[fnfjfk]

My prediction: strong remote work advocates will claim this will be catastrophic for Amazon, many critical people will leave and only those not competent enough to get a job elsewhere will stay. Office advocates will claim it will reinvigorate the culture and lead Amazon to new heights. The actual outcome will be that mostly nothing changes about Amazon’s performance or product quality.

[throwawayFanta]

It won't work that way. If you look at the internal structure of amazon, you realize that majority of the good engineers have been there for 5+ years. Amazon always churned through people, causing good engineers who couldn't deal with the culture to leave within 2-3 years, and mediocre engineers getting pipped over 3-4 years.

[stuckkeys]

Your statement is solid. But from What I have heard, Amazon is getting a lot of pressure from the GOV to bring in more people into the office to support local businesses which I think it is a bit vague. But yeah, they are going to lose some great talent. They are going to have a bunch of useless recruiters roaming the offices lol.

[fzeroracer]

Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left.

Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many teams and companies are running with skeleton crews because they've chased off a lot of competent engineers and think they can coast by with the bare minimum. Stuff like what happened to Boeing or Crowdstrike are great examples of the end result, and a lot more companies than you'd expect are operating right on the critical failure margins. The concept of redundancy has outright vanished.

[causal]

It's even more subtle than that. Things just start decaying when talent leaves- you often can't trace it to a single engineer or piece of knowledge that's lost. You'll find reasons why things broke- but you won't see the myriad ways a more talented pool of developers would have prevented it from ever breaking in the first place.

[artyom]

This is what's happening in my org, talented people was leaving consistently (5-6/month), things are currently maintained with skeleton crews -- the ones that are maintained, the rest are accidents waiting to happen.

Quality inertia is what's preventing stuff from crashing down instantly, but it'll eventually be the case. It's just a matter of when the last guy that's worth their role leaves.

Most "SDEs" attracted by past big money have below-minimum reading skills, can't write code, can't troubleshoot, can't debug anything even if they life depends on it. They were hired to form a particular structure for the manager two levels above to be promoted.

[fnfjfk]

I agree they may decline over time, but I don’t know how to disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies that have been around for a long time.

When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.

[foobarian]

FFS we're 3/4 of the way migrating our stack to AWS. They better not screw it up!