Always have. Amazon has the same use and discard philosophy for their office workers and always had. They have firing quotas and cycle staff through constantly. In the tech industry it’s considered a right of passage to be fired from Amazon. They also have fired people on chemo for decreased performance.
On top of this they are also highly compartmentalized, which sounds like a nightmare to me. A few years ago we ran into a bug with one of their AWS services (I forget the specifics at this point, but it was with a network load balancer). It was a rather novel bug, but easy enough to reproduce, so I was able to give AWS support a working example. They quickly confirmed the bug and said it would be fixed as soon as possible.
Since it was an odd bug I asked AWS support if they could provide a high level description of the fix once it was implemented. It was then that they told me how their teams were so highly siloed and couldn’t really share details like that with each other. The support rep I worked with wouldn’t even know if the bug was fixed by a load balancer team, a more generic networking team, or some other team. They would only know the bug was fixed.
I used to work in Amazon (left after 10 years because it wore me down), but it wasn’t that compartmentalized.
I’m sure there were some teams that were like that but I could easily find another team, open a ticket, get a response and see their on calls investigate the issue. It was often times possible to look at their service metrics and source code to see if I could find the problem myself.
Support just can’t share that info because they don’t know what is considered a trade secret or internal detail vs what is public.
Always have. Amazon has the same use and discard philosophy for their office workers and always had. They have firing quotas and cycle staff through constantly. In the tech industry it’s considered a right of passage to be fired from Amazon. They also have fired people on chemo for decreased performance.
On top of this they are also highly compartmentalized, which sounds like a nightmare to me. A few years ago we ran into a bug with one of their AWS services (I forget the specifics at this point, but it was with a network load balancer). It was a rather novel bug, but easy enough to reproduce, so I was able to give AWS support a working example. They quickly confirmed the bug and said it would be fixed as soon as possible.
Since it was an odd bug I asked AWS support if they could provide a high level description of the fix once it was implemented. It was then that they told me how their teams were so highly siloed and couldn’t really share details like that with each other. The support rep I worked with wouldn’t even know if the bug was fixed by a load balancer team, a more generic networking team, or some other team. They would only know the bug was fixed.
I used to work in Amazon (left after 10 years because it wore me down), but it wasn’t that compartmentalized.
I’m sure there were some teams that were like that but I could easily find another team, open a ticket, get a response and see their on calls investigate the issue. It was often times possible to look at their service metrics and source code to see if I could find the problem myself.
Support just can’t share that info because they don’t know what is considered a trade secret or internal detail vs what is public.