The problem is that forced attrition doesn't create a dynamic, competitive environment full of go-getters. It creates an environment full of treacherous bums who work as little as possible, and spend all of their efforts making sure they look good and don't take the blame for any failures.

You can see the results of this in Amazon's consistently poor companywide performance in every arena. They're even managing to lose ground to Microsoft in cloud computing. It's pathetic.

When you have the scale of Amazon, you don’t need a lot of go getters. Just a relatively few and a lot of grunts. One CS leetCode grinder at the L5 level is replaceable with another.

I think this is really important point. Somehow lot of folks are missing it. As if each engineer is responsible for launching a new Amazon service every year. I have heard and met many current Amazon software engineer. Most of their job description sound rather crappy routine work even for me earning 1/3rd salary of Amazon.

I surmise large number of engineers there are just collecting bounty on Amazon monopoly on cloud infra. Their skill and work is not more challenging or interesting than hundreds of thousand engineers at 20-30% income of Amazon in boring enterprise IT shop.

That’s not just true of engineers. It took years for a friend who worked there as an L6 in the finance department for Amazon Retail to match his compensation after he left and it took him becoming a director at a manufacturing company.

Another former coworker who was a project manager (engagement manager) got maybe 60% of their compensation and is doing more work.

Myself personally, I was an L5 at AWS and now I’m doing at least L6 level work and I’m still making 15% less than I was making at Amazon.

It’s going to take a couple of years at the company I’m at now and building out an entire specialty practice - L7 level work - to get to my L5 compensation.

I have a roadmap I designed with my manager to do it and it’s a straightforward process, it’s just going to take time. I’m excited about doing it. It’s the scope/impact level of work I did to get into AWS on a much smaller scale at a startup.

Yeah, to be fair.. the people I know from Wall St tech that left for Amazon were not the best tech people I knew. The best tech people would have found more well compensated roles within Wall St tech.

Generally a mix of people who exhausted other paths to higher compensation by their mid 30s - mid 40s (senior management track / trader track) and this was the next big thing.

"Wall Street tech" has it's own levels as well.

We're they from a top tier IB, top tier HF or Prop trading company?

Or from lower tier IB/HF/Trading company or worse one of the 1000's of fintechs.

They are losing ground to Microsoft because MS is already in bed with the “enterprise” and big enterprise was late adopters to cloud.

Source: I worked at AWS ProServe for a little over 3 years and saw how hard it was to detangle BigEnterprise from Microsoft

This is something Amazon is going to have to get better at, as I see Azure beginning to become the default (IBM) choice for many businesses.

Google already seems like an also-ran, and did you even know that Oracle has a cloud offering too?

>CS grad

>time and motivation to grind

>pass an interview

Let's be honest, what more are we looking for?

Ability to deliver the projects? Be a pleasant, reliable collaborator? Teach, learn, critique, take feedback, adapt?

I agree with you and my interviewers that I conduct are always more behavioral. Most of the positions I interview candidates for are for bog standard CRUD jobs that anyone can do technically. The deciding factor are the traits you mentioned.

Technical skills can very much be the barrier to delivering CRUD projects, but it is usually more like troubleshooting, debugging, unscrewing your dev environment, understanding the behavior of your framework and database engine, leaving yourself good log messages, etc.