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Is a greenfield project at Amazon actually greenfield the way anyone means though?

I assume there are org-wide style guides, best practices, approved languages and libraries, strategies, norms, etc. - I don't mean to say it's a bad thing (or make any judgement) but I'd have thought there would be relatively little difference from anything brownfield; that it's really just a 'not a monorepo' technicality?

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I'm running a greenfield project at bigcorp, and I can tell you hands down "yes it makes a difference". Sure, you have to write it in the company language, do accessibility etc., but it's far better than being tied down to the last guy's hacks and assumptions, or cross team dependencies that can't be untangled.

I've ran greenfield at FAANG, and smaller companies.

Greenfield at smaller companies has more technical decisions to be made, since as you say, FAANG already has strongly preferred frameworks.

It's a shame, since making technical decisions is an important source of professional growth.

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