| Current engineer at Amazon. Maybe a particular bad manager is doing this, but there's no institutional mechanism where management or executives literally count people's commits. Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people aren't comparing commit counts to stack employees. The simplest reason is – it's much more expensive to let go someone and re-hire and train another engineer. You won't hear about that on any of these news stories because it's not so attention grabbing or interesting. Amazon for sure can do better in many areas. No denying that. But keep in mind we have a massive workforce of engineers. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5% of those unhappy people are willing to post about it on Reddit, Hacker News, Leetcode, or where ever, you're going to feel like every person at Amazon basically hates their job. And the other thing is the people who do respond with positive experiences don't get the "upvotes" and get their experiences pushed to the top of the discussion. They often get down ranked and personally attacked. Lastly – No one is counting lines of code. This is actually a pretty absurd claim, and I can't say it's NEVER happened, but anyone doing that is a wrong hire. Less code is generally better. There are no brownie points for more code or more complexity. Amazon's leadership principals encourage frugality and invent and simplify. |
EVERY manager I've interacted with at Amazon looks at CRUX statistics -- it is the actual reason that they exist.
My current manage (5 year badge employee btw) is counting my code. We are both L6s and he has shared with me the various target CR each level is expect to do (per week).
For L6 it is 4 (in the AWS org) per week.
The leadership principals also say "hire and develop the best", which ought to mean that they would be doing the damnedest to keep people.
But they don't. I've seen three people Pivoted in the last 6 months -- two of them had been with Amazon (AWS) for over 4 years.
These people did not "suddenly" become bad, or shit at their job, or etc. What happened is that they were stacked ranked, and they were at the bottom. The job was, and remains, exactly the same.
Which is why stack ranking is stupid. Same job. Same person. One year you are meeting the bar. The next you are the worst at it.