In case it isn’t completely obvious from this, it is indeed hellish to work there. Most of AWS has a 2 reviewer requirement. If AI is writing most of the code (and it is because most Amazon code is copypasta boilerplate) you need 3 developers to sign off to ship anything. But of course due to headcount attrition, managers have ~1.5 developers to a project. Meanwhile the L8 manager is doing nothing except stack ranking each level of engineers according to number of commits merged & customer facing features shipped, and firing 15% of the bottom at the end of each year. There is no notion of subject matter expertise or technical depth, theyre happy to replace whoever with fresh-grads (theyre all just cogs anyway right!). Between that and voluntary departures, teams having 80-100% turnover every 5 years is basically par.

Also while this is happening most developers are getting constantly hammered by operational issues and critical security tasks because 1) the legacy toolchain imports 6 different language package ecosystems and 2)no one ever pays down tech debt in legacy code until its a high severity ticket count in a KPI dashboard visible to the senior management.