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I am deeply ambivalent about my tenure at Amazon overall, but I unconditionally applaud the level of psychological safety in their dev culture: there is a shared understanding that any system failure caused by a single person is necessarily a failure of the process that governs changes to that system.

If there were any singular behavior I wish every tech company would adopt, it is that level of perspective on what makes a system reliable.

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My experience there was overall very negative. My comment above, though, was actually a very bright spot, and I want to call out the positives that exist.

At the time, I had several years in the industry under my belt but was new to big tech companies, and especially the tech that Amazon had built. I lacked confidence in myself but I was super conscious of actively seeking out the help of others. And it failed spectacularly - one SDE3 in my team with whom I was sort of paired would quite literally back away slowly when I was showing him an issue I needed his advice on.

Big companies like that have such variation in teams, and I think I just got rather unlucky in my experience.

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