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Comment by mikert89 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is in keeping the lights on mode in large swaths of the company. They are far beyond looking for top talent, most of the company is engineers keeping the computer systems running

Majority of the teams have very little room for innovation, it’s discouraged

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If that's the case, why they PIP a certain percentage of people every year? Same applies to Meta, too.

need to crack the whip even for boring work

Cultural inertia IMO. If youre growing headcount like gangbusters, the PIP quota is arguably reasonable as a forcing function for bad hires. When youre holding steady or shrinking it's much more toxic in terms of incentivizing politics and killing institutional knowledge. But it's "how we do things".

That even applies to Meta

is this, like, true? or gut feeling? or made up?

I worked there for a long time. It’s 100% true. They mostly need low level workers to keep the systems going.

I’ve only been at AWS for seven years, but it’s a completely different company than it was in 2018.

So much technology is basically a public utility masquerading as a public growth company. It's time to start moving them into public ownership.

It's either that or tax the fuck out of their profit centers.

The hyper growth in AWS is gone, there’s a lot of clarity on what makes money, and a ton of technical debt that requires never ending support.

It's kind of true for all big companies. Sure, launch some little things and pretend to innovate, but the real job is to keep greasing the wheels of the cash cows. Like Meta loves to talk big about AI and VR and blockchain, but at least when I interviewed there, everyone I spoke to was from commerce or ads.

Huge numbers of people being put under stupid amounts of pressure to get small fractions of a percent in increased revenue.

It's true. Most of the "innovators" are either high up in the company, quit for greener pastures, or sit around waiting for their stocks to vest. Current employees have one job: maintenance.

The way budgeting works at Amazon, every team contributes items to lines in a spreadsheet. Those get rolled up at every level all the way to the CEO, who then approves or denies, and then it all rolls back down.

There is a special section called KTLO (keep the lights on). That one usually gets priority (because it's pro-customer, since customers want the existing stuff to keep working).

I've seen departmental budgets that dedicate 75% of their headcount to KTLO.

How do they allocate headcount to different teams? How often is that rebalanced?

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