[coredog64]

Having seen how the sausage is made, Amazon's internal engineering culture is a textbook example of the principal/agent problem. You only get a raise from a promo, and you only get a promo from scope. It's way easier for management to demonstrate scope and so those folks build out empires of crap. In the best case they're just consuming oxygen, but I have definitely seen orgs created that were a negative influence on productivity.

[darkwater]

Never worked for BigTech, so I'mm really not in my territory, but I wonder what is the purpose of all those interviews to get "the best of the best" and then let these things happen. What are the incentives for the management layer?

[33MHz-i486]

probably the main thing is just having low-level engineers competent enough to run operations on the dozens of poorly maintained 50k LoC codebases per team, hundreds of bespoke internal dependencies, processes, and custom tooling. build ecosystems of 5+ languages.

secondarily its an industrialization of software development. the hiring process is where they try define the labor as a replaceable component. grab the best cogs you can annually for the lowest price, run them in the machine for 2-4 years and swap most of them out before they get too expensive, or specialized or uppity.