[jkingsbery]

(I'm an engineer at Amazon, but I don't speak on behalf of the company, I'm just sharing my experience)

Here are a few different ways that AWS and Retail interact:

1. The obvious that everyone knows: Retail uses AWS's products, providing feedback and ideas for new services and features.

2. Employee transfers: it's quite common for people to move between Retail and AWS and vice versa, and they bring what they learned in one org to their new org, helping to spread information about best practices.

3. Other employee knowledge transfers: I've personally benefited from engineers in AWS sharing their knowledge about general engineering topics on internal interest mailing lists or through tech talks.

4. Best practices: there are some differences, but AWS and Retail operate similarly in many ways: use of 6-pagers for sharing ideas (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty-amazons-6-pager-brad-p...), weekly review of metrics, hiring tools and practices being just a few examples.

[scarface74]

This is all a Devils Advocate post. I have no reason to complain about my (future) compensation. Working in the consulting division allowed me to make $BigTech money as an “Enterprise Developer” without studying a single algorithm, and being able to work completely remote from a low cost of living area....

As a soon to be employee on the AWS side and speaking very selfishly, I could see it benefiting AWS employees tremendously being separate from the low margin retail side. They would probably have benefits and compensation more in line with the other BigTech companies.

Employees at AWS definitely wouldn’t be as limited in what they can contribute to their 401K because they are considered Highly Compensated Employees and the contribution rate is weighed down by factory workers.