[nixgeek]

Separating design and build from operate is antithetical to Amazon. It isn’t a “figure out” for a lot of companies including Amazon — it’s very intentional and seemingly unlikely to change. They’ve observed that they create a stronger culture of ownership (which then drives getting things fixed faster and more empathy for the customers) through having the builders also be the operators.

Still needs supportive management: there are teams at Amazon who have time to fix everything which paged them at anti-social hours, and there are teams which don’t prioritize beyond minding the SLA of their COE Action Items, and more silently accrue operational debt and page people more often. Tricky balance to be sure.

Even the ‘SRE’ or ‘PE’ approaches you see at Google and Meta don’t obviate the need for development teams to have on-call rotations. At least in “BigTech” where teams operate services instead of shipping shrink-wrapped software it’s becoming rare to NOT see some on-call responsibility with engineering roles (including management). I suppose it isn’t just on-call, and the other big change in BigTech of the last decade was the somewhat widespread elimination of QA teams and SDET roles, and the merger of those responsibilities into the feature/service teams, and to SDE.