taway_zonian257

> Management has zero incentive to change any of problems you signal, and probably don't see them as an issue.

SDE1 here, I might be completely wrong but I'm inclined to believe that upper management is kept practically blind about the real struggles and issues experienced on lower-levels, and this scenario is abused by managers to scapegoat their way out of problems they have to deal with, specially the ones they created. I'm not going to provide examples as they could be easily traced back, but I can say that I've witnessed a L7 overpromissing on a project in spite of callouts from lower levels, and once postponing the delivery of some milestones started to become inevitable then I've started hearing said manager frequently mention "firing offenses" on dailies.

> The thing I've noticed at Amazon is that not only are the pre-existing conditions awful, but nobody has any interest or willpower to fix it. Everyone will happily vent to you and tell you how awful things are, but any suggestions to fix it or make things more efficient (even if the fix is very simple and requires low effort) will be met with hostility. And I'm not just talking tech issues, but also process/workload issues.

SDE1 here. IMMV of course but on my corner of the org I've seen a bunch of team members raising concerns regarding tech debt for the L7 to shut it down as it got in the way of delivering the features he wanted to deliver.

Also the elephant in the room is how the company relies on trial by fire as a form of performance evaluation, which involves inexperienced SDEs being pushed to deliver alone chunks of major projects in spite of lack of experience or insight.

> Everything the parent comment mentioned is exactly what we see.

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.