Oh, I know, I was there (for 1 year, ironically). I was talking more generally.

Amazon is at the higher end of unsustainable, like most of the gamedev industry (for example), but on the company scale there's always more workers feeding into the top of the funnel, so they can still get the work done, they don't care that they're churning through employees.

Nevertheless, fundamentally most tech companies work on a similar model, they're just not as horrid as Amazon so the process isn't as obviously absurd. But it's still a broken system that I don't think anyone really knows how to fix, yet.

Since you were there:

What effect does that churn have on their technology? If the average developer only sticks around for one or two years before burning out, subject-matter experts are going to be really scarce, and once you don't have any of those you lose the ability to innovate in any meaningful sense.

I don't think Amazon and the other corporations perceive this as a broken system. It looks like they want/designed it like this.