Amazon has a culture of promotion focused “engineering”. This rings true across product management and software development.
Rather than solving real customer facing problems, many organizations including Kindle, emphasize “what do I need to do to get promoted?”
This is not only SDEs, but L7/Senior engineering managers and L8/directors, who latch onto a sales pitch and put all their eggs in one basket.
The template is like this:
> I’m going to build a new framework, platform, format, or some other “thing” that everyone should now use to solve {{problem}}. Then, I can claim a larger scope and significant impact, no matter how pointless, costly, or annoying this thing is to customers.
They write documents. These are narratives where they spend hours and hours reviewing and nit picking how “crisp” a sentence is, or how there are too many commas, or some other superfluous bullshit.
There’s an OP1 document, where an L7 writes a fancy narrative, justify more head count and growing their organization. It’s their ticket to a director promotion.
If you’re a developer, you flock to the same project. For L4s and L5s, it’s your ticket to the next level. For an L6, you spend your time selling the absolute hell out of this thing, going on a road show and pitching your idea to get buy in from other teams. You’re careful not to write much of the code and mainly come off as being the architect and consultant. This is your ticket to getting to the Principal level. If this is someone else’s idea, you’ll do whatever it takes to take credit when this succeeds but blame everyone else when it fails.
Best case, the thing you deliver gets you promoted. Then, you simply just move onto to another organization. You were in Kindle and this new piece of shit has made on call hell? Oh well, you already got your promotion. Now you can just move on to AWS (or find another team in any of Amazons legacy businesses where you can coast).
Kindle was an army of H1Bs with an extremely toxic culture. They refuse to hire or even interview white, black, or Hispanic candidates. You can pay H1Bs less, and they’re happy with it because they get to live in Redmond, WA instead of India.
I could go on and on, but I feel anxiety right now even thinking about my time working there. Absolute shithole.