Do people get fired over things like this in the bigger companies?
When I read it I remember thinking how true it was. That person would be very unlikely to commit the same error, and might even work to prevent others from making that error.
So the system failed, not a particular person, and the solution is to dive deep into why the system failed, and improve it.
Obviously there are exceptions for willful extreme negligence or policy violations.
As long as you can add to your cult karma, you can do anything at Amazon!
I have several friends that work at, or worked at AWS within Amazon. When something goes wrong, I hear it's a blame game. I hear that it's a witch hunt and the person that's responsible gets held accountable, even if they didn't cause it. Example: Employee is in charge of project, project hires subcontractors, subcontractors screw up, Employee is fired.
Sounds unfair. Sounds unreasonable. Happened.
Now, that's not to say there's not a lot of pressure. People are held accountable. But they are held accountable for fixing the underlying issue and making sure the same mistakes aren't made again. I've never heard of someone getting fired for making a mistake. People get fired when the same expensive mistake is made repeatedly by the same person. (And really, based on my experience, that might not even be enough. I think in order to get fired you probably would have to fail to understand the nature of the mistake when everyone else in the room understands.)
But of course the real reason is that Amazon's work environment is basically chock full of shitty middle-managers, many who are adopted from Microsoft or salvaged somehow from better tech companies in the valley.
They even have these leadership principles that are basically a bunch of no-brainers that they force down the employees throats at every opportunity. They use them as a criteria for performance reviews, even before actual hard metrics. Shitty middle managers will keep stressing the leadership principles because (1) that's what they are told to do (2) they need to rate their subordinates on them (3) because these principles are qualitative, the only insurance they have is that they spewed them enough to get through.
Amazon, to sum it up, is just, shitty employees from other tech companies. And dumb/average intelligence follow-the-pack type drones - many who can hardly speak English and are on work visas..and they put many of these terrible speakers as managers!! (Amazon loves cheap labor, and will use it for ANY position possible)
When your leadership principles are sold as prolific and something every employee "should study" (Bezos words') you really can't expect to hire intelligent folk who don't want no-brainer basic business and character traits hamfisted to them as if it is the new work of Plato himself.
Mistakes happen. Sometimes they are really expensive.
I've got a friend who's a manager at the Amazon Game Studio. That part of the company at least doesn't do stack ranking in the way that it was described in the NYT article. There may be other teams (or even most of the company) that do, though. I think that teams in different locations end up developing their own internal culture, to a certain degree.
People get fired for leaks and being intentionally malicious, not mistakes. Even expensive ones. [besides, a big outage is usually caused by multiple smaller issues if your systems are sufficiently reliable. Also, read the SRE book about "blameless postmortems"]
Last quarter amazon earned $20.58bn from product sales.
So 4 hours of that is $38,000,000.
Still, some people who do go somewhere else, or are less likely to try Amazon in the future. I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least a multi-million dollar mistake.
If I go to Amazon.com I just go to the search bar and refine from there. So I guess I use their "navigation" in the form of their groupings of features on the left side.
Any calculation based on the hours down needs to be reduced to account for people finding products by other means (already saved for later in their basket, direct links, searches via external search engines).
I'd say that number is probably a ceiling on their losses, and that the actual number should be much lower. I'm super curious if non-tech news organizations will pick up this story, in which case the biggest hit could be from the PR. That being said, it doesn't seem like such a bad time to go down.