Comment by 33MHz-i486

17 hours ago

the way in which Mantle was built is highlighted internally by PEs as some sort of triumph but really its a fairly tone deaf indicted of AWS’s engineering culture ... “To achieve a meaningful result in a reasonable amount of time we had to break nearly ever constraint that we force all other engineers to work under. good luck to you plebs of L6 and below”

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33MHz-i486

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darkwater  9 hours ago

I'm going to play devil's advocate here: _what if_ most of lower level engineers are actually not able to self-organize themselves like this dedicated, I bet hand-picked group of PE can? I'm pretty sure AWS ruthless culture would gladly use less middle-managers and be swifter in time to market if it were so easy, no? What works for a single, highly-focused project (or a handful of similar situations) doesn't scale when you have to take care of bazillion customers, do boring/smaller tasks and keep the machine ticking.

  • coredog64  2 hours ago

    Having seen how the sausage is made, Amazon's internal engineering culture is a textbook example of the principal/agent problem. You only get a raise from a promo, and you only get a promo from scope. It's way easier for management to demonstrate scope and so those folks build out empires of crap. In the best case they're just consuming oxygen, but I have definitely seen orgs created that were a negative influence on productivity.

    • darkwater  2 hours ago

      Never worked for BigTech, so I'mm really not in my territory, but I wonder what is the purpose of all those interviews to get "the best of the best" and then let these things happen. What are the incentives for the management layer?