Re:AWS just went multi-cloud
by julianozen on Thursday December 03, 2020 @03:31PM
(#25294358)
From my time at Amazon, I wasn't really a part of these decisions so the following is just my anecdotal perception those businesses and how often teams had things like lunches, team events and hired staff
In general, if the underlying business is profitable or if the product is experimental Amazon will allocate a larger budget to the team
- Retail has narrow profits and is fairly well established -> Lower budgets
- AWS is very profitable -> High budget
- Alexa (while I was there) was growing very fast and was trying crazy initiatives -> High budget
Contrast this to my impression of Google, where it seems like every team has roughly the same perks but only a few make money
I'm curious about how individual teams within Amazon have funding problems.
Amazon overall seems to have plenty of money and they seem like the sort of place that wouldn't have a problem dissolving a team that isn't meeting their goals (I'm assuming they'd dissolve the team and then move people they want to keep to other teams, etc - they seem like they'd be very data driven about what teams to keep, not malicious).
Can anyone shed light on how a team might develop funding / budget issues at a place like Amazon?