It’s kinda crazy that the whole FEE thing was treated like a lightbulb moment for the company when everyone else in the industry had them.

Amazon moves incredibly fast when it comes to products and incredibly slow when it comes to employee growth. They are treating it like a lightbulb moment, but several of the people involved in this have been working on it for a decade.

Reality is, they didn't want to pay FEE's big money because they weren't worth it, and now the company is starving for good UX and they want to pretend they invented a solution to the problem by creating a role that's existed at Google for more than 10 years.

I hope there is buy in from at least the Product Manager level as well. The issues are deeper than just a new coat of paint.

What changed?

Previously Amazon separated frontend focused engineers (WDE's) and software engineers (SDE's) but the former had a lower payscale than the latter. The end result, every single time, is that great FEE's would simply work at Amazon for 1-2 years and move to Google or Facebook where they were paid considerably more.

Amazon finally rectified it by introducing the FEE role, which has the same pay scale as SDE's. Perhaps more importantly, the WDE role terminated at WDE III and even that was incredibly difficult to achieve.