No engineering excellence

During my 2+ years at Amazon, I've seen 3 types of engineering:

1) Just plain buggy poor engineering. This is done by teams because they are moving too fast and because no one cares to actual have high quality services which don't crash all the time.

2) Oversimplified design engineering which is self-contained and can't be reused. Better quality than above but completely useless in terms of anything but immediate value as a one-time deliverable.

3) Combining both very buggy code and poor design. Not only does it not work reliably but it's also short-sighted in terms of the engineering design. This is what most teams deliver (and which is what caused yesterday's major AWS S3 outage).

Amazon is so big that nothing ever gets fixed the right way. People just shuffle away to another department or quit the company and leave behind a mess no one will fix. New stuff is wedged in between broken systems with little testing and hardly any architecture reviews.

To summarize, if Engineering Excellence matters to you do not go to Amazon. Despite what they say, they don't value it and you wont have time to do it anyway.

Is everything a steaming pile of crap inside Amazon? No, but most of it is really brittle. All the complaints on this site and glassdoor about high operations workload prove that.

Amazon engineers are constantly angry because of they hate having to do bullsh*t work just to keep the lights on. They eventually (usually in less than 1-2 years) decide the money isn't worth this hassle and move on.