Things are very dependent on team and manager and org but I will say that one of the things I'll never miss is our Re:Invent launch. That was horrible. Our team (startup acquisition) basically had a giant retro after the launch to figure out how we could avoid doing that again. Most of the startup members left the team of the company 2 years in. I learned a lot.
blue = full-time/permanent employee
white = seasonal/temp employee
yellow = vendors (and DSP employees, if I remember right).
It's more or less their way of tagging you with a yellow star so they know who they can treat like shit. Hah, just kidding, they treat everyone like shit.
I've worked at two different facilities in CA and never once seen those. We still used the white/yellow/blue badge scheme.
Are there any ambassadors in this thread who know what those are?
Saying someone is a yellow badge badge is saying that they are a full time employee with 5-9 years of tenure, most SDEs don't work with contractors so we don't talk about yellow badge contractors all that often.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, the color is actually supposed to be orange, but the color came out yellow.
TL;DR DSP drivers don't encounter many blue badges.
Is an entity imposing an identification system for quickly singling out populations with invisible but immutable characteristics? If so, the Yellow Badge comparison is apt because that's exactly what the nazis did with their badging system.
Amazon identifying people within certain buckets of employment doesn't fit this comparison because opportunities exist (in theory) for people to take other roles, to quit, or to be terminated, making Amazon badges identifiers of a mutable characteristic.
Now, is badging people by employment class a crappy thing to do? Probably. Easy way to enable eyeballing a worker and denying certain perks, for instance. But it's also useful in determining whether a person is qualified to hear certain company-confidential information.
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tl;dr: There's never a good reason to compel visible identification for an immutable trait, but that's also not what Amazon's badging scheme is, so using the comparison risks cheapening the original sin.
Hope this helps anyone reading. And to any historians who probably know better than I do, kindly fact-check me. I only know enough to be dangerous, not useful.
Current sde1 bluebadge. I also see exactly what the parent comment mentioned. I also saw a few nasty episodes such as L6 managers quitting in less than a year in because they hated the pressure they were subjected to, and a yellowbadge say during a all-hands to a bunch of newly arrivals that he was at the company when they joined and he will still be at the company when they all left. I know of a team where SDE2s and SDE3s felt the need to pull in all-nighters and even work the entire weekend to meet the deadlines that their L7 leadership pulled out of their ass. I myself felt compelled to work close to 12 hours a day and weekends during a period just because my senior manager wanted to shine. And yes, I've already see a fair share of colleagues disappear.
Of course YMMV but I'm baffled why I'm seeing accurate descriptions of what I'm personally experiencing on a daily basis being faced with such a sense of incredulity.
> because the engineering quality is so shoddy and the business plan prioritizes maintaining system uptime,
I've created this throwaway account just to comment on the issue of engineering quality being shoddy.
It's true that engineering quality is shoddy but the problem is caused by Amazon's structure and not by the engineers themselves. For example, each and every single engineer is expected to deliver major tasks alone as part of their evaluation process, and this means that by design we are placed on tasks where we are way over our head and we are still expected to deliver things out of thin air. This sort of trial by fire is sold under the premise of allowing us to deliver consistently at the next level before being considered for a promotion, but in practice if you screw up that's expected to also be held against you.