Amazon

Amazon offers competitive salaries to employees.

Amazon has a well-deserved reputation for terrible work-life balance and poor career prospects for software engineers. While the prevailing understanding of 2022-2023 layoffs blames over-hiring, engineers during this time were still working incredibly demanding shifts, often 50-60 hours per week. This suggests the problem of overburdened engineers is likely caused by something other than not having enough talent or labor.

While leaders enjoy and promote the culture of “ownership,” that very culture, coupled with expectations of high turnover and meager documentation, means that actual development is usually hindered by years of inscrutable tech debt for any given product, along with key gaps in institutional knowledge left by former employees.

Management exacerbates this problem by encouraging talent to flee the company through opaque performance review cycles with turnover quotas.

In anecdotes and observations, the drop in productivity over time during the fully-remote experience correlates remarkably well with the average tenure of employees on teams.

My hypothesis is that poor engineering practices and constant loss of talent hinder onboarding and cause drops in team performance.

Team members don’t expect to be around for the consequences of expensive shortcuts, and new team members are asked to fix the problems of years past while given little or no context via documents from departed team members.

Active pursuit of constant churn deincentivizes product maintenance and documentation that would allow for realistic timelines and productive employee onboarding.

Since the firings will continue until morale improves, take some common sense steps to pursue alternative solutions like utilizing technical writers and carving out other engineering support roles.