how compensation works, so they don't stay long enough to observe tooling changes, and are left with the assumption that tools are sacred. The reality is that it takes about two years between major rewritten versions of most tools. Then there is a leap forward, stasis for a while while feedback is gathered and the limits of the existing tooling are found, then in roughly two years there is another leap forward, etc. This churn requires work to keep up with, so some teams also fall behind if their product team prioritizes features over keeping up, so they may also be stuck on old versions of tooling for even longer.
So in summary I'd say yes in the short term some of the tools appear sacred. In the long term pretty much every internal tool or framework is discarded and replaced by newer versions on a fairly regular cadence.
I would say that 1) the experience varies by team 2) there's a lot of truth to that. But it's not a matter of being sacred, but the (sad) fact that Amazon being a ruthlessly data-driven business, investment on the tools and on reducing technical debt (real or perceived) is always prioritized down in OP1s.
Correct. If you're a PM on AWS and you launch a service, promotion chances will increase substantially. This is the main reason why the product portfolio is so bloated with services that are minor variations of other, existing services. Someone sees a minor use case there, PRFAQs it, voilà!
