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.
replyNever 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?
replyprobably the main thing is just having low-level engineers competent enough to run operations on the dozens of poorly maintained 50k LoC codebases per team, hundreds of bespoke internal dependencies, processes, and custom tooling. build ecosystems of 5+ languages.
replysecondarily its an industrialization of software development. the hiring process is where they try define the labor as a replaceable component. grab the best cogs you can annually for the lowest price, run them in the machine for 2-4 years and swap most of them out before they get too expensive, or specialized or uppity.