Stripped of fluff, the main point of the article seems to be that their engineers are doing too much manual repetitive work, due to bad tooling and processes. Why would that be caused by their performance review system?
Easy: tooling and process are often seen as being of little importance because they’re not easily associated with metrics that are important in toxic review process cultures. Engineers who like working on these things are treated as second class citizens and performance reviews will reflect that.
(I don’t know that this is the case with Amazon: I’m just providing an anecdote based on my observations at places I’ve worked.)
Not just engineers, but also engineering managers and product managers. Shipping bugfixes and tooling improvements is often harder than shipping new features, and is generally less visible to the people who make hiring/firing/promotion decisions.
I’ve found tooling lags behind in places where incentives are too short term, or most of the funding comes from projects (rather than durable product teams). I’m not saying this is Amazon.
> Why would that be caused by their performance review system?
May be because their performance review prioritizes employee contributions that impact bottom line immediately instead of building infra that might improve developer productivity?
You can't manage what you don't measure. Developer tooling quality impact on revenue is very difficult to measure. Therefore, a rationally managed organization cannot authorize any work on developer tooling.
TBF, that was scrapped in 2017. Source: worked there.
There was a clear culture shock for some of the more seasoned Amazonians (and you could see a fall out effect with some "mails to your manager" every now and then if you crossed a Grand Poobah the wrong way), but to all of us "newer" hires, the times of adversarial review were just a story.
I'm not saying there aren't other issues - there certainly are. What you highlighted is one of them. All I'm saying is that The Grand "Me-vs-You" peer review process is gone.
Anecdotally, I can say with confidence that some teams have a lot of autonomy in deciding to follow (or not follow) company-wide practices / guidance like what you've posted (obviously, only a few do it, since non-compliance isn't officially blessed). I was lucky enough to work in a team which was much better than baseline. But I try not to let that colour my memory - I heard and saw plenty of horror stories, and I saw plenty of people (including in my leadership) trying to do the right thing. Like most things, there are shades of grey here.
Have never worked at Amazon nor do I know anyone who did, what exactly did that entail? "Snitching" on your co-workers? I'm asking because a quick web search didn't help me too much.