[giaour]

As a former AWS engineer, I'm going to disagree. Teams and products at AWS are set up to weather most any individual leaving, but they are fairly lean and would certainly feel the pain of an engineer quitting in protest.

Obviously, Tim Bray has a lot more leverage than most engineers at AWS or Amazon. It takes someone at the senior principal or distinguished engineer level to really shock the upper echelons of management. But there are droves of SDE IIs and SDE IIIs who've been with the company for a few years and whose leaving the company in protest would have a noticeable, immediate impact on their team and larger org.